By Daniel Howden
Prologue: August 14 began calmly for Riccardo Gatti. On the first morning of a new search and rescue mission in the central Mediterranean, the former yachtsman turned activist walked the grayed wooden deck of the Golfo Azzurro, a trawler that has been stripped of its bulky fishing equipment to make space for life jackets and water bottles.
Its previous mission had tested everyone’s patience when several Italian ports refused to allow the vessel to dock and unload its rescued asylum seekers, a sign of the increasing political pressure on rescue charities such as Gatti’s Proactiva Open Arms. The only consolation had been that the ship’s unwanted cargo were in fact a trio of Libyan musicians who serenaded the crew as they searched for a safe port.
Now stationed 27 nautical miles off the coast of Libya, Gatti’s vessel was on standby for boats in distress. Instead they were approached by the C-Star, a vessel chartered by European anti-migrant activists. The Golfo Azzurro crew braced for a confrontation.
The C-Star dispatched its speedboat, which came alongside and slapped a sticker on the hull emblazoned with the group’s name: “Defend Europe.”
The two groups of Europeans, one intent on saving lives, the other on stopping migrants from reaching their continent, exchanged words “that were not kindly,” Gatti said. The confrontation was emblematic of the heated debates over immigration that have come to dominate the public square in Europe, turning the Mediterranean into both a political stage and a graveyard.
It was the arrival of a third vessel on the scene that served as a reminder these arguments have real consequences beyond Europe.
Rescued migrants shelter on the deck of the Golfo Azzurro in January, 2017 (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
The Golfo Azzurro hailed the Italian coast guard, which has been coordinating search and rescue operations off Libya in the anarchy that followed the ouster of the Gadhafi regime in 2011, but no help was offered. When they appealed to the European Union naval mission to counter smuggling, the answer was the same.
“We were under attack and we were on our own,” Gatti said.
The Libyans demanded that the Golfo Azzurro lower its ladder to be boarded. The rescue ship ignored the order and set a lateral course at low speed to gain time. Once it came within 24 miles (39km) of Libya’s coast it would be inside the country’s “contiguous zone,” an extension of territorial waters, and could be lawfully boarded.
“We knew if we enter 24 miles we are fucked,” Gatti said.
For the next hour and a half the Golfo Azzurro was threatened repeatedly. Then, after a seven-minute radio silence, came a curt order to head due north. The standoff was over. But the parting line from the supposed coast guard boat was chilling: “If we see you again we’ll kill you.”
The first three months of 2017 marked the high point of an extraordinary period during which nongovernmental organizations took on the leading share of responsibility for saving the lives of migrants in the central Mediterranean.
Of the nearly 180,000 people rescued between North Africa and Europe during 2016, 46,796 were saved by NGOs. That was 10,000 more than either the Italian navy or coast guard. The trend continued into this year, with nine main organizations operating as many as 13 search and rescue vessels of varying sizes, plus two spotter planes, in the area.
But their success was met by a powerful backlash. As the scale and impact of NGO operations grew, their role in central Mediterranean migration flows was questioned and challenged as never before. By September 2017, widespread threats and intimidation both legal and physical reduced the presence of private rescuers to a single vessel.
The blowback against the civilian activists began in earnest in December 2016 when a leaked report from Europe’s border agency Frontex accused them of colluding with smugglers. Previously, the civilian activists had been accused only of being a “pull factor” – tempting migrants to risk their lives at sea to reach Europe.
Two prosecutors on Sicily, the island that forms the toe of Italy’s boot, followed with similar accusations.
In February, a prosecutor in the port city of Catania, Carmelo Zuccaro, announced a task force to examine claims that people smugglers were financing the NGO rescue boats. “Do these NGOs all have the same motivations? And who is financing them?” Zuccaro asked.
As recently as 2014, just 3 percent of Italians considered immigration a major concern. Three years later more than a third of Italians told Ipsos pollsters they were very concerned by immigration. Local elections in June 2017 saw immigration hard-liners rewarded and candidates from the Democratic Party, the largest in Italy’s parliament, punished. The issue is expected to dominate the general election early next year.
When Zuccaro eventually admitted to a parliamentary committee in May 2017 that he had no evidence of such collusion and had instead merely been expressing a “hypothesis,” it made no headlines.
This febrile atmosphere created political opportunities for those willing to question the motives of rescuers. Zuccaro gained a national profile when he claimed he had evidence of phone calls between smugglers and activists aboard the rescue ships. The fact that his task force was not a criminal investigation did not stop it being cited by leaders of the two most popular opposition parties, the populist 5-Star Movement and the anti-immigrant Northern League, who have labeled the NGOs “sea taxis” for migrants.
When Zuccaro eventually admitted to a parliamentary committee in May 2017 that he had no evidence of such collusion and had instead merely been expressing a “hypothesis,” it made no headlines.
People swim towards the Proactiva Open Arms rescue ship after their inflatable boat begins to sink (AP Photo/Santi Palacios).
At those May hearings, Ambrogio Cartosio, a prosecutor from Trapani on the western shore of Sicily, announced a second investigation into possible collusion between charity boats and smugglers.
This probe led to the impounding in August of the Iuventa, a charity boat operated by Jugend Rettet, which translates into “youth rescue” in German. Investigators also alleged that migrants and smugglers shared the coordinates of their boats with rescuers on the messaging platform WhatsApp.
Court papers related to the case revealed that Italian intelligence services infiltrated the crew of another NGO rescue boat, the Vos Hestia. A three-man private security team aboard the commercial vessel – chartered by the U.K.-based charity Save the Children – reported not only to the Trapani prosecutor, but also to Italian intelligence services and Matteo Salvini, the outspoken leader of the far-right Northern League, an MEP who played a leading role in stoking public suspicion of the NGOs.
IMI, the security company hired by the Save the Children ship, was linked by investigative journalist Andrea Palladino to the far-right activist group Defend Europe. When Palladino obtained a list of members of a closed Facebook group for employees of IMI, he found the name of Gianmarco Concas, a former Italian navy officer and spokesman for Generation Identitaire, the group behind Defend Europe and the C-Star mission. Cristian Ricci, the head of IMI, denied the firm had links to Defend Europe but could not explain Concas’ presence in his closed group.
Saving migrants’ lives in the Mediterranean has always been political. The first nongovernmental rescue ship to appear in the Mediterranean, in 2004, was the Cap Anamur III – itself the granddaughter of a vessel that sailed to the South China Sea in 1979 to aid Vietnamese refugees. In a sign of things to come, the Cap Anamur III was intercepted off Sicily and impounded, and its crew was charged with abetting the illegal entry into Italy of the migrants aboard. Crew members were acquitted of the charges in 2009.
After the fall of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, there was a sharp increase in the number of refugees and migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean from Libya to Europe. But there was no concerted European response until October 2013, when 366 lives were lost in a shipwreck off Lampedusa, Italy. The death toll prompted Italy to launch Mare Nostrum, a year-long operation that effectively expanded Italy’s search and rescue area to encompass the zones of both Malta and Libya.
The naval mission faced international accusations that it encouraged more migrants to cross. When Italy’s request for funding support from its E.U. partners was ignored and the government faced domestic criticism over costs, Mare Nostrum was shut down on October 31, 2014. The next day, Operation Triton began, run by the E.U.’s border agency Frontex, which focused primarily on “border control and surveillance.” Triton covered a much smaller area, and at $3.6 million per month its operating budget was one-third of Mare Nostrum’s.
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To be continued
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Daniel Howden – Editor at Refugees Deeply, former at Guardian, and The Economist . His Latest Investigation: Central Med: EU priorities, Libyan Realities.
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