Diplomacytoday: A day on a refugee rescue ship: 'this job must be done, there must be no sinking'

On board a merchant ship around 30 miles north of Libya, Gordie Hatt hurries up the stairs to the bridge, his long white hair tied back in a ponytail. “Where is everyone?” says the 63-year-old Canadian, bursting from the staircase. “It’s just Amani and me down on deck, and we have a thousand people trying to find a place to sleep.”
Hatt has a point. This is the bridge of the Bourbon Argos, one of three merchant ships hired by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to rescue stricken refugees from the waters north of Libya, in the absence of full-scale EU rescue operations. Earlier in the morning the crew rescued two boats in quick succession, a pair of operations that brought 1,001 refugees aboard the Argos, almost all of them Eritreans. The boat is only supposed to take 500, so Hatt needs all the help he can get on deck.

But what he doesn’t know is that an even bigger problem is unravelling in the waters in front of the boat, consuming his colleagues’ attention. In this bit of the southern Mediterranean, there are nine rescue operations in progress, involving MSF’s boats, the Italian coastguards and a few warships from European navies. But it’s not enough. From the bridge, Hatt’s colleagues can see two more flimsy refugee boats on the water, and only one of them is being rescued.The Argos cannot safely take on any more passengers, so Sebastian Klein, the MSF team’s 34-year-old second-in-command, stands by the radar monitor looking grim. “We can’t help them,” says Klein, a Norwegian. “The only difference would be if they started sinking and we had to rescue them.”The situation is already tense enough when Klein’s boss, Lindis Hurum, picks up the bridge telephone, and radios another rescue ship in the area. “Does your boat have a gynaecologist?” she asks. “We have a very pregnant woman onboard who needs to deliver within 24 hours.”Even as the smuggling season begins to wind down, this is the reality in the southern Mediterranean, 30-odd miles north of the smuggling ports of western Libya. In recent months the media’s migration coverage has shifted from here to the beaches of Greece and the plains of the Balkans, along the new routes that Syrian refugees are taking to reach the EU. But even without the Syrians, the number of people attempting the sea crossing from Libya to Italy has remained near record levels. And record numbers have died in doing so.

According to figures released to the Guardian by the International Organisation for Migration on Tuesday, 130,891 people have reached Italy so far in 2015, only marginally fewer than the record 138,796 who crossed during the equivalent period last year.
Since May the EU has stepped up its search-and-rescue missions in the region. But the operations are still understaffed, as this incident in early September shows, and are overly reliant on private groups such as the Migrant Offshore Aid Station (Moas), and MSF.

For most of the Bourbon Argos team, the action starts at 6.19am when Hurum knocks on the doors of their tiny four-man cabins. A veteran of MSF’s Ebola mission in west Africa, she has been up all night monitoring the boats situation. Her vigilance pays off at dawn when Italy’s Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) radios to say that a refugee vessel just outside Libyan waters has called for help, using a satellite phone given to the refugees by smugglers.
“You have 30 minutes,” Hurum tells the 10-strong team as she wakes them up. There’s a frenzy of rustling and stumbling as they reach for their lifejackets and helmets. They gather downstairs in the calm of the mess room, where the muffled blare of the ship’s huge engine sounds like the throb of a distant club night. There’s Hatt, a former navy technician whose job is to fix, build or invent any contraption that the team might need; Amani, an Eritrean interpreter who braved the sea voyage 13 years ago and has returned to the same waters to help rescue people following in his footsteps; and Irene Paola Martino, who runs the ship’s makeshift hospital. Her sub-team includes Dr Matthias Heukäufer, a cardiologist who has spent most of his career in a quiet university hospital, and two nurses, Line Lootens and Gaia Cortinovis. Hurum tells them all to be ready for more than one rescue. “MRCC wants to know: how many can we take?”
Around the MSF team, the ship’s sailors are donning overalls and gas masks. At times it’s been a bit of a culture clash. MSF hires the boat from a merchant fleet called Bourbon, which employs the boat’s Ukrainian officers and Filipino seamen. They’re men who stick to strict timetables and hierarchies, while MSF’s multinational team pride themselves on their flexibility and egalitarianism. And they’re used to transporting fuel and anchors, not traumatised refugees with scabies and head lice.

Refugee children use colouring books on the deck of Bourbon Argos. Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi / Reuters/Reuters

But gradually they’ve warmed to this unusual job. After weeks rescuing refugees, first mate Glib Grygoriuk now bristles when he sees them numbered on arrival in Italy. “They’re people, not numbers,” he says. Captain Ruslan Voznyuk is never seen without a black T-shirt from the Right Sector, a nationalist militia in Ukraine, and says he isn’t certain about immigration. But he is proud of his mission and enthusiastic about the aid workers on his ship. “This job must be done,” the captain says. “In the sea there must be no sinking. God gives life so people must live.”
Briefing over, the team prepare the boat. Most things are ready: the portable cabin that houses the makeshift hospital is already pristine, the mini-morgue that will house any corpses is cold, the toilets are clean. Now the ship’s dinghy needs to be winched into the water, and a rope ladder put in position.
Up on the forecastle, Hurum and Klein scan the sea through their binoculars for the first signs of the boat. For a while they just see the red morning sun edging over the horizon. But then there it is, a distant black sliver between the water and the sky. It edges closer and closer, until you can see a few flecks of orange against the black – the lifejackets of those on board.
Finally, the boat’s contours emerge more clearly. The smugglers usually cram the refugees on three kinds of equally unreliable vessels. The first is the inflatable dinghy, which often deflates. The second is the wooden fishing boat, complete with a cabin. Then there’s the cabin-less kind, the wooden skiffs that have just a deck and a hold.
This is one of the latter, a blue boat with a white line running along its side. And soon it’s so close that you can see the passengers’ faces. One is crying, others are smiling, some are singing with joy. In the openings that lead to the hold, men peer from the darkness. Up on deck people eat bananas, and at the ship’s stern lounge two lone Libyans. Nael Nasser, a mediator and translator like Amani, is relieved. “They seem calm,” he says. “It should be an easy rescue.”

But these things are never simple. As the Argos glides alongside the refugees, shielding the smaller boat from the waves, the crew can see that the Eritreans are using a bucket to bale out the hold. How much longer the boat will stay afloat is unclear. The welfare of the passengers packed inside the hold is also a concern. The lack of ventilation, coupled with the fumes of the engine, often suffocates people trapped in their hundreds below deck. More than 50 died like this last month.
Then there’s the possibility of panic. By this point in other rescues, passengers have been known to try to sink their own boat, to make sure their saviours don’t give up on them. Last week 600 refugees ignored instructions to leave their boat one by one and instead piled on to the Argos in any way they could.
It’s Amani’s role to avoid a repeat of that. He raises the loudhailer. “Stay calm,” he says in Tigrinya, the most widely spoken Eritrean language. “Stay where you are. We have enough places for you all. But please come one by one.” Ropes are thrown, and the ladder is lowered. The rescue begins.
One by one they totter uncertainly up the ladder to the Argos. Some can barely walk, their legs cramped and numb from hours of sitting in the same position, trapped between their neighbours. Some are covered in vomit after choking on the fumes in the hold. But as they step on to the deck and Hatt extends a hand and a hello, relief blooms across their faces. Soon they are collectively singing hymns.

Moments after arriving on the Argos, Eritrean refugees sing to celebrate surviving the sea, the Sahara, and the hell of Libya.

“I must thank you,” says Lingo, a 35-year-old Eritrean geography teacher who, it later emerges, was sent to a forced labour camp alongside Amani in 2001. “When we saw you, we automatically changed from animals into humans.”
For the vast majority of the passengers on this boat and on the one rescued an hour later, the trauma began in Eritrea. It is hard for outsiders to comprehend the level of control the Eritrean dictatorship exerts on its citizens. The headline facts are that there is no constitution, no court system, no elections and no free press. But the intricacies of its repression can be summarised by the lives of Lingo and his friend Tadese, a 33-year-old doctor.
Like all Eritreans, they remain lifelong military conscripts, free for deployment in any capacity and at any time the state sees fit. Many remain in the army. But this pair were posted to government institutions hundreds of miles from their home, unable to see their family except for 11 days a year. It meant accepting salaries worth just a few dozen dollars a month, without the right to earn extra money in the non-existent private sector. And it meant regularly reporting for military duty, often at night after work, and always in the school holidays.
“I will say this again and again and again,” says Tadese, sitting on deck after his rescue. “Living in Eritrea is worse than death.”
Hundreds of thousands of his countrymen appear to agree, since they are leaving in their droves. Before Lingo fled the country, his class had dwindled from 62 to seven students, such is the rate of departure.
There is no set route out of the country. Many pay smugglers thousands of dollars to escape over the nearest border to either Ethiopia or Sudan. But for those travelling north to Libya, like the people on the Argos, everyone must travel through Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. It is a hellish journey. First the Sudanese smugglers store their passengers in walled compounds in Omdurman, on the western side of the city. Then in the small hours of the morning they’re crammed into lorries – hundreds of people in each – and driven through the desert to the Libyan border. Then they are handed over to Libyan smugglers, who put them in Toyota pick-ups – 30 crammed into the tiny space at the back of the truck. Finally they’re driven to Ajdabiya, in north-east Libya.
According to the Eritreans on the Argos, it’s a journey worse than the sea voyage. For a start, in the desert it’s very easy to get lost, run out of fuel and die of thirst. You can get attacked by bandits and militias. You’re packed like sardines into the back of the truck, so on most trips someone dies of dehydration or falls off the side. Alex Solomon, a 26-year-old on the Argos, says eight people in his car died in the heat. Others suffered broken limbs after their car overturned, and still haven’t seen a doctor when they are rescued by MSF several weeks later. On arrival in Ajdabiya, Tadese says, he was unconscious from dehydration.
In Ajdabiya the treatment is no better. You’re locked in a compound until your family pays a colleague of the smugglers in whatever country they’re in. No one pays upfront, because the smugglers might not take you all the way, and no one carries cash on them, because it will be stolen (though one woman on the Argos was treated for bruising after hiding $400 in her vagina). This particular group each had to pay $1,600 (£1,050) in retrospective payment for the desert journey. And if your family hasn’t got the money, the smugglers torture you while your family listens on the phone. “Every day they punished me by beating me with a stick, and then a rifle butt on my back,” says Eissa Abdirahman, one of a handful of Somalians on the boat, and a footballer who fled home after being threatened with assassination by jihadis opposed to playing western sport. “I stayed a month like that.”
Once their families had paid, the refugees were driven west to Ben Walid, many packed into sealed containers. This is because the drive to Ben Walid is through Islamic State territory. If Isis fighters know there are refugees in the truck, they’ll stop it, leave the Muslims and take the Christians. Nine people on this boat were held by Isis and threatened with execution. One, 20-year-old Afwerki, was shot in the leg as he tried to escape. Another, Natsenet, who only managed to escape when a bomb hit the jihadi camp, recalls: “Every day they asked us to convert to Islam.”

A refugee and her child on the deck of Bourbon Argos. Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters

Life didn’t get better when they finally arrived in Ben Walid. There they were held in another smuggler’s compound, and the same process followed: jail and torture until their families paid an associate of the smuggler back home. This time the price was $2,000 – an advance payment for the luxury of the sea voyage. Once that was paid, they were moved to a third compound, known as a mazraa, near the sea. Again they waited in squalid conditions, usually for a week or more but sometimes months. Food was distributed once a day, and there were regular beatings. Women are often raped. For some people, the boat is almost a relief.
“All the suffering that a human can suffer happens in this mazraa,” says Tadese as the Argos rumbles towards Italy. “Of course, we knew about what it would be like before we got there. So why did we choose it? Because we want freedom. Because we want to escape from the conditions of our nation. And if the situation there continues, people will never stop coming.”

Diplomacytoday

Tuesday 29 September 2015

A day on a refugee rescue ship: 'this job must be done, there must be no sinking'

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