“We rescued 68 people from two unsuitable boats on the night of May 1st,” Marie Michel, a crew member of the sea rescue organization SOS Humanity, reported at a press conference marking the group’s tenth anniversary.
“Both boats were in the Libyan search and rescue zone at the time, but the Libyan rescue coordination center did not coordinate any of these rescues, but said that they are not responsible,” she added.
In Michel’s view, this sums up how the European Union has successively outsourced responsibility for rescuing people from drowning in the Mediterranean to civilian organizations for more than ten years.
According to the International Organization for Migration, almost 32,000 refugees have drowned in the Mediterranean since 2014. This year alone, 500 have drowned — so far.
Controversial migration deals
Agreements worth hundreds of millions of euros between the EU and Libya in 2017, and the EU and Tunisia in 2023, were designed to reduce migration — and the many deaths in the Mediterranean.
The deals stipulated that coastguards of both countries would take over border protection. However, these agreements have been heavily criticized, and reports on serious human rights violations are unabated.
“Many of the survivors from Libya who have been on board with us in the last five days bear signs of torture on their bodies,” Michel said.
She added that migrants had recounted how they had been humiliated, forced to strip their clothing, doused with ice-cold water, beaten with wooden sticks, metal rods and plastic hoses, shot with pistols, and raped.
The rescue organization’s most recent report on the situation in Libya, Tunisia and the Mediterranean also shares the harrowing stories of 64 survivors.
“After being severely beaten, three young men jumped into the sea. The Libyan coastguard let them die in front of our eyes and even insulted them as they drowned. They said to each other: ‘Let them die, it’s easier for us and for them’,” one migrant recalled.
European sea rescue program
On May 4, 2015, four families founded the search and rescue organization SOS Humanity in Berlin. Since then, they say they have rescued more than 38,000 refugees in distress at sea along the Mediterranean route from North Africa to Italy.
“The first rescue we carried out on March 7, 2016, rescued 74 exhausted, injured and desperate men and women in a small, unprotected rubber dinghy far off the coast of Libya,” SOS Humanity founder Klaus Vogel told DW, adding that “our expectation of getting European governments to see refugees as fellow human beings, and to recognize the rescue of refugees in the Mediterranean as Europe’s natural duty has not been fulfilled.”
The organization calls for German politicians to push for a collective European sea rescue program, and to end its cooperation agreements with Libya and Tunisia.
Meanwhile, the aid organization criticizes that Germany’s incoming government does not even mention the term “sea rescue” in its coalition agreement.
‘The world’s deadliest border’
“For more than ten years now, we have had a situation in Europe in which European government have held repeated crisis summits , but they have not been able to put and end to the dying,” Gerald Knaus, Austrian migration expert and co-founder and chairman of the think tank European Stability Initiative, told DW.
“The deadliest border in the world remains the deadliest border in the world. And this continuous dying is an expression of a complete and systematic failure,” he said.
Knaus is the architect of the 2016 refugee agreement between the European Union and Turkey.
At the time, the deal included €6 billion ($6.42 billion) worth of aid for Ankara in return for Turkey sealing off the migrant route across the Mediterranean and agreeing to take back refugees. According to the social scientist, the number of deaths in the Aegean Sea has fallen from 1,100 in one year to 80 as a result.
Human dignity instead of populism
According to Knaus, a deal with African countries, such as Libya and Tunisia, could include issuing five-year visas for citizens who enter legally, increasing the number of scholarships available, and investing several hundred million euros to combat poverty.
In return, the countries could agree to take back refugees who are obliged to leave the country. “The political signal would be that Europe does not have to elect far-right parties to control migration,” he told DW.
“The fatal message on the other side of the Atlantic is that Donald Trump has stopped irregular migration, the numbers have fallen dramatically. But he is doing this at the expense of human dignity and is demolishing the rule of law,” Knaus said.
“So, it is now extremely important for Germany’s centrist parties and this coalition to urgently develop a solution based on the rule of law, with the necessary seriousness and without populism,” he argued, adding that “blaming sea rescuers is populism and has always been populism.”
This article was originally published in German.
