Fatal trap on the cruel sea

Though they survived the night at sea, many of passengers on the boat were unwell, seasick and freezing. They decided to call for help and used their satellite phone at approximately 11am the next day. They contacted the Alarm Phone, a hotline operated by international activists in Europe and Africa, that can be called by migrants in distress at sea.

Alongside my work as a researcher on migration and borders, I am also a member of this activist network, and on that day I supported our shift team who received and documented the direct calls from the people on the boat in distress.

The boat had been trying to get as far away as possible from the Libyan coast. Only then would the passengers stand a chance of escaping Libya’s coastguard.

The European Union and Italy struck a deal in 2017 to train the Libyan coastguard in return for them stopping migrants reaching European shores. But a report in the same year by Amnesty International highlighted how the Libyan authorities operate in collusion with smuggling networks. Time and again, media reports suggest they have violated the human rights of escaping migrants as well as the laws of the sea.

The migrant travellers aboard the ‘white balloon’ knew that if they were detected and caught, they would be abducted back to Libya, or illegally ‘refouled’ – the term for forcing people back to their place of origin.

But Libya is a dangerous place for migrants in transit – as well as for Libyan nationals – given the ongoing civil conflict between several warring factions. In all likelihood, being sent back to Libya would mean being sent to detention centres described as ‘concentration camp-like’ by German diplomats.

The odds of reaching Europe were stacked against the people on the boat. Over the past year, the European-Libyan collaboration in containing migrants in North Africa, a research focus of mine, has resulted in a decrease of sea arrivals in Italy – from about 119,000 in 2017 to 23,000 in 2018.

Precisely how many people were intercepted by the Libyan coastguards last year is unclear but the country’s authorities have put the figure at around 15,000. The fact that this refoulement industry has led to a decrease in the number of migrant crossings in the central Mediterranean means that fewer people have been able to escape grave human rights violations and reach a place of safety.

In repeated conversations, the 106 people on the boat made clear to the Alarm Phone activists that they would rather move on and endanger their lives by continuing to Europe than be returned by the Libyan coastguards. The activists stayed in touch with them, and for transparency reasons, the distress situation was made public via Twitter.

Around noon, the situation on board deteriorated markedly and anxiety spread. With weather conditions worsening and after a boy had fallen unconscious, the people on the boat expressed for the first time their immediate fear of dying at sea and requested that Alarm Phone alert all available authorities.

The activists swiftly notified the Italian coastguards. But both the Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre, and in turn the Maltese authorities, suggested it was the Libyan coastguard’s responsibility to handle the distress call. And yet, eight different phone numbers of the Libyan coastguards could not be reached by the activists.

In the afternoon, the situation had come across the radar of the Italian media. When the Alarm Phone activists informed the people on board that the public had also been made aware of the situation by the media one person succinctly responded: ‘I don’t need to be on the news, I need to be rescued.’

And yet media attention catapulted the story into the highest political spheres in Italy. According to a report in the Corriere della Sera, the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, took charge of the situation, stating that the fate of the migrant boat could not be left to Alarm Phone activists.

Conte instructed the Italian foreign intelligence service to launch rapid negotiations with the Libyan coastguards. It took some time to persuade them, but eventually, the Libyans were convinced to take action.

In the meantime, the precarious passengers on the boat reported water leaking into their vessel, of the freezing cold, and their fear of drowning. The last time the Alarm Phone reached them, around 8pm, they could see a plane in the distance but were unable to forward their GPS coordinates to the Alarm Phone due to the failing battery of their satellite phone.

About three hours later, the Italian coastguards issued a press release: the Libyans had assumed responsibility and co-ordinated the rescue of several boats. According to the release, a merchant vessel had rescued the boat and the 106 people would be returned to Libya.

According to the survivors and Médecins Sans Frontières who treated them on arrival, at least six people appeared to have drowned during the voyage – presumably after the Alarm Phone lost contact with them. Another boy died after disembarkation.

A day later, on January 21, members of a second group of 144 people called the Alarm Phone from another merchant vessel. Just like the first group, they had been refouled to Libya, but they were still on board. Some still believed that they would be brought to Europe.

Speaking on the phone with the activists, they could see land but it was not Europe but Libya. Recognising they had been returned to their place of torment, they panicked, cried and threatened collective suicide. The women were separated from the men – Alarm Phone activists could hear them shout in the background. In the evening, contact with this second group of migrants was lost.

During the evening of January 23, several of the women of the group contacted the activists. They said that during the night, Libyan security forces had boarded the merchant vessel and transported small groups into the harbour of Misrata, where they were taken to a detention centre. They said they had been beaten when they refused to disembark. One of them, bleeding, feared that she had already lost her unborn child.

On the next day, the situation worsened further. The women told the activists that Libyan forces entered their cell in the morning, pointing guns at them, after some of the imprisoned had tried to escape. Reportedly, every man was beaten. The pictures they sent to the Alarm Phone made it into Italian news, showing unhygienic conditions, overcrowded cells, and bodies with torture marks.

Just like the 106 travellers on the ‘white balloon’, this second group of 144 people had risked their lives but were now back in their hell.

It’s more than likely that for some of these migrant travellers, this was not their first attempt to escape Libya. The tens of thousands captured at sea and returned over the past years have found themselves entangled in the European-Libyan refoulement ‘industry’.

Due to European promises of financial support or border technologies, regimes with often questionable human rights records have wilfully taken on the role as Europe’s frontier guards.

In the Mediterranean, the Libyan coastguards are left to do the dirty work while European agencies – such as Frontex, Eunavfor Med as well as the Italian and Maltese coastguards – have withdrawn from the most contentious and deadly areas of the sea.

It is sadly not surprising that flagrant human rights violations have become the norm rather than the exception. Quite cynically, several factions of the Libyan coastguards have profited not merely from Europe’s financial support but also from playing a ‘double game’ in which they continue to be involved in human smuggling while, disguised as coastguards, they clamp down on the trade of rival smuggling networks. This means that the Libyan coastguards often profit from both letting migrant boats leave and from subsequently recapturing them.

The detention camps in Libya, where torture and rape are everyday phenomena, are not merely containment zones of captured migrants – they form crucial extortion zones in this refoulement industry. Migrants are turned into cash cows and are repeatedly subjected to violent forms of extortion, often forced to call relatives at home and beg for their ransom.

Despite this systematic abuse, migrant voices cannot be completely drowned out. They continue to appear, rebelliously, from detention and even from the middle of the sea, reminding us all about Europe’s complicity in the production of their suffering.

• Maurice Stierl is a Leverhulme research fellow at the University of Warwick; this article also appears at theconversation.com

ABOUT ALARM PHONE

The project was set up in 2014 by activists in Europe and northern Africa. Alarm Phone is not a rescue service. It has no resources, like boats or helicopters, in the Mediterranean that can give assistance in an emergency.

Instead, it can help support rescue operations, by making sure that distress calls from migrant boats are acted upon. Part of its role is in tipping off humanitarian organisations and media outlets, to apply pressure on the authorities to step in. It does this by chronicling emergencies online, in real-time, as they arise.

To find out more, visit alarmphone.org