organization:doctors without borders

  • Jordi Ruiz Cirera | Mexico-based Photographer

    http://jordiruizphotography.com/info-contact/info

    http://jordiruizphotography.com/work/ramallahs-youth-at-a-crossroads


    

    Jordi Ruiz Cirera is an independent documentary photographer and filmmaker from Barcelona, based in Mexico. Devoted to long-term projects, Jordi focuses on the effects of globalisation in small communities and how they are adapting to it, and, since relocating in Mexico City, on migration issues across the Americas.

    He is a recipient of Magnum Foundation’s Emergency Fund and winner of global awards including the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Magnum’s 30 under 30, POYi, Lucie Awards, Magenta Flash Forward and the AOP’s Student Photographer of the Year. His work has been exhibited widely in galleries and at festivals, and belongs to a number of private collections.

    Jordi’s work has appeared in international publications that include The New York Times, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Guardian, Le Monde M and National Geographic’s Proof. He also works on commissions for corporate clients and non-profits such as MSF / Doctors Without Borders, the United Nations and Save the Children.

    In 2014, Jordi published his first monograph, Los Menonos, with independent publishing house Éditions du LIC. He holds a BA degree in design and an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from the London College of Communication. Jordi is a member of Panos Pictures.

    #palstine #ramallah #photographie

  • The Battle Against One of the Worst Ebola Epidemics Ever Is in Trouble
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/health/ebola-epidemic-congo.html

    “Ebola responders are increasingly being seen as the enemy,” Dr. Joanne Liu, president of Doctors Without Borders, said at a news conference in Geneva on Thursday. “In the last month alone, there were more than 30 different incidents and attacks against elements of the response.”

    “The existing atmosphere can only be described as toxic,” she said.

    Some people in the region question why the vaccine is being given only to certain people — including health workers and contacts of patients — and not to everyone, she said. Many wonder why outside aid has flooded in for Ebola, but not for malaria, diarrhea or other common, debilitating diseases that afflict many more people. Some have asked aid workers where they were when militias were carrying out massacres of civilians.

  • And Yet We Move - 2018, a Contested Year

    Alarm Phone 6 Week Report, 12 November - 23 December 2018

    311 people escaping from Libya rescued through a chain of solidarity +++ About 113,000 sea arrivals and over 2,240 counted fatalities in the Mediterranean this year +++ 666 Alarm Phone distress cases in 2018 +++ Developments in all three Mediterranean regions +++ Summaries of 38 Alarm Phone distress cases

    Introduction

    “There are no words big enough to describe the value of the work you are doing. It is a deeply human act and it will never be forgotten. The whole of your team should know that we wish all of you health and a long life and the best wishes in all the colours of the world.” These are the words that the Alarm Phone received a few days ago from a man who had been on a boat in the Western Mediterranean Sea and with whom our shift teams had stayed in touch throughout the night until they were finally rescued to Spain. He was able to support the other travellers by continuously and calmly reassuring them, and thereby averted panic on the boat. His message motivates us to continue also in 2019 to do everything we can to assist people who have taken to the sea because Europe’s border regime has closed safe and legal routes, leaving only the most dangerous paths slightly open. On these paths, over 2,240 people have lost their lives this year.

    While we write this report, 311 people are heading toward Spain on the rescue boat of the NGO Proactiva Open Arms. The travellers called the Alarm Phone when they were on a boat-convoy that had left from Libya. Based on the indications of their location, Al-Khums, the civil reconnaissance aircraft Colibri launched a search operation in the morning of the 21st of December and was able to spot the convoy of three boats which were then rescued by Proactiva. Italy and Malta closed their harbours to them, prolonging their suffering. Over the Christmas days they headed toward their final destination in Spain. The successful rescue operation of the 313 people (one mother and her infant child were flown out by a helicopter after rescue) highlights the chain of solidarity that activists and NGOs have created in the Central Mediterranean Sea. It is a fragile chain that the EU and its member states seek to criminalise and tear apart wherever they can.

    Throughout the year of 2018, we have witnessed and assisted contested movements across the Mediterranean Sea. Despite violent deterrence policies and practices, about 113,000 people succeeded in subverting maritime borders and have arrived in Europe by boat. We were alerted to 666 distress situations at sea (until December 23rd), and our shift teams have done their best to assist the many thousands of people who saw no other option to realise their hope for a better future than by risking their lives at sea. Many of them lost their lives in the moment of enacting their freedom of movement. Over 2,240 women, men, and children from the Global South – and probably many more who were never counted – are not with us anymore because of the violence inscribed in the Global North’s hegemonic and brutal borders. They were not able to get a visa. They could not board a much cheaper plane, bus, or ferry to reach a place of safety and freedom. Many travelled for months, even years, to get anywhere near the Mediterranean border – and on their journeys they have lived through hardships unimaginable for most of us. But they struggled on and reached the coasts of Northern Africa and Turkey, where they got onto overcrowded boats. That they are no longer with us is a consequence of Europe’s racist system of segregation that illegalises and criminalises migration, a system that also seeks to illegalise and criminalise solidarity. Many of these 2,240 people would be alive if the civil rescuers were not prevented from doing their work. All of them would be alive, if they could travel and cross borders freely.

    In the different regions of the Mediterranean Sea, the situation has further evolved over the course of 2018, and the Alarm Phone witnessed the changing patterns of boat migration first hand. Most of the boats we assisted were somewhere between Morocco and Spain (480), a considerable number between Turkey and Greece (159), but comparatively few between Libya and Italy (27). This, of course, speaks to the changing dynamics of migratory escape and its control in the different regions:

    Morocco-Spain: Thousands of boats made it across the Strait of Gibraltar, the Alboran Sea, or the Atlantic and have turned Spain into the ‘front-runner’ this year with about 56,000 arrivals by sea. In 2017, 22,103 people had landed in Spain, 8,162 in 2016. In the Western Mediterranean, crossings are organised in a rather self-organised way and the number of arrivals speaks to a migratory dynamism not experienced for over a decade in this region. Solidarity structures have multiplied both in Morocco and Spain and they will not be eradicated despite the wave of repression that has followed the peak in crossings over the summer. Several Alarm Phone members experienced the consequences of EU pressure on the Moroccan authorities to repress cross-border movements first hand when they were violently deported to the south of Morocco, as were several thousand others.

    Turkey-Greece: With about 32,000 people reaching the Greek islands by boat, more people have arrived in Greece than in 2017, when 29,718 people did so. After arrival via the sea, many are confined in inhumane conditions on the islands and the EU hotspots have turned into rather permanent prisons. This desperate situation has prompted renewed movements across the Turkish-Greek land border in the north. Overall, the number of illegalised crossings into Greece has risen due to more than 20,000 people crossing the land border. Several cases of people experiencing illegal push-back operations there reached the Alarm Phone over the year.

    Libya-Italy/Malta: Merely about 23,000[1] people have succeeded in fleeing Libya via the sea in 2018. The decrease is dramatic, from 119,369 in 2017, and even 181,436 in 2016. This decrease gives testament to the ruthlessness of EU deterrence policies that have produced the highest death rate in the Central Mediterranean and unspeakable suffering among migrant communities in Libya. Libyan militias are funded, trained, and legitimated by their EU allies to imprison thousands of people in camps and to abduct those who made it onto boats back into these conditions. Due to the criminalisation of civil rescuers, a lethal rescue gap was produced, with no NGO able to carry out their work for many months of the year. Fortunately, three of them have now been able to return to the deadliest area of the Mediterranean.

    These snapshots of the developments in the three Mediterranean regions, elaborated on in greater detail below, give an idea of the struggles ahead of us. They show how the EU and its member states not only created dangerous maritime paths in the first place but then reinforced its migrant deterrence regime at any cost. They show, however, also how thousands could not be deterred from enacting their freedom of movement and how solidarity structures have evolved to assist their precarious movements. We go into 2019 with the promise and call that the United4Med alliance of sea rescuers has outlined: “We will prove how civil society in action is not only willing but also able to bring about a new Europe; saving lives at sea and creating a just reception system on land. Ours is a call to action to European cities, mayors, citizens, societies, movements, organisations and whoever believes in our mission, to join us. Join our civil alliance and let us stand up together, boldly claiming a future of respect and equality. We will stand united for the right to stay and for the right to go.”[2] Also in the new year, the Alarm Phone will directly engage in this struggle and we call on others to join. It can only be a collective fight, as the odds are stacked against us.

    Developments in the Central Mediterranean

    In December 2018, merely a few hundred people were able to escape Libya by boat. It cannot be stressed enough how dramatic the decrease in crossings along this route is – a year before, 2,327 people escaped in December, in 2016 even 8,428. 2018 is the year when Europe’s border regime ‘succeeded’ in largely shutting down the Central Mediterranean route. It required a combination of efforts – the criminalisation of civil search and rescue organisations, the selective presence of EU military assets that were frequently nowhere to be found when boats were in distress, the closure of Italian harbours and the unwillingness of other EU member states to welcome the rescued, and, most importantly, the EU’s sustained support for the so-called Libyan coastguards and other Libyan security forces. Europe has not only paid but also trained, funded and politically legitimised Libyan militias whose only job is to contain outward migratory movements, which means capturing and abducting people seeking to flee to Europe both at sea and on land. Without these brutal allies, it would not have been possible to reduce the numbers of crossings that dramatically.

    The ‘Nivin case’ of November 7th exemplifies this European-Libyan alliance. On that day, a group of 95 travellers reached out to the Alarm Phone from a boat in distress off the coast of Libya. Among them were people from Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Eritrea. Italy refused to conduct a rescue operation and eventually they were rescued by the cargo vessel Nivin. Despite telling the rescued that they would be brought to a European harbour, the crew of the Nivin returned them to Libya on November 10th. At the harbour of Misrata, most of the rescued refused to disembark, stating that they would not want to be returned into conditions of confinement and torture. The people, accused by some to be ‘pirates’, fought bravely against forced disembarkation for ten days but on the 20th of November they could resist no longer when Libyan security forces stormed the boat and violently removed them, using tear gas and rubber bullets in the process. Several of the protestors were injured and needed treatment in hospital while others were returned into inhumane detention camps.[3]

    Also over the past 6 weeks, the period covered in this report, the criminalisation of civil rescue organisations continued. The day that the protestors on the Nivin were violently removed, Italy ordered the seizure of the Aquarius, the large rescue asset operated by SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontières that had already been at the docs in France for some time, uncertain about its future mission. According to the Italian authorities, the crew had falsely labelled the clothes rescued migrants had left on the Aquarius as ‘special’ rather than ‘toxic’ waste.[4] The absurdity of the accusation highlights the fact that Italy’s authorities seek out any means to prevent rescues from taking place, a “disproportionate and unfounded measure, purely aimed at further criminalising lifesaving medical-humanitarian action at sea”, as MSF noted.[5] Unfortunately, these sustained attacks showed effect. On the 6th of December, SOS Med and MSF announced the termination of its mission: “European policies and obstruction tactics have forced [us] to terminate the lifesaving operations carried out by the search and rescue vessel Aquarius.” As the MSF general director said: “This is a dark day. Not only has Europe failed to provide search and rescue capacity, it has also actively sabotaged others’ attempts to save lives. The end of Aquarius means more deaths at sea, and more needless deaths that will go unwitnessed.”[6]

    And yet, despite this ongoing sabotage of civil rescue from the EU and its member states, three vessels of the Spanish, German, and Italian organisations Open Arms, Sea-Watch and Mediterranea returned to the deadliest area of the Mediterranean in late November.[7] This return is also significance for Alarm Phone work in the Central Mediterranean: once again we have non-governmental allies at sea who will not only document what is going on along the deadliest border of the world but actively intervene to counter Europe’s border ‘protection’ measures. Shortly after returning, one of the NGOs was called to assist. Fishermen had rescued a group of travellers off the coast of Libya onto their fishing vessel, after they had been abandoned in the water by a Libyan patrol boat, as the fishermen claimed. Rather than ordering their rapid transfer to a European harbour, Italy, Malta and Spain sought out ways to return the 12 people to Libya. The fishing boat, the Nuestra Madre de Loreto, was ill-equipped to care for the people who were weak and needed medical attention. However, they were assisted only by Proactiva Open Arms, and for over a week, the people had to stay on the fishing boat. One of them developed a medical emergency and was eventually brought away in a helicopter. Finally, in early December, they were brought to Malta.[8]

    Around the same time, something rare and remarkable happened. A boat with over 200 people on board reached the Italian harbour of Pozzallo independently, on the 24th of November. Even when they were at the harbour, the authorities refused to allow them to quickly disembark – a irresponsible decision given that the boat was at risk of capsizing. After several hours, all of the people were finally allowed to get off the boat. Italy’s minister of the interior Salvini accused the Maltese authorities of allowing migrant boats to move toward Italian territory.[9] Despite their hardship, the people on the Nuestra Madre de Loreto and the 200 people from this boat, survived. Also the 33 people rescued by the NGO Sea-Watch on the 22nd of December survived. Others, however, did not. In mid-November, a boat left from Algeria with 13 young people on board, intending to reach Sardinia. On the 16th of November, the first body was found, the second a day later. Three survived and stated later that the 10 others had tried to swim to what they believed to be the shore when they saw a light in the distance.[10] In early December, a boat with 25 people on board left from Sabratha/Libya, and 15 of them did not survive. As a survivor reported, they had been at sea for 12 days without food and water.[11]

    Despite the overall decrease in crossings, what has been remarkable in this region is that the people escaping have more frequently informed the Alarm Phone directly than before. The case mentioned earlier, from the 20th of December, when people from a convoy of 3 boats carrying 313 people in total reached out to us, exemplifies this. Detected by the Colibri reconnaissance aircraft and rescued by Proactiva, this case demonstrates powerfully what international solidarity can achieve, despite all attempts by EU member states and institutions to create a zone of death in the Central Mediterranean Sea.
    Developments in the Western Mediterranean Sea

    Over the past six weeks covered by this report, the Alarm Phone witnessed several times what happens when Spanish and Moroccan authorities shift responsibilities and fail to respond quickly to boats in distress situations. Repeatedly we had to pressurise the Spanish authorities publicly before they launched a Search and Rescue (SAR) operation. And still, many lives were lost at sea. On Moroccan land, the repression campaign against Sub-Saharan travellers and residents continues. On the 30th of November, an Alarm Phone member was, yet again, arrested and deported towards the South of Morocco, to Tiznit, along with many other people. (h https://alarmphone.org/en/2018/12/04/alarm-phone-member-arrested-and-deported-in-morocco/?post_type_release_type=post). Other friends in Morocco have informed us about the deportation of large groups from Nador to Tiznit. Around the 16th of December, 400 people were forcibly removed, and on the 17th of December, another 300 people were deported to Morocco’s south. This repression against black residents and travellers in Morocco is one of the reasons for many to decide to leave via the sea. This has meant that also during the winter, cross-Mediterranean movements remain high. On just one weekend, the 8th-9th of December, 535 people reached Andalusia/Spain.[12]

    Whilst people are constantly resisting the border regime by acts of disobedience when they cross the borders clandestinely, acts of resistance take place also on the ground in Morocco, where associations and individuals are continuously struggling for the freedom of movement for all. In early December, an Alarm Phone delegation participated at an international conference in Rabat/Morocco, in order to discuss with members of other associations and collectives from Africa and Europe about the effects of the outsourcing and militarisation of European borders in the desire to further criminalise and prevent migration movements. We were among 400 people and were impressed by the many contributions from people who live and struggle in very precarious situations, by the uplifting atmosphere, and by the many accounts and expressions of solidarity. Days later, during the international meeting in Marrakesh on the ‘Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration’, the Alarm Phone was part of a counter-summit, protesting the international pact on migration which is not meant to reduce borders between states, but to curtail the freedom of movement of the many in the name of ‘legal’ and ‘regulated’ migration. The Alarm Phone delegation was composed of 20 activists from the cities of Tangier, Oujda, Berkane, Nador and Fes. One of our colleagues sums up the event: “We have expressed our ideas and commitments as Alarm Phone, solemnly and strongly in front of the other organisations represented. We have espoused the vision of freedom of movement, a vision without precedent. A vision which claims symbolically all human rights and which has the power to help migrants on all continents to feel protected.” In light of the Marrakesh pact, several African organisations joined together and published a statement rejecting “…the wish to confine Africans within their countries by strengthening border controls, in the deserts, at sea and in airports.”[13]

    Shortly after the international meeting in Marrakesh, the EU pledged €148 million to support Morocco’s policy of migrant containment, thus taking steps towards making it even more difficult, and therefore more dangerous for many people on the African continent to exercise their right to move freely, under the pretext of “combating smuggling”. Making the journeys across the Mediterranean more difficult does not have the desired effect of ending illegalised migration. As the routes to Spain from the north of Morocco have become more militarised following a summer of many successful crossings, more southern routes have come into use again. These routes, leading to the Spanish Canary Islands, force travellers to overcome much longer distances in the Atlantic Ocean, a space without phone coverage and with a heightened risk to lose one’s orientation. On the 18th of November, 22 people lost their lives at sea, on their way from Tiznit to the Canary Islands.[14] Following a Spanish-Frontex collaboration launched in 2006, this route to the Canary Islands has not been used very frequently, but numbers have increased this year, with Moroccan nationals being the largest group of arrivals.[15]
    Developments in the Aegean Sea

    Over the final weeks of 2018, between the 12th of November and the 23rd of December, 78 boats arrived on the Greek islands while 116 boats were stopped by the Turkish coastguards and returned to Turkey. This means that there were nearly 200 attempts to cross into Europe by boat over five weeks, and about 40 percent of them were successful.[16] Over the past six weeks, the Alarm Phone was involved in a total of 19 cases in this region. 6 of the boats arrived in Samos, 3 of them in Chios, and one each on Lesvos, Agathonisi, Farmkonisi, and Symi. 4 boats were returned to Turkey (3 of them rescued, 1 intercepted by the Turkish coastguards). In one distress situation, a man lost his life and another man had to be brought to the hospital due to hypothermia. Moreover, the Alarm Phone was alerted to 2 cases along the Turkish-Greek land border. While in one case their fate remains uncertain, the other group of people were forcibly pushed-back to Turkey.

    Thousands of people still suffering in inhuman conditions in hotspots: When we assist boats crossing the Aegean Sea, the people are usually relieved and happy when arriving on the islands, at least they have survived. However, this moment of happiness often turns into a state of shock when they enter the so-called ‘hotspots’. Over 12,500 people remain incarcerated there, often living in tents and containers unsuitable for winter in the five EU-sponsored camps on Lesvos, Samos, Chios, Kos, and Leros. In addition to serious overcrowding, asylum seekers continue to face unsanitary and unhygienic conditions and physical violence, including gender-based violence. Doctors without Borders has reported on a measles outbreak in Greek camps and conducted a vaccination campaign.[17] Amnesty International and 20 other organizations have published a collective call: “As winter approaches all asylum seekers on the Aegean islands must be transferred to suitable accommodation on the mainland or relocated to other EU countries. […] The EU-Turkey deal containment policy imposes unjustified and unnecessary suffering on asylum seekers, while unduly limiting their rights.”

    The ‘humanitarian’ crisis in the hotspots is the result of Greece’s EU-backed policy of containing asylum seekers on the Aegean islands until their asylum claims are adjudicated or until it is determined that they fall into one of the ‘vulnerable’ categories listed under Greek law. But as of late November, an estimated 2,200 people identified as eligible for transfer are still waiting as accommodation facilities on the mainland are also severely overcrowded. Those who are actually transferred from the hotspot on Lesvos to the Greek mainland are brought to far away camps or empty holiday resorts without infrastructure and without a sufficient number of aid workers.

    Criminalisation along Europe’s Eastern Sea Border: A lot has been written about the many attempts to criminalise NGOs and activists carrying out Search and Rescue operations in the Mediterranean. Much less publicly acknowledged are the many cases in which migrant travellers themselves become criminalised for their activist involvement, often for protesting against the inhuman living conditions and the long waiting times for the asylum-interviews. The case of the ‘Moria 35’ on Lesvos was a case in point, highlighting how a few individual protesters were randomly selected by authorities to scare others into silence and obedience. The Legal Centre Lesvos followed this case closely until the last person of the 35 was released and they shared their enquiries with “a 15-month timeline of injustice and impunity” on their website: “On Thursday 18th October, the last of the Moria 35 were released from detention. Their release comes one year and three months – to the day – after the 35 men were arbitrarily arrested and subject to brutal police violence in a raid of Moria camp following peaceful protests, on July 18th 2017.” While the Legal Centre Lesbos welcomes the fact that all 35 men were finally released, they should never have been imprisoned in the first place. They will not get back the 10 to 15 months they spent in prison. Moreover, even after release, most of the 35 men remain in a legally precarious situation. While 6 were granted asylum in Greece, the majority struggles against rejected asylum claims. Three were already deported. One individual was illegally deported without having exhausted his legal remedies in Greece while another individual, having spent 9 months in pre-trial detention, signed up for so-called ‘voluntary’ deportation.[18] In the meantime, others remain in prison to await their trials that will take place with hardly any attention of the media.

    Humanitarian activists involved in spotting and rescue released after 3 months: The four activists, Sarah Mardini, Nassos Karakitsos, Panos Moraitis and Sean Binder, were released on the 6th of December 2018 after having been imprisoned for three months. They had been held in prolonged pre-trial detention for their work with the non-profit organization Emergency Response Center International (ERCI), founded by Moraitis. The charges misrepresented the group as a smuggling crime ring, and its legitimate fundraising activities as money laundering. The arrests forced the group to cease its operations, including maritime search and rescue, the provision of medical care, and non-formal education to asylum seekers. They are free without geographical restrictions but the case is not yet over. Mardini and Binder still face criminal charges possibly leading to decades in prison.[19] Until 15 February the group ‘Solidarity now!’ is collecting as many signatures as possible to ensure that the Greek authorities drop the case.[20]

    Violent Pushbacks at the Land Border: During the last six weeks, the Alarm Phone was alerted to two groups at the land border separating Turkey and Greece. In both situations, the travellers had already reached Greek soil, but ended up on Turkish territory. Human Right Watch (HRW) published another report on the 18th of December about violent push-backs in the Evros region: “Greek law enforcement officers at the land border with Turkey in the northeastern Evros region routinely summarily return asylum seekers and migrants […]. The officers in some cases use violence and often confiscate and destroy the migrants’ belongings.”[21] Regularly, migrants were stripped off their phones, money and clothes. According to HRW, most of these incidents happened between April and November 2018.[22] The UNHCR and the Council of Europe’s Committee for Prevention of Torture have published similar reports about violent push backs along the Evros borders.[23]
    CASE REPORTS

    Over the past 6 weeks, the WatchTheMed Alarm Phone was engaged in 38 distress cases, of which 15 took place in the Western Mediterranean, 19 in the Aegean Sea, and 4 in the Central Mediterranean. You can find short summaries and links to the individual reports below.
    Western Mediterranean

    On Tuesday the 13th of November at 6.17pm, the Alarm Phone was alerted by a relative to a group of travellers who had left two days earlier from around Orán heading towards Murcia. They were around nine people, including women and children, and the relative had lost contact to the boat. We were also never able to reach the travellers. At 6.46pm we alerted the Spanish search and rescue organization Salvamento Maritimo (SM) to the distress of the travellers. For several days we tried to reach the travellers and were in contact with SM about the ongoing rescue operation. We were never able to reach the travellers or get any news from the relative. Thus, we are still unsure if the group managed to reach land somewhere on their own, or if they will add to the devastating number of people having lost their lives at sea (see: http://www.watchthemed.net/reports/view/1085).

    On Thursday the 22nd of November, at 5.58pm CET, the Alarm Phone received news about a boat of 11 people that had left Nador 8 hours prior. The shift team was unable to immediately enter into contact with the boat, but called Salvamento Maritimo to convey all available information. At 11.48am the following day, the shift team received word from a traveler on the boat that they were safe (see: http://www.watchthemed.net/reports/view/1088).

    At 7.25am CET on November 24, 2018, the Alarm Phone shift team was alerted to a boat of 70 people (including 8 women and 1 child) that had departed from Nador 3 days prior. The shift team was able to reach the boat at 7.50am and learned that their motor had stopped working. The shift team called Salvamento Maritimo, who had handed the case over to the Moroccan authorities. The shift team contacted the MRCC, who said they knew about the boat but could not find them, so the shift team mobilized their contacts to find the latest position and sent it to the coast guard at 8.55am. Rescue operations stalled for several hours. At around 2pm, the shift team received news that rescue operations were underway by the Marine Royale. The shift team remained in contact with several people and coast guards until the next day, when it was confirmed that the boat had finally been rescued and that there were at least 15 fatalities (see: http://www.watchthemed.net/reports/view/1087).

    On Friday the 7th of December 2018, we were alerted to two boats in distress in the Western Mediterranean Sea. One boat was brought to Algeria, the second boat rescued by Moroccan fishermen and returned to Morocco (see for full report: http://watchthemed.net/reports/view/1098).

    On Saturday, the 8th of December 2018, we were informed by a contact person at 3.25pm CET to a boat in distress that had left from Nador/Morocco during the night, at about 1am. There were 57 people on the boat, including 8 women and a child. We tried to establish contact to the boat but were unable to reach them. At 4.50pm, the Spanish search and rescue organisation Salvamento Maritimo (SM) informed us that they were already searching for this boat. At 8.34pm, SM stated that this boat had been rescued. Some time later, also our contact person confirmed that the boat had been found and rescued to Spain (see: http://watchthemed.net/reports/view/1099).

    On Monday the 10th of December, the Alarm Phone shift team was alerted to three boats in the Western Med. Two had left from around Nador, and one from Algeria. One boat was rescued by the Spanish search and rescue organisation Salvamento Maritimo, one group of travellers returned back to Nador on their own, and the boat from Algeria returned to Algeria (see: http://www.watchthemed.net/reports/view/1101).

    On Wednesday the 12th of December the Alarm Phone shift team was alerted two boats in the Western Med, one carrying seven people, the other carrying 12 people. The first boat was rescued by the Spanish search and rescue organization Salvamento Maritimo (SM), whilst the second boat was intercepted by the Moroccan Navy and brought back to Morocco, where we were informed that the travellers were held imprisoned (see: http://www.watchthemed.net/reports/view/1102).

    On December 21st, 2018, we were informed of two boats in distress in the Western Mediterranean Sea. The first had left from Algeria and was probably rescued to Spain. The other one had departed from Tangier and was rescued by the Marine Royale and brought back to Morocco (for full report, see: http://watchthemed.net/index.php/reports/view/1110).

    On the 22nd of December, at 5.58pm CET, the Alarm Phone shift team was alerted to a boat of 81 people (including 7 women) that had left the previous day from Nador. The motor was not working properly. They informed that they were in touch with Salvamiento Maritimo but as they were still in Moroccan waters, Salvamiento Maritimo said they were unable to perform rescue operations. The shift team had difficulty maintaining contact with the boat over the course of the next few hours. The shift team also contacted Salvamiento Maritimo who confirmed that they knew about the case. At 7.50pm, Salvamiento Maritimo informed the shift team that they would perform the rescue operations and confirmed the operation at 8.15pm. We later got the confirmation by a contact person that the people were rescued to Spain (see: http://watchthemed.net/index.php/reports/view/1111).

    On the 23rd of December 2018, at 1.14am CET, the Alarm Phone received an alert of a boat with 11 men and 1 woman who left from Cap Spartel at Saturday the 22nd of December. The Alarm Phone shift team was alerted to this rubber boat in the early hours of Sunday the 23rd of December. The shift team informed the Spanish Search and Rescue organisation Salvamento Maritimo (SM) at 4:50am CET about the situation and provided them with GPS coordinates of the boat. SM, however, rejected responsibility and shifted it to the Moroccan authorities but also the Moroccan Navy did not rescue the people. Several days later, the boat remains missing (see for full report: http://watchthemed.net/reports/view/1112).
    Aegean Sea

    On Saturday the 17th of November the Alarm Phone shift team was alerted to two boats in the Aegean Sea. The first boat returned back to Turkey, whilst the second boat reached Samos on their own (see: http://www.watchthemed.net/reports/view/1086).

    On the 19th of November at 8.40pm CET the shift team was alerted to a boat of 11 travelers in distress near the Turkish coast on its way to Kos. The shift team called the Turkish Coastguard to inform them of the situation. At 9.00pm, the Coastguard called back to confirm they found the boat and would rescue the people. The shift team lost contact with the travelers. At 9.35pm, the Turkish coast guard informed the shift team that the boat was sunk, one man died and one person had hypothermia and would be brought to the hospital. The other 9 people were safe and brought back to Turkey (see: http://www.watchthemed.net/index.php/reports/view/1090).

    On the 20th of November at 4.07am CET, the shift team was alerted to a boat with about 50 travelers heading to Samos. The shift team contacted the travelers but the contact was broken for both language and technological reasons. The Alarm Phone contacted the Greek Coastguard about rescue operations. At 7.02am, the shift team was told that a boat of 50 people had been rescued, and the news was confirmed later on, although the shift team could not obtain direct confirmation from the travelers themselves (see:http://www.watchthemed.net/reports/view/1089).

    On the 23rd of November at 7.45pm CET, the Alarm Phone was contacted regarding a group of 19 people, (including 2 women, 1 of whom was pregnant, and a child) who had crossed the river Evros/ Meric and the Turkish-Greek landborder 3 days prior. The shift team first contacted numerous rescue and protection agencies, including UNHCR and the Greek Police, noting that the people were already in Greece and wished to apply for asylum. Until today we remained unable to find out what happened to the people (see: http://www.watchthemed.net/reports/view/1091).

    On the 26th of November at 6:54am CET the Alarm Phone shift team was alerted to a group of 30 people (among them 7 children and a pregnant woman) who were stranded on the shore in southern Turkey, close to Kas. They wanted us to call the Turkish coastguard so at 7:35am we provided the coastguard with the information we had. At 8:41am we received a photograph from our contact person showing rescue by the Turkish coastguard (see: http://watchthemed.net/index.php/reports/view/1092).

    On the 29th of November at 4am CET the Alarm Phone shift team was alerted to a boat carrying 44 people (among them 19 children and some pregnant women) heading towards the Greek island of Samos. Shortly afterwards the travellers landed on Samos and because of their difficulties orienting themselves we alerted the local authorities. At 9:53am the port police told us that they had rescued 44 people. They were taken to the refugee camp (see: http://watchthemed.net/index.php/reports/view/1093).

    On Monday, the 3rd of December 2018, the Alarm Phone was alerted at 5.30am CET to a boat in distress south of Chios, with 43 people on board, among them 14 children. We were able to reach the boat at 5.35am. When we received their position, we informed the Greek coastguards at 7.30am and forwarded an updated GPS position to them ten minutes later. At 8.52am, the coastguards confirmed the rescue of the boat. The people were brought to Chios Island. On the next day, the people themselves confirmed that they had all safely reached Greece (see: http://watchthemed.net/reports/view/1095).

    On Tuesday the 4th of December 2018, at 6.20am CET, the Alarm Phone was alerted to a boat in distress near Agathonisi Island. There were about 40 people on board. We established contact to the boat at 6.38am. At 6.45am, we alerted the Greek coastguards. The situation was dangerous as the people on board reported of high waves. At 9.02am, the Greek coastguards confirmed that they had just rescued the boat. The people were brought to Agathonisi (see for full report: http://watchthemed.net/reports/view/1096).

    On Wednesday the 5th of December 2018, at 00:08am CET, the Alarm Phone was alerted by a contact person to a boat in distress near Chios Island, carrying about 50 people. We received their GPS position at 00.17am and informed the Greek coastguards to the case at 00.30am. At 00.46am, we learned from the contact person that a boat had just been rescued. The Greek authorities confirmed this when we called them at 00.49am. At around 1pm, the people from the boat confirmed that they had been rescued (see: http://watchthemed.net/reports/view/1097).

    On Friday the 7th of December 2018, the Alarm Phone was contacted at 5.53am CET by a contact person and informed about a group of 19 people who had crossed the Evros river to Greece and needed assistance. We assisted them for days, but at some point contact was lost. We know that they were returned to Turkey and thus suspect an illegal push-back operation (see for full report: http://watchthemed.net/index.php/reports/view/1109).

    On Thursday the 13th of December the Alarm Phone shift team was alerted to two boats in the Aegean sea. In both cases we were not able to reach the travellers, but we were in contact with both the Turkish and Greek coast guard and were in the end able to confirm that one boat had arrived to Lesvos on their own, whilst the others had been rescued by Turkish fishermen (see: http://www.watchthemed.net/reports/view/1100).

    On the 17th of December, 2018, at 6.39am, the Alarm Phone shift team was alerted to a boat of 60 travellers. Water was entering the boat, and so the travelers were in distress. Though the shift team had a difficult time remaining in contact with the boat, they contacted the Greek Coastguard to inform them of the situation and the position of the boat. Although the team was not able to remain in contact with the travelers, they received confirmation at 8.18am that the boat had been brought to Greece (see: http://watchthemed.net/reports/view/1103).

    On the 18th of December at 2.11am CET, the Alarm Phone was alerted to two boats. The first, of 29 travellers, had landed on the island of Symi and needed help to exit the place of landing. The second was a boat of 54 travellers (including 16 children, and 15 women) that was rescued by the Greek Coastguard later (see: http://watchthemed.net/reports/view/1104).

    On the 21st of December, our shift teams were alerted to 2 boats on the Aegean. The first boat was directed to Chios Island and was likely rescued by the Greek Coastguard. The second boat was in immediate distress and after the shift team contacted the Greek Coastguard they rescued the boat (see: http://watchthemed.net/reports/view/1105).

    On the 23rd of December 2018 at 6am CET, the Alarm Phone received information about a boat in distress heading to Samos with around 60 travellers (including 30 children and 8 women, 4 pregnant). The shift team made contact with the boat and was informed that one of the women was close to giving birth and so the situation was very urgent. The shift team then called the Greek Coast Guard. At 8.07am, the shift team received confirmation that the boat had been rescued (see: http://watchthemed.net/reports/view/1106).
    Central Mediterranean

    On Monday the 12th of November at 6.57pm, the Alarm Phone was called by a relative, asking for help to find out what had happened to his son, who had been on a boat from Algeria towards Sardinia, with around 11 travellers on the 8t of November. Following this, the Alarm Phone was contacted by several relatives informing us about missing people from this boat. Our shift teams tried to gain an understanding of the situation, and for days we stayed in contact with the relatives and tried to support them, but it was not possible to obtain information about what had happened to the travellers (see: http://www.watchthemed.net/index.php/reports/view/1094).

    On November 23rd at 1.24pm CET, the Alarm Phone shift team was called by a boat of 120 travelers that was in distress and had left the Libyan coast the night before. The shift team remained in touch with the boat for several hours, and helped recharge their phone credit when it expired. As the boat was in distress, and there were no available NGO operations near the boat, the shift team had no choice but to contact the Italian Coast Guard, but they refused to engage in Search and Rescue (SAR) activities, and instead told the Libyan Coastguard. The boat was intercepted and returned to Libya (see: http://watchthemed.net/reports/view/1107).

    On December 20th, 2018, the Alarm Phone shift team was alerted to two cases in the Central Mediterranean Sea. The first was a boat of 20 people that was intercepted and brought back to Libya. The second concerned 3 boats with 300 people in total, that were rescued by Open Arms and brought to Spain (for full report see: http://watchthemed.net/reports/view/1108).

    https://alarmphone.org/en/2018/12/27/and-yet-we-move-2018-a-contested-year/?post_type_release_type=post

  • Italy accuses NGO migrant ship of dumping toxic waste | Agricultural Commodities | Reuters
    https://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL8N1XV4S2

    *• Italy orders seizure of migrant ship Aquarius
    • Doctors without Borders accused of waste abuses
    • Charity denies charges, says Italy wants to stop rescues

    Italian magistrates on Tuesday accused the Doctors without Borders (MSF) charity of illegally dumping toxic waste at ports in southern Italy in what MSF said was an attempt to undermine migrant rescue efforts.

    Magistrates ordered the MSF-operated ship Aquarius, which has saved thousands of migrants since 2016, to be impounded but the charity denied any wrongdoing and accused Italy of seeking to criminalise humanitarian search and rescue missions.

  • WATCH | “There is a minefield sign and the migrants will go into this area because they know the police won’t be there”. Hans von der Brelie (@euronewsreport) is reporting from the Bosnia-Herzegovina border.

    https://twitter.com/euronews/status/1058409250043633671

    #Bonsie_Herzégovine #Bosnie #migrations #asile #réfugiés #mines_anti-personnel #frontières #Croatie

    Ici le reportage:
    On the ground at the Bosnian-Croatian border where migrant tensions are rising

    Tensions are rising on the Bosnian-Croatian border, where scores of migrants are demanding entry to the European Union, amid reports this week of fresh police clashes, plummeting temperatures and inadequate living conditions.

    Thousands of migrants and refugees fleeing wars and poverty in North Africa and Asia are sleeping rough near the border, which they hope to cross to gain access to the EU.

    Several people were injured on Wednesday in clashes with Croatian police, with migrants accusing officers of beating them and smashing their phones.

    Meanwhile, Doctors Without Borders warned that “as temperatures drop the situation becomes more difficult and tensions are rising.”

    Euronews correspondent Hans von der Brelie is at the scene. Take a look at his pictures and videos below to find out what is really happening on the ground:
    https://twitter.com/euronews/status/1058409250043633671
    Matiola and Nazir want to enter the European Union without visas. However, they can’t cross the well-protected Bosnian border with Croatia.

    They are stuck in the northwestern part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Bihac, sleeping rough — protected against rain by plastic sheets.

    Tensions are rising on the Bosnian-Croatian border, where scores of migrants are demanding entry to the European Union, amid reports this week of fresh police clashes, plummeting temperatures and inadequate living conditions.

    Thousands of migrants and refugees fleeing wars and poverty in North Africa and Asia are sleeping rough near the border, which they hope to cross to gain access to the EU.

    Several people were injured on Wednesday in clashes with Croatian police, with migrants accusing officers of beating them and smashing their phones.

    Meanwhile, Doctors Without Borders warned that “as temperatures drop the situation becomes more difficult and tensions are rising.”

    Euronews correspondent Hans von der Brelie is at the scene. Take a look at his pictures and videos below to find out what is really happening on the ground:

    Matiola and Nazir want to enter the European Union without visas. However, they can’t cross the well-protected Bosnian border with Croatia.

    They are stuck in the northwestern part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Bihac, sleeping rough — protected against rain by plastic sheets.

    A torn EU umbrella lays on top of destroyed tents and garbage in a public park of #Bihac.

    Hundreds of migrants had put their tents here, but they are no longer tolerated and the camp was dismantled.


    Migrants rebuild a shelter in Bihac park.

    These friends from the Kurdish part of Iraq have stayed together throughout the difficult journey. They dream of building a future in Germany or France.

    This is 24-year-old Muhamed Suliman. He worked as a taxi driver in Dubai before heading towards Europe. It was "too hot to stay there. Not enough pay. Too many fines,” he said.

    Suliman said his dream is to reach Italy, but there is no way to cross into Croatia.

    “I will try again. Again and again,” he said.

    Wearing plastic sandals, he said Croatian police took his shoes.


    The remains of a dismantled tent camp in Bihac park.

    Kurdish Iraqi migrants discuss their broken smartphone. “The Croatian police smashed it,” they said.

    Ageed, Muhemed, Jalal, Karwan, Lawin, Ahmad, Tahiro are from Iraq. They speak Kurdish.

    They have been staying for many weeks in the public park of Bihac, the starting point to cross illegally over the external EU border.

    They have tried several times to enter Croatia but were always caught by border guards.

    Muhamed claims he was surrounded by seven Croatian policemen and beaten up.

    This is a former students dormitory building in Bihac park, where almost 1,000 migrants and refugees sleep rough. They mainly come from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Northern Africa, Bangladesh, Iran and Iraq.

    People cook on an open fire in front of a former students’ dormitory in Bihac.

    The migrants from Pakistan are aiming to cross the nearby external EU border illegally into Croatia and travel further towards Italy, Germany, France and Spain.

    This official tries to detect migrants crossing into Croatia illegally every day and night.

    Ivana and Josip are two of 6,300 police officers controlling the Croatian border with Bosnia and Herzegovina.

    As it prepares to join the EU’s Schengen zone soon, Croatia has invested heavily in human resources.

    “We have really a lot of colleagues around here at the external border of the EU”, Ivana and Josip told Euronews.

    This is just one out of many watchtowers and observation posts on the Croatian side of the external EU border with Bosnia and Herzegovina.

    “No need to build a border fence here,” says Damir Butina, head of the border police unit in Cetingrad.

    This is the famous “#green_border” between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The tiny creek marks the exact borderline.

    The left side of the picture is Croatia, the right is Bosnia and Herzegovina.

    Dozens of migrants try to cross the border every day and every night. While there is no fence, there is hidden high tech surveillance all around. You move — and you will be detected.

    https://www.euronews.com/2018/11/02/on-the-ground-at-the-bosnian-croatian-border-where-migrant-tensions-are-ri
    #frontière_verte #militarisation_des_frontières

  • La vie de désespoir des réfugiés relégués par l’Australie sur une île du Pacifique

    La femme du Somalien Khadar Hrisi a tenté plusieurs fois de se suicider. R, une Iranienne de 12 ans, a voulu s’immoler par le feu : à Nauru, minuscule caillou du Pacifique, des réfugiés relégués par l’Australie racontent à l’AFP une vie sans perspective, sans soins et sans espoir.

    Nauru, le plus petit pays insulaire du monde, vient d’accueillir le Forum des îles du Pacifique (Fip) mais a interdit aux journalistes l’accès aux camps de rétention où Canberra refoule les clandestins qui tentent de gagner l’Australie par la mer.

    L’AFP a toutefois réussi à y pénétrer et à rencontrer des réfugiés dont la quasi totalité ont souhaité l’anonymat pour des raisons de sécurité.

    A Nauru, près d’un millier de migrants dont une centaine d’enfants, sur 11.000 habitants, vivent dans huit camps financés par Canberra, certains depuis cinq ans, selon leurs récits.

    Dans le camp numéro 5, que l’on atteint au détour d’un chemin sous une chaleur écrasante, dans un paysage hérissé de pitons rocheux, le Somalien Hrisi veut témoigner à visage découvert.

    Il n’a plus peur, il n’a plus rien. Sa femme ne parle pas, son visage est inexpressif.

    M. Hrisi la laisse seule le moins possible, à cause de sa dépression. Elle a tenté plusieurs fois de se suicider ces derniers jours, raconte-t-il.

    « Quand je me suis réveillé, elle était en train de casser ça », dit-il en montrant des lames de rasoir jetables. « Elle allait les avaler avec de l’eau ».

    – Problèmes psychologiques -

    M. Hrisi affirme qu’ils sont allés plusieurs fois à l’hôpital de Nauru financé par l’Australie mais que celui-ci refuse de les prendre en charge. L’autre nuit, « ils ont appelé la police et nous ont mis dehors ».

    Le camp numéro 1 traite les malades, expliquent les réfugiés. Mais il n’accueille qu’une cinquantaine de personnes car l’endroit croule sous les demandes. Or beaucoup de migrants vont mal et souffrent de problèmes psychologiques liés à leur isolement sur l’île.

    Les évacuations sanitaires vers l’Australie sont rares selon eux.

    Les ONG ne cessent de dénoncer la politique d’immigration draconienne de l’Australie.

    Depuis 2013, Canberra, qui dément tout mauvais traitement, refoule systématiquement en mer tous les bateaux de clandestins, originaires pour beaucoup d’Afghanistan, du Sri Lanka et du Moyen-Orient.

    Ceux qui parviennent à passer par les mailles du filet sont envoyés dans des îles reculées du Pacifique. Même si leur demande d’asile est jugée légitime, ils ne seront jamais accueillis sur le sol australien.

    Canberra argue qu’il sauve ainsi des vies en dissuadant les migrants d’entreprendre un périlleux voyage. Les arrivées de bateaux, qui étaient quasiment quotidiennes, sont aujourd’hui rarissimes.

    Le Refugee Council of Australia et l’Asylum Seeker Resource Centre ont dénoncé récemment les ravages psychologiques de la détention indéfinie, en particulier chez les enfants.

    « Ceux qui ont vu ces souffrances disent que c’est pire que tout ce qu’ils ont vu, même dans les zones de guerre. Des enfants de sept et douze ans ont fait l’expérience de tentatives répétées de suicide, certains s’arrosent d’essence et deviennent catatoniques », écrivaient-ils.

    R, une Iranienne de 12 ans rencontrée par l’AFP, a tenté de s’immoler. Elle vit à Nauru depuis cinq ans avec ses deux parents de 42 ans et son frère de 13 ans.

    Les enfants passent leurs journées prostrés au lit. La mère a la peau couverte de plaques, elle dit souffrir et ne recevoir aucun traitement.

    – Essence et briquet -

    Le père a récemment surpris sa fille en train de s’asperger d’essence. « Elle a pris un briquet et elle a crié +Laisse-moi seule ! Laisse-moi seule ! Je veux me suicider ! Je veux mourir !+ ».

    Son fils sort lentement de son lit et confie d’une voix monocorde : « Je n’ai pas d’école, je n’ai pas de futur, je n’ai pas de vie ».

    Non loin de là, entre deux préfabriqués, une cuve est taguée du sigle « ABF » et d’une croix gammée. L’Australian Border Force est le service australien de contrôle des frontières, honni par les réfugiés.

    Ces derniers se déplacent librement sur l’île car la prison, ce sont ses 21 kilomètres carrés.

    Khadar reçoit un ami, un ancien gardien de buts professionnel camerounais qui raconte avoir secouru un voisin en train de se pendre. Son meilleur ami a été retrouvé mort, le nez et les yeux pleins de sang, sans qu’il sache la cause du décès.

    Pas de perspectives, et pas de soins. Au grand désespoir d’Ahmd Anmesharif, un Birman dont les yeux coulent en permanence. Il explique souffrir aussi du cœur et passe ses journées sur un fauteuil en mousse moisie, à regarder la route.

    Les défenseurs des droits dénoncent des conditions effroyables et font état d’accusations d’agressions sexuelles et d’abus physiques.

    Les autorités de l’île démentent. Les réfugiés « mènent leur vie normalement, comme les autres Nauruans (...) on est très heureux de vivre ensemble », assurait ainsi lors du Fip le président de Nauru, Baron Waqa.

    Mais les réfugiés soutiennent que leurs relations avec les Nauruans se détériorent.

    « Ils nous frappent toujours, ils nous lancent toujours des pierres », accuse l’adolescent iranien.

    – Economie sous perfusion -

    Un autre Iranien, un mécanicien qui a réussi à monter un petit commerce, crie sa colère. Il vient de se faire voler « la caisse, les motos, les outils ». « La police ne retrouve jamais rien quand ce sont les Nauruans qui volent les réfugiés », assène-t-il.

    Si les conditions sont vétustes dans les camps, où la plupart des logements sont des préfabriqués, beaucoup d’habitants de Nauru semblent vivre dans des conditions plus précaires encore.

    Bon nombre habitent des cabanes de tôle, les plages sont jonchées de détritus. Ils disent ne pas comprendre de quoi se plaignent les migrants.

    En attendant, les camps sont cruciaux pour l’économie de l’île, exsangue depuis l’épuisement des réserves de phosphate qui avait contribué à l’opulence du siècle dernier.

    Selon les chiffres australiens, les recettes publiques sont passées de 20 à 115 millions de dollars australiens (12 à 72 millions d’euros) entre 2010-2011 et 2015-2016, essentiellement grâce aux subventions australiennes liées aux camps.

    « Si on enlève les réfugiés, Nauru est morte : c’est pour ça que le président tient à ce que nous restions », juge le Camerounais.

    Mais tous les réfugiés rencontrés souhaitent partir, n’importe où pour certains.

    « Au XXIe siècle, les gens pensent en secondes, en instants. Le gouvernement australien a volé cinq ans de notre vie... qui s’en soucie ? », regrette le père de la petite Iranienne.


    https://actu.orange.fr/monde/la-vie-de-desespoir-des-refugies-relegues-par-l-australie-sur-une-ile-du-pacifique-CNT0000016r391/photos/un-refugie-du-sri-lanka-a-anibare-sur-l-ile-de-nauru-dans-le-pacifique-l
    #Nauru #externalisation #asile #migrations #réfugiés #Australie #photographie
    via @marty
    cc @reka

    • The #Nauru Experience: Zero-Tolerance Immigration and #Suicidal_Children

      A recent visit to Nauru revealed the effects of Australia’s offshore #detention_policy and its impact on #mental_health.

      The Krishnalingam family on the roof of an abandoned mansion in Ronave, Nauru. The family applied for resettlement in the #United_States after fleeing Sri Lanka and being certified as #refugees.

      CreditCreditMridula Amin

      TOPSIDE, Nauru — She was 3 years old when she arrived on Nauru, a child fleeing war in #Sri_Lanka. Now, Sajeenthana is 8.

      Her gaze is vacant. Sometimes she punches adults. And she talks about dying with ease.

      “Yesterday I cut my hand,” she said in an interview here on the remote Pacific island where she was sent by the Australian government after being caught at sea. She pointed to a scar on her arm.

      “One day I will kill myself,” she said. “Wait and see, when I find the knife. I don’t care about my body. ”

      Her father tried to calm her, but she twisted away. “It is the same as if I was in war, or here,” he said.

      Sajeenthana is one of more than 3,000 refugees and asylum seekers who have been sent to Australia’s offshore #detention_centers since 2013. No other Australian policy has been so widely condemned by the world’s human rights activists nor so strongly defended by the country’s leaders, who have long argued it saves lives by deterring smugglers and migrants.

      Now, though, the desperation has reached a new level — in part because of the United States.

      Sajeenthana and her father are among the dozens of refugees on Nauru who had been expecting to be moved as part of an Obama-era deal that President #Trump reluctantly agreed to honor, allowing resettlement for up to 1,250 refugees from Australia’s offshore camps.

      So far, according to American officials, about 430 refugees from the camps have been resettled in the United States — but at least 70 people were rejected over the past few months.

      That includes Sajeenthana and her father, Tamil refugees who fled violence at home after the Sri Lankan government crushed a Tamil insurgency.

      Sajeenthana, 8, with her father after describing her suicidal thoughts and attempts at self-harm in September.CreditMridula Amin and Lachie Hinton

      A State Department spokeswoman did not respond to questions about the #rejections, arguing the Nauru refugees are subject to the same vetting procedures as other refugees worldwide.

      Australia’s Department of Home Affairs said in a statement that Nauru has “appropriate mental health assessment and treatment in place.”

      But what’s clear, according to doctors and asylum seekers, is that the situation has been deteriorating for months. On Nauru, signs of suicidal children have been emerging since August. Dozens of organizations, including #Doctors_Without_Borders (which was ejected from Nauru on Oct. 5) have been sounding the alarm. And with the hope of American resettlement diminishing, the Australian government has been forced to relent: Last week officials said they would work toward moving all children off Nauru for treatment by Christmas.

      At least 92 children have been moved since August — Sajeenthana was evacuated soon after our interview — but as of Tuesday there were still 27 children on Nauru, hundreds of adults, and no long-term solution.

      The families sent to Australia for care are waiting to hear if they will be sent back to Nauru. Some parents, left behind as their children are being treated, fear they will never see each other again if they apply for American resettlement, while asylum seekers from countries banned by the United States — like Iran, Syria and Somalia — lack even that possibility.

      For all the asylum seekers who have called Nauru home, the psychological effects linger.
      ‘I Saw the Blood — It Was Everywhere’

      Nauru is a small island nation of about 11,000 people that takes 30 minutes by car to loop. A line of dilapidated mansions along the coast signal the island’s wealthy past; in the 1970s, it was a phosphate-rich nation with per capita income second only to Saudi Arabia.

      Now, those phosphate reserves are virtually exhausted, and the country relies heavily on Australian aid. It accounted for 25 percent of Nauru’s gross domestic product last year alone.

      Mathew Batsiua, a former Nauruan lawmaker who helped orchestrate the offshore arrangement, said it was meant to be a short-term deal. But the habit has been hard to break.

      “Our mainstay income is purely controlled by the foreign policy of another country,” he said.

      In Topside, an area of old cars and dusty brush, sits one of the two processing centers that house about 160 detainees. Hundreds of others live in community camps of modular housing. They were moved from shared tents in August, ahead of the Pacific Islands Forum, an intergovernmental meeting that Nauru hosted this year.

      Sukirtha Krishnalingam, 15, said the days are a boring loop as she and her family of five — certified refugees from Sri Lanka — wait to hear if the United States will accept them. She worries about her heart condition. And she has nightmares.

      “At night, she screams,” said her brother Mahinthan, 14.

      In the past year, talk of suicide on the island has become more common. Young men like Abdullah Khoder, a 24-year-old Lebanese refugee, says exhaustion and hopelessness have taken a toll. “I cut my hands with razors because I am tired,” he said.

      Even more alarming: Children now allude to suicide as if it were just another thunderstorm. Since 2014, 12 people have died after being detained in Australia’s offshore detention centers on Nauru and Manus Island, part of Papua New Guinea.

      Christina Sivalingam, a 10-year-old Tamil girl on Nauru spoke matter-of-factly in an interview about seeing the aftermath of one death — that of an Iranian man, Fariborz Karami, who killed himself in June.

      “We came off the school bus and I saw the blood — it was everywhere,” she said calmly. It took two days to clean up. She said her father also attempted suicide after treatment for his thyroid condition was delayed.

      Seeing some of her friends being settled in the United States while she waits on her third appeal for asylum has only made her lonelier. She said she doesn’t feel like eating anymore.

      “Why am I the only one here?” she said. “I want to go somewhere else and be happy.”

      Some observers, even on Nauru, wonder if the children are refusing to eat in a bid to leave. But medical professionals who have worked on the island said the rejections by the Americans have contributed to a rapid deterioration of people’s mental states.

      Dr. Beth O’Connor, a psychiatrist working with Doctors Without Borders, said that when she arrived last year, people clung to the hope of resettlement in the United States. In May, a batch of rejections plunged the camp into despair.

      Mr. Karami’s death further sapped morale.

      “People that just had a bit of spark in their eye still just went dull,” Dr. O’Connor said. “They felt more abandoned and left behind.”

      Many of the detainees no longer hope to settle in Australia. #New_Zealand has offered to take in 150 refugees annually from Nauru but Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, has said that he will only consider the proposal if a bill is passed banning those on Nauru from ever entering Australia. Opposition lawmakers say they are open to discussion.

      In the meantime, Nauru continues to draw scrutiny.
      ‘I’m Not Going Back to Nauru’

      For months, doctors say, many children on Nauru have been exhibiting symptoms of #resignation_syndrome — a mental condition in response to #trauma that involves extreme withdrawal from reality. They stopped eating, drinking and talking.

      “They’d look right through you when you tried to talk to them,” Dr. O’Connor said. “We watched their weights decline and we worried that one of them would die before they got out.”

      Lawyers with the National Justice Project, a nonprofit legal service, have been mobilizing. They have successfully argued for the #medical_evacuation of around 127 people from Nauru this year, including 44 children.

      In a quarter of the cases, the government has resisted these demands in court, said George Newhouse, the group’s principal lawyer.

      “We’ve never lost,” he said. “It is gut-wrenching to see children’s lives destroyed for political gain.”

      A broad coalition that includes doctors, clergy, lawyers and nonprofit organizations, working under the banner #kidsoffnauru, is now calling for all asylum seekers to be evacuated.

      Public opinion in Australia is turning: In one recent poll, about 80 percent of respondents supported the removal of families and children from Nauru.

      Australia’s conservative government, with an election looming, is starting to shift.

      “We’ve been going about this quietly,” Mr. Morrison said last week. “We haven’t been showboating.”

      But there are still questions about what happens next.

      Last month, Sajeenthana stopped eating. After she had spent 10 days on a saline drip in a Nauruan hospital, her father was told he had two hours to pack for Australia.

      Speaking by video from Brisbane last week (we are not using her full name because of her age and the severity of her condition), Sajeenthana beamed.

      “I feel better now that I am in Australia,” she said. “I’m not going back to Nauru.”

      But her father is less certain. The United States rejected his application for resettlement in September. There are security guards posted outside their Brisbane hotel room, he said, and though food arrives daily, they are not allowed to leave. He wonders if they have swapped one kind of limbo for another, or if they will be forced back to Nauru.

      Australia’s Home Affairs minister has said the Nauru children will not be allowed to stay.

      “Anyone who is brought here is still classified as a transitory person,” said Jana Favero, director of advocacy and campaigns at the Asylum Seeker Resource Center. “Life certainly isn’t completely rosy and cheery once they arrive in Australia.”

      On Monday, 25 more people, including eight children, left the island in six family units, she said.

      Those left behind on Nauru pass the days, worrying and waiting.

      Christina often dreams of what life would be like somewhere else, where being 10 does not mean being trapped.

      A single Iranian woman who asked not to be identified because she feared for her safety said that short of attempting suicide or changing nationality, there was no way off Nauru.

      She has been waiting two years for an answer to her application for resettlement in the United States — one that now seems hopeless given the Trump administration’s policies.

      Each night, often after the power goes out on Nauru, she and her sister talk about life and death, and whether to harm themselves to seek freedom.

      https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/world/australia/nauru-island-asylum-refugees-children-suicide.html

  • Attivarsi ovunque contro le frontiere assassine

    Guido Viale, presidente dell’#Osservatorio_solidarietà della #Carta_di_Milano, ha aperto i lavori della conferenza Solidarietà attraverso i confini, il 25 marzo a Fa’ la cosa giusta, illustrando semplicemente che la viva voce dei tanti protagonisti presenti avrebbe dato il senso dell’iniziativa oggi ancora più importante dopo il sequestro della nave di Proactivia Openarms operato in dispregio delle leggi italiane e internazionali come atto intimidatorio contro chi nel pieno rispetto delle leggi e dei Diritti umani è impegnato per salvare vite umane che i governi della Fortezza Europa, Italia in testa, vorrebbero si concludessero senza clamore in fondo al mare nostrum. Dopo una sintetica illustrazione di Daniela Padoan delle attività dell’Osservatorio solidarietà e una poesia di Ahmed, letta da Denise Rogers, una ragazza argentina che ha dato voce ai tanti migranti morti, si sono susseguite le testimonianze da Ventimiglia, Bolzano, Lesbo, Atene, Como formando un quadro tragico della situazione ma dimostrando anche che c’è un’Europa della solidarietà e dei diritti che lotta contro leggi e governi custodi implacabili di frontiere assassine.

    https://ecoinformazioni.wordpress.com/2018/03/25/attivarsi-ovunque-contro-le-frntiere-assassine

    #solidarité #mer #terre #Méditerranée #Alpes #frontière_sud-alpine #criminalisation_de_la_solidarité #délit_de_solidarité #sauvetage

    J’aimerais ici reprendre les propos de Charles Heller, qui ont été publié dans une interview dans Libé :

    Ceux qui ont imposé le contrôle des frontières de l’espace européen utilisent le terme de #integrated_border_management, la « #gestion_intégrée_des_frontières » : il ne suffit pas de contrôler la limite de la frontière territoriale, il faut contrôler avant, sur et après la frontière. La violence du contrôle s’exerce sur toute la trajectoire des migrants. De la même manière, les pratiques de solidarité, plus ou moins politisées, s’exercent sur l’ensemble de leur trajectoire. On pourrait imaginer une « #solidarité_intégrée », qui n’est pas chapeautée par une organisation mais qui de fait opère, petit bout par petit bout, sur les trajectoires.

    https://www.pacte-grenoble.fr/sites/pacte/files/files/liberation_20171215_15-12-2017-extrait.pdf
    cc @isskein

    • Crimes of solidarity. Migration and containment through rescue

      ‘Solidarity is not a crime.’ This is a slogan that has circulated widely across Europe in response to legal prosecutions and municipal decrees, which, especially in Italy and France, have been intended to act against citizens who provide logistical and humanitarian support to transiting migrants. Such criminalisation of individual acts of solidarity and coordinated platforms of refugee support is undertaken both in the name of national and European laws, in opposition to the facilitation of irregular entries, and through arbitrary police measures. In Calais on the French coast, for example, locals have been prohibited from allowing migrants to take showers in their homes or to recharge their mobile phones, while in the Roya Valley at the Italian-French border, many locals have been placed on trial, including the now famous ploughman Cedric Herrou. Responding to accusations that he has been one of the main facilitators along the French-Italian underground migrant route, Herrou has replied that ‘it is the State that is acting illegally, not me’, referring to the French State’s own human rights violations. 1

      ‘Crimes of solidarity’, to use the expression employed by activists and human rights organisations, are defined and prosecuted according to the 2002 EU Directive which prevents and penalises ‘the facilitation of unauthorised entry, transit and residence’ of migrants. In both Italy and France there are national laws that criminalise the facilitation and the support of ‘irregular’ migration; what in France activists call ‘délit de solidarité’. Notably, citizens who help migrants to cross national borders are prosecuted in Italy under the same law that punishes smugglers who take money from migrants. In France, the ‘humanitarian clause’, which exempts from sanctions citizens who support migrants whose life, dignity and physical integrity is at risk, is often disregarded. Nonetheless, the expression ‘crimes of solidarity’ should not lead us to overstate the legal dimension of what is at stake in this. Indeed, the ‘crime’ that is posited here goes well beyond the legal boundaries of European law, as well as national ones, and acquires an ethical and political dimension. In particular, the criminalisation of individuals and groups who are facilitating the crossing of migrants, without making a profit from doing so, opens up the critical question of exactly ‘who is a smuggler?’ today. Significantly, the very definition of ‘smuggling’ in European and international documents is a fairly slippery one, as the boundaries between supporting migrants for one’s own financial benefit or for ‘humanitarian’ reasons are consistently blurred. 2

      In a 1979 interview, Michel Foucault stressed the potential strategic role that might be played by ‘rights’ to ‘mark out for a government its limit’. 3 In this way, Foucault gestured towards an extralegal conceptualisation and use of rights as actual limits to be set against governments. In the case of crimes of solidarity, we are confronted less, however, with the mobilisation of rights as limits to states’ action than with what Foucault calls ‘infra-legal illegalisms’; 4 namely, with practices of an active refusal of states’ arbitrary measures that are taken in the name of migration containment, regardless of whether or not the latter are legally grounded or in violation of the law.

      NGOs and independent organisations that undertake search and rescue activities to save migrants in the Mediterranean have also been under attack, accused of collaborating with smuggling networks, of constituting a pull-factor for migrants, and of ferrying them to Europe. Three years after the end of the military-humanitarian operation Mare Nostrum, which was deployed by the Italian Navy to save migrant lives at sea, the Mediterranean has become the site of a sort of naval battle in which the obligation to rescue migrants in distress is no longer the priority. The fight against smugglers and traffickers has taken central stage, and the figure of the shipwrecked refugee has consequently vanished little by little. Today, the war on smugglers is presented as the primary goal and, at the same time, as a strategy to protect migrants from ‘traffickers’. The criminalisation of NGOs, like Doctors without Borders, Save the Children and SOS Mediterranee, and of independent actors, including Sea-Eye, Sea-Watch, Jugend-Rettet and Arms Pro-Activa, who conduct search and rescue operations, started with the simultaneous implementation of the Libyan mobile sea-barrier, which charges the Libyan Coast Guard with responsibility for intercepting migrant vessels and bringing them back to Libya. As a consequence of this agreement, being rescued means being captured and contained.

      Following the signing of a new bilateral agreement between Libya and Italy in March 2017, in July, the Italian government put pressure on one of the three Libyan governments (the one led by Fayez al-Serraj) demanding better cooperation in intercepting and returning migrants who head to Europe by sea. In order to accelerate this process, Italy sent two Navy ships into Libyan national waters, with the purpose of ‘strengthening Libyan sovereignty by helping the country to keep control of its national waters’. 5

      Far from being a smooth negotiation, however, the Libyan government led by General Khalifa Haftar threatened to shoot in the direction of the Italian ships if they were to violate Libya’s sovereignty by entering their national territory. 6

      Overall, the ‘migration deal’ has been made by the EU and Italy in the context of different asymmetric relationships: on the one hand, with a ‘rogue state’ such as Libya, characterised by a fragmented sovereignty, and on the other, with non-state actors, and more precisely with the same smugglers that Europe has supposedly declared war on. Indeed, as various journalistic investigations have proved, Italy has paid Libyan militias and smuggling networks to block migrants’ departures temporarily in exchange for fewer controls on other smuggling channels, specifically those involving drugs and weapons. In this way, smugglers have been incorporated into a politics of migration containment. Governing migration through and with smugglers has become fully part of the EU’s political agenda. As such, a critical appraisal of the criminalisation of migrant smuggling requires undoing the existing narrative of a war on smugglers, as well as challenging those analyses that simply posit smugglers as the straightforward enemies of society.

      The naval battle in the Mediterranean has not been an exclusive affair of Italy and Libya. On the contrary, it is within this type of geopolitical context that the escalating criminalisation of sea rescue is more broadly taking place. 7 On July 31, at the request of the European Commission, the Italian Home Office released a ‘Code of Conduct’ that NGOs have been asked to sign if they want to continue search and rescue activities. Given that the code of conduct imposes on NGOs the obligation to have armed judicial police on board, 8 some organisations, including Doctors without Borders, Sea Watch and Jugend Rettet, have refused to sign, arguing that through the enforcement of the Code of Conduct, and under pressure from the European Commission, Italy has turned towards a militarisation of humanitarianism and of independent actors. As a consequence of the refusal to sign, their ships have been prevented from docking in Italian ports and the rescuers of the Jugend Rettet are currently on trial, accused of collaborating with Libyan smugglers. On August 11, Libya traced new virtual restrictive sea borders for NGOs, declaring that search and rescue ships will not be allowed to get closer than one hundred miles from the Libyan coast. The humanitarian scene of rescue has been shrunk.

      In such a political context, two interrelated aspects emerging from the multiplication of attacks against refugee support activities and against search and rescue operations are worth considering. The first concerns a need to unpack what is now meant by the very expression ‘crime of solidarity’ within the framework of this shift towards the priority of fighting smugglers over saving migrants. This requires an engagement with the biopolitical predicaments that sustain a debate centered on the question of to what extent, and up to which point, rescuing migrants at sea is deemed legitimate. The second, related point concerns the modes of containment through rescue that are currently at work in the Mediterranean. One consequence of this is that the reframing of the debate around migrant deaths at sea has lowered the level of critique of a contemporary politics of migration more generally: the fight against smugglers has become the unquestioned and unyielding point of agreement, supported across more or less the entire European political arena.

      The criminalisation of NGOs, accused of ferrying migrants to Europe, should be read in partial continuity with the attack against other forms of support given to migrants in many European countries. The use of the term ‘solidarity’ is helpful in this context insofar as it helps to highlight both actions undertaken by citizens in support of refugees and, more importantly, the transversal alliances between migrants and non-migrants. In fact, acting in solidarity entails supporting migrant struggles – for example, as struggles for movement or struggles to stay in a certain place – more than it does acting in order to save or bring help to them. 9 As Chandra Mohanty argues, practices of solidarity are predicated upon the recognition of ‘common differences’, 10 and in this sense they entail a certain shared political space and the awareness of being governed by the same mechanisms of precaritisation and exploitation. 11 In other words, solidarity does not at all imply a simple politics of identity, but requires building transversal alliances and networks in support of certain struggles. The reduction of migrants to bodies to be fished out of the water, simultaneous with the vanishing of the figure of the refugee, preemptively denies the possibility of establishing a common ground in struggling for freedom of movement and equal access to mobility.

      Despite the many continuities and similarities between the criminalisation of refugee support activities on the mainland and at sea, if we shift the attention to the Mediterranean Sea, what is specifically at stake here is a biopolitics of rescuing or ‘letting drown’. Under attack in the Mediterranean scene of rescue and drowning are what could be termed crimes of humanitarianism; or, that is, crimes of rescue. Humanitarianism as such, precisely in its acts of taking migrants out of the sea through independent search and rescue operations that exercise an active refusal of the geographical restrictions imposed by nation states, has become an uncomfortable and unbearable mode of intervention in the Mediterranean.
      Geographies of ungrievability

      The criminalisation of alliances and initiatives in support of migrants’ transit should not lead us to imagine a stark opposition between ‘good humanitarians’, on the one side, and bad military actors or national authorities, on the other. On the contrary, it is important to keep in mind the many entanglements between military and humanitarian measures, as well as the role played by military actors, such as the Navy, in performing tasks like rescuing migrants at sea that could fall under the category of what Cuttitta terms ‘military-humanitarianism’. 12 Moreover, the Code of Conduct enforced by the Italian government actually strengthens the divide between ‘good’ NGOs and ‘treacherous’ humanitarian actors. Thus, far from building a cohesive front, the obligation to sign the Code of Conduct produced a split among those NGOs involved in search and rescue operations.

      In the meantime, the figure of the refugee at sea has arguably faded away: sea rescue operations are in fact currently deployed with the twofold task of not letting migrants drown and of fighting smugglers, which de facto entails undermining the only effective channels of sea passage for migrants across the Mediterranean. From a military-humanitarian approach that, under Mare Nostrum, considered refugees at sea as shipwrecked lives, the unconditionality of rescue is now subjected to the aim of dismantling the migrants’ logistics of crossing. At the same time, the migrant drowning at sea is ultimately not seen any longer as a refugee, i.e. as a subject of rights who is seeking protection, but as a life to be rescued in the technical sense of being fished out of the sea. In other words, the migrant at sea is the subject who eventually needs to be rescued, but not thereby placed into safety by granting them protection and refuge in Europe. What happens ‘after landing’ is something not considered within the framework of a biopolitics of rescuing and of letting drown. 13 Indeed, the latter is not only about saving (or not saving) migrants at sea, but also, in a more proactive way, about aiming at human targets. In manhunting, Gregoire Chamayou explains, ‘the combat zone tends to be reduced to the body of the enemy’. 14 Yet who is the human target of migrant hunts in the Mediterranean? It is not only the migrant in distress at sea, who in fact is rescued and captured at the same time; rather, migrants and smugglers are both considered the ‘prey’ of contemporary military-humanitarianism.

      Public debate in Europe about the criminalisation of NGOs and sea rescue is characterised by a polarisation between those who posit the non-negotiable obligation to rescue migrants and those who want to limit rescue operations in the name of regaining control over migrant arrivals, stemming the flows and keeping them in Libya. What remains outside the order of this discourse is the shrinking and disappearing figure of the refugee, who is superseded by the figure of the migrant to be taken out of the sea.

      Relatedly, the exclusive focus on the Mediterranean Sea itself contributes to strengthening geographies of ungrievability. By this I mean those produced hierarchies of migrant deaths that are essentially dependent on their more or less consistent geographic distance from Europe’s spotlight and, at the same time, on the assumption of shipwrecked migrants as the most embodied refugee subjectivities. More precisely, the recent multiplication of bilateral agreements between EU member states and African countries has moved back deadly frontiers from the Mediterranean Sea to the Libyan and Niger desert. As a consequence, migrants who do not die at sea but who manage to arrive in Libya are kept in Libyan prisons.
      Containment through rescue

      On 12 August 2017, Doctors without Borders decided to stop search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean after Libya enforced its sea-barrier by forbidding NGOs to go closer than about one hundred miles from the Libyan coast, and threatening to shoot at those ships that sought to violate the ban. In the space of two days, even Save the Children and the independent German organisation Sea-Eye declared that they would also suspend search and rescue activities. The NGOs’ Mediterranean exit has been presented by humanitarian actors as a refusal to be coopted into the EU-Libyan enforcement of a sea barrier against migrants. Yet, in truth, both the Italian government and the EU have been rather obviously pleased by the humanitarians’ withdrawal from the Mediterranean scene of drown and rescue.

      Should we therefore understand the ongoing criminalisation of NGOs as the attempt to fully block migrant flows? Does it indicate a return from the staging of a ‘good scene of rescue’ back to an overt militarisation of the Mediterranean? The problem is that such an analytical angle risks, first, corroborating the misleading opposition between military intervention and humanitarianism in the field of migration governmentality. Second, it re-instantiates the image of a Fortress Europe, while disregarding the huge ‘migration industry’ that is flourishing both in Libya, with the smuggling-and-detention market, and on the Northern shore of the Mediterranean. 15 With the empty space left by the NGOs at sea, the biopolitics of rescuing or letting drown has been reshaped by new modes of containment through rescue: migrants who manage to leave the Libyan coast are ‘rescued’ – that is, intercepted and blocked – by the Libyan Coast Guard and taken back to Libya. Yet containment should not be confused with detention nor with a total blockage of migrants’ movements and departures. Rather, by ‘containment’ I refer to the substantial disruptions and decelerations of migrant movements, as well as to the effects of more or less temporary spatial confinement. Modes of containment through rescue were already in place, to some extent, when migrants used to be ‘ferried’ to Italy in a smoother way, by the Navy or by NGOs. Indeed, from the moment of rescue onward, migrants were transferred and channelled into the Hotspot System, where many were denied international protection and, thus, rendered ‘illegal’ and constructed as deportable subjects. 16 The distinction between intercepting vessels sailing to Europe and saving migrants in distress has become blurred: with the enforcement of the Libyan sea barrier, rescue and capture can hardly be separated any longer. In this sense, visibility can be a trap: if images taken by drones or radars are sent to Italian authorities before migrants enter international waters, the Italian Coast Guard has to inform Libyan authorities who are in charge of rescuing migrants and thus taking them back to Libya.

      This entails a spatial rerouting of military-humanitarianism, in which migrants are paradoxically rescued to Libya. Rather than vanishing from the Mediterranean scene, the politics of rescue, conceived in terms of not letting people die, has been reshaped as a technique of capture. At the same time, the geographic orientation of humanitarianism has been inverted: migrants are ‘saved’ and dropped in Libya. Despite the fact that various journalistic investigations and UN reports have shown that after being intercepted, rescued and taken back to Libya, migrants are kept in detention in abysmal conditions and are blackmailed by smugglers, 17 the public discussion remains substantially polarised around the questions of deaths at sea. Should migrants be saved unconditionally? Or, should rescue be secondary to measures against smugglers and balanced against the risk of ‘migrant invasion’? A hierarchy of the spaces of death and confinement is in part determined by the criterion of geographical proximity, which contributes to the sidelining of mechanisms of exploitation and of a politics of letting die that takes place beyond the geopolitical borders of Europe. The biopolitical hold over migrants becomes apparent at sea: practices of solidarity are transformed into a relationship between rescuers and drowned. 18

      The criminalisation of refugee support activities cannot be separated from the increasing criminalisation of refugees as such: not only those who are labelled and declared illegal as ‘economic migrants’, but also those people who are accorded the status of refugees. Both are targets of restrictive and racialised measures of control. The migrant at sea is presented as part of a continuum of ‘tricky subjectivities’ 19 – which include the smuggler, the potential terrorist and the refugee – and as both a ‘risky subject’ and a ‘subject at risk’ at the same time. 20 In this regard, it is noticeable that the criminalisation of refugees as such has been achieved precisely through the major role played by the figure of the smuggler. In the EU’s declared fight against smuggling networks, migrants at sea are seen not only as shipwrecked lives to be rescued but also as potential fake refugees, as concealed terrorists or as traffickers. At the same time, the fight against smugglers has been used to enact a further shift in the criminalisation of refugees, which goes beyond the alleged dangerousness of migrants. Indeed, in the name of the war against the ‘illegal’ smuggling economy, as a shared priority of both left- and right-wing political parties in Europe, the strategy of letting migrants drown comes, in the end, to be justified. As Doctors without Borders have pointed out, ‘by declaring Libya a safe country, European governments are ultimately pushing forward the humanitarianisation of what appears at the threshold of the inhuman.’ 21

      The migrant at sea, who is the subject of humanitarianism par excellence, is no longer an individual to be saved at all costs, but rather the object of thorny calculations about the tolerated number of migrant arrivals and the migrant-money exchange with Libya. Who is (in) danger(ous)? The legal prosecutions and the political condemnation of ‘crimes of rescue’ and of ‘crimes of solidarity’ bring to the fore the undesirability of refugees as refugees. This does not depend so much on a logic of social dangerousness as such, but, rather, on the practices of spatial disobedience that they enact, against the restrictions imposed by the European Union. Thus, it is precisely the irreducibility of migrants to lives to be rescued that makes the refugee the main figure of a continuum of tricky subjectivities in a time of economic crisis. Yet, a critical engagement with the biopolitics of rescuing and drowning cannot stick to a North-South gaze on Mediterranean migrations. In order not to fall into a Eurocentric (or EU-centric) perspective on asylum, analyses of crimes of solidarity should also be articulated through an inquiry into the Libyan economy of migration and the modes of commodification of migrant bodies, considering what Brett Neilson calls ‘migration as a currency’; 22 that is, as an entity of exchange and as a source of value extraction.

      Crimes of solidarity put in place critical infrastructures to support migrants’ acts of spatial disobedience. These infra-legal crimes shed light on the inadequacy of human rights claims and of the legal framework in a time of hyper-visible and escalating border violence. Crimes of solidarity consist of individual and collective active refusals of states’ interventions, which are specifically carried out at the very edges of the law. In this way, crimes of solidarity manage to undo the biopolitics of rescuing and letting drown by acting beyond the existing scripts of ‘crisis’ and ‘security’. Rather than being ‘rescued’ from the sea or ‘saved’ from smugglers, migrants are supported in their unbearable practices of freedom, unsettling the contemporary hierarchies of lives and populations.
      Notes

      See the interview with Herrou in l’Humanité, accessed 30 September 2017, https://www.humanite.fr/cedric-herrou-cest-letat-qui-est-dans-lillegalite-pas-moi-629732. ^

      Economic profit is an essential dimension of ‘smuggling’, as it is defined by the United Nations Conventions against Transnational Organised Crime (2000). However, it is not in the 2002 EU Council Directive defining the facilitation of unauthorised entry, transit and residence. ^

      Michel Foucault, ‘There can’t be societies without uprisings’, trans. Farès Sassine, in Foucault and the Making of Subjects, ed. Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini and Martina Tazzioli (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 40. ^

      See Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972-1973, trans. Graham Burchell (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2015). ^

      See ‘Il governo vara la missione navale, prima nave italiana in Libia’, La Stampa, 18 July 2017, http://www.ilsecoloxix.it/p/italia/2017/07/28/ASBvqlaI-parlamento_missione_italiana.shtml. ^

      See, for example, the report in Al Arabiya, 3 August 2017, http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2017/08/03/Haftar-instructs-bombing-Italian-warships-requested-by-Fayez-al-S ^

      See Liz Fekete, ‘Europe: crimes of solidarity’, Race & Class 50:4 (2009), 83 – 97; and Eric Fassin, ‘Le procès politique de la solidarité (3/4): les ONG en Méditerranée’ (2017), Mediapart, accessed 30 September 2017, https://blogs.mediapart.fr/eric-fassin/blog/170817/le-proces-politique-de-la-solidarite-34-les-ong-en-mediterranee ^

      The Code of Conduct can be found at: http://www.interno.gov.it/sites/default/files/allegati/codice_condotta_ong.pdf; see also the transcript by Euronews, 3 August 2017, http://www.euronews.com/2017/08/03/text-of-italys-code-of-conduct-for-ngos-involved-in-migrant-rescue ^

      Sandro Mezzadra and Mario Neumann, ‘Al di la dell’opposizione tra interesse e identità. Per una politica di classe all’altezza dei tempi’ (2017), Euronomade, accessed September 30 2017, http://www.euronomade.info/?p=9402 ^

      Chandra Mohanty, “‘Under western eyes’’ revisited: feminist solidarity through anticapitalist struggles’, in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28:2 (2003), 499-–535. ^

      As Foucault puts it, ‘In the end, we are all governed, and in this sense we all act in solidarity’. Michel Foucault, ‘Face aux gouvernement, les droits de l’homme’, in Dits et Ecrits II (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 1526. ^

      P. Cuttitta, ‘From the Cap Anamur to Mare Nostrum: Humanitarianism and migration controls at the EU’s Maritime borders’, in The Common European Asylum System and Human Rights: Enhancing Protection in Times of Emergency, ed. Claudio Matera and Amanda Taylor (The Hague: Asser Institute, 2014), 21–-38. See also Martina Tazzioli, ‘The desultory politics of mobility and the humanitarian-military border in the Mediterranean: Mare Nostrum beyond the sea’, REMHU: Revista Interdisciplinar da Mobilidade Humana 23:44 (2015), 61-–82. ^

      See Lucia Ciabarri and Barbara Pinelli, eds, Dopo l’Approdo: Un racconto per immagini e parole sui richiedenti asilo in Italia (Firenze: Editpress, 2016). ^

      Gregoire Chamayou, ‘The Manhunt Doctrine’, Radical Philosophy 169 (2011), 3. ^

      As a matter of fact, the vessels of the EU naval operation EU Navfor Med and the vessels of the Frontex operation ‘Triton’ were increased in number a few days after the pull-out of the NGOs. ^

      Nicholas De Genova, ‘Spectacles of migrant “illegality”: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 36:7 (2013), 1180-–1198. ^

      See, for instance, the UN Report on Libya (2017), accessed 30 September 2017,http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/N1711623.pdf. ^

      Tugba Basaran, ‘The saved and the drowned: Governing indifference in the name of security’, Security Dialogue 46:3 (2015), 205 – 220. ^

      Glenda Garelli and Martina Tazzioli, ‘The Biopolitical Warfare on Migrants: EU Naval Force and NATO Operations of migration government in the Mediterranean’, in Critical Military Studies, forthcoming 2017. ^

      Claudia Aradau, ‘The perverse politics of four-letter words: risk and pity in the securitisation of human trafficking’, Millennium 33:2 (2004), 251-–277. ^

      Interview with Doctors without Borders, Rome, 21 August 2017. ^

      Brett Neilson, ‘The Currency of Migration’, in South Atlantic Quarterly, forthcoming 2018.

      https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/crimes-of-solidarity

      signalé par @isskein sur FB

  • Blaming the Rescuers
    https://blamingtherescuers.org/iuventa
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CQaj2KNIZw

    In our report we analysed and countered the arguments used to fuel a “toxic narrative” against rescue NGOs, which emanated from EU agencies such as Frontex and different institutional bodies in Italy. While this campaign had remained largely on a discursive level, over the summer of 2017 it quickly escalated with the Italian government’s attempt to impose a “code of conduct” on rescue NGOs. An intense standoff ensued as several NGOs, from larger organisations such as Doctors without Borders to smaller ones such as the German Jugend Rettet (‘Youth Rescue’), refused to sign it before the announced deadline of 31 July 2017, claiming that the code would have threatened their activities at sea with requests that a leading legal scholar had described as “nonsensical”, “dishonest” and “illegal”.

    On 2 August 2017, only days after this deadline had passed, Jugend Rettet’s ship, the Iuventa, was seized by the Italian judiciary. Its crew was accused of having colluded with smugglers during three different rescue operations: the first on the 10 September 2016, the second and third on 18 June 2017. The order of seizure contended that on those occasions the Iuventa was being used to “aiding and abetting illegal immigration” by arranging the direct handover of migrants by smugglers and returning empty boats for re-use.

    The video presented here offers a counter-investigation of the authorities’ version, and a refutation of their accusations.

    • Forensic Oceanography – visibleproject
      http://www.visibleproject.org/blog/project/forensic-oceanography-various-locations-in-europe-and-northern-afric

      Forensic Oceanography (FO) is a project that critically investigates the militarised border regime in the Mediterranean Sea, analysing the spatial and aesthetic conditions that have caused over 16,500 registered deaths at the maritime borders of Europe over the last 20 years. Together with a wide network of NGOs, scientists, journalists and activist groups, FO has produced, since 2011, several maps, video animations (e.g. Liquid Traces), visualisations, human rights reports (e.g. the report on the ‘Left-to-Die Boat’ case) and websites (e.g. www.watchthemed.net) that attempt to document the violence perpetrated against migrants at sea and challenge the regime of visibility imposed by surveillance means on this contested area.

      By combining testimonies of human rights violations with digital technologies such as satellite imagery, vessel tracking data, geo-spatial mapping and drift modelling, FO has exercised a critical right to look at sea with a two-fold purpose. On the one hand, using surveillance means ‘against the grain’, it has produced spatial analysis that has been used within existing legal and political forums, supporting the quest for justice of migrants and their families in legal proceedings, parliamentary auditions, human rights and journalistic investigations. At the same time, through a series of installations and articles, FO has attempted to spur a debate on the politics of image production in the age of surveillance and on what it means to produce images, videos and sounds that become evidence and documentation of human rights violations.

    • Bonjour @unagi !
      Super de mettre en avant le travail de Lorenzo Pezzani e Charles Heller...
      Toutefois, je voulais te rendre attentif du fait que les vidéos que tu as postés relèvent de différentes enquêtes faites par les deux chercheurs...

      Celle-ci :
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CQaj2KNIZw


      fait partie d’une « trilogie » pour prouver qu’il n’y a pas collusion entre les ONG et les trafiquants. C’est leur dernier travail.
      Voici où trouver tous les documents y relatifs :
      http://www.forensic-architecture.org/case/iuventa

      Pour les autres, il y a pas mal de documentation sur seenthis.

    • Non, sorry @unagi c’est moi qui me suis trompée...

      En fait ils ont utilisé le site blamingtherescuers (ton premier lien) aussi pour y mettre leur dernière analyse, celle de la #Iuventa.
      Je me suis trompée car « Blaming the rescuers » a été aussi le titre d’un de leurs rapports...
      #sorry

  • Sorry I Drowned

    This 6-minute animated film “Sorry I Drowned”, created by the Beirut-based Studio Kawakeb and Doctors Without Borders (MSF), is inspired by a letter allegedly found on the body of someone who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea due to the prevailing cynical politics of our day.

    The film illustrates the migrant-rejection crisis from the eyes of the migrants taking the Mediterranean route. It speaks about how desperate people are rejected and kicked away in their hour of need, and the consequence of that rejection and inhumane treatment. Although the film illustrates a drowning in the sea, the same rejection and inhumane treatment is taking place in many places on land too.

    How far would you go for a safe, dignified life for you and your family? What reception would you expect?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4ips769WXs


    #film_d'animation #film #mourir_en_mer #méditerranée #asile #migrations #réfugiés #lettre #court_métrage #court-métrage
    cc @reka @isskein

  • Italian commission says more controls needed on aid groups rescuing migrants | Reuters
    http://in.reuters.com/article/europe-migrants-italy-idINKCN18C2CW

    In their conclusions, parliamentarians said no NGO groups were under investigation, but they called for them to be put under greater scrutiny, saying their ship crews and financial backers should be registered with authorities.

    They also suggested that police should travel aboard NGO vessels — something most humanitarian groups have rejected.

    In no way, either under international or local law, is it desirable for private organisations to create humanitarian corridors,” the parliamentary report said, stressing that only state bodies should oversee the migrant crisis.

    Aid groups such as Doctors without Borders deny helping the smugglers, saying their sole aim is to save the lives of migrants who are invariably crammed onto dangerous, unstable rubber dinghies or wooden fishing boats and pushed out to sea.
    […]
    The commission chairman, Nicola Latorre, said migrants were given satellite phones with the numbers of NGOs to call once they were at sea to try to secure their rescue.

    It has emerged that the phones are thrown into the sea if the rescues are carried out by naval vessels. But if an NGO carries out the rescue, the phones are taken back and used in subsequent crossings,” Latorre said.

  • Exposed: abuses of migrants by state officials on Europe’s borders

    Violence, brutality and unlawful treatment by authorities on the Western Balkan route are a frequent occurrence, claim refugees and other migrants in a new NGO report revealed today. People fleeing war, persecution and poverty describe beatings, robbery and inhuman treatment at the hands of police, border guards and other officials. In many cases, people tell of illegal deportations with state agents denying access to asylum procedures for those seeking international protection.

    https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-04-06/exposed-abuses-migrants-state-officials-europes-borders
    #frontières #asile #migrations #réfugiés #violence #brutalité #Croatie #rapport #hongrie #bulgarie #serbie

    Lien vers le rapport:
    https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp-dangerous-game-pushback-migrants-refugees-060417-en_0.pdf
    #push-back #refoulement

  • Cholera Stalks ‘Refugee Islands’ in Swamplands of South Sudan

    In South Sudan, people are sheltering from conflict wherever they can, including a network of islands in the swamps of Unity State. On one island, where 2,300 displaced people live without access to clean water or toilets, cholera has become rife.


    #choléra #santé #asile #migrations #réfugiés #Soudan_du_Sud #sud_soudan

    • Violence at the Hungarian border

      This winter, as temperatures dropped to 20 below zero, the level of violence at Hungary’s border with Serbia increased sharply, with many describing acts that can be only seen as torture. People of all ages, some as young as 13, were beaten, stripped naked and ordered to lie face-down in the mud, snow or water for as long as an hour. Their clothing was taken or destroyed. Water poured down their necks. Eyes pepper sprayed. Batons struck against genitals. Forced selfies with laughing officers. All this performed by people in “dark blue uniforms” – official Hungarian border police.

      Over the past two years, the Hungarian government has been running a “xenophobic scapegoating campaign" against migration, according to the Helsinki Committee. A 175 kilometer long fence has been setup along the Serbian-Hungarian border, while parallel efforts have been made to prevent the possibility of getting asylum through legal paths.

      Meanwhile in Serbia, the number of refugees significantly exceeds the country’s accommodation capacity and is still growing. During one of the harshest winters in years, up to 2000 people have had no alternative but to sleep rough outdoors – on the streets of Belgrade or in the forests of the north. Without a safe place to stay in Serbia and no legal way to travel backwards, they’ve been stuck in limbo.

      For most of them, attempting irregular crossings has become the only option. Nearly all of those who tried encountered systematic brutality and humiliation regardless of their gender, age or nationality.

      Numerous cases of beatings, dog bites and other abuses at the hands of Hungarian border police have been reported by human rights organisations and activists during the past year. From January 2016 to February 2017, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) treated over a hundred people in Belgrade alone with intentional injuries allegedly perpetrated by the Hungarian border patrols.

      Although the Hungarian authorities deny all the accusations, the enormous scale and clear pattern of violence leave no doubt: these are not just rare and isolated acts of brutality.

      The stories in this video were collected during January and February 2017. During these 2 months we’ve interviewed more than 20 victims of abuse following human rights reporting guidelines. Informally, we’ve talked with many more.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYxb2rtAohQ


      #vidéo

  • Over 300 refugees drown in Mediterranean - World Socialist Web Site
    http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/11/19/medi-n19.html

    Over 300 refugees drown in Mediterranean
    By Martin Kreikenbaum
    19 November 2016

    At least 340 refugees drowned in four accidents involving boats travelling from Libya to Italy in the course of two days, according to official sources.

    On Wednesday night, more than 100 refugees drowned in one of the wrecks, as confirmed by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Of the 130 people on board the boat, MSF only managed to rescue 27.

    #méditerranée #mourir_en_mer

  • Contre les migrants, la #Hongrie matraque à plein

    2 septembre 2016 | Par Philippe Bertinchamps

    Affiches, spots publicitaires à la radio et à la télévision… Tandis que la campagne référendaire bat son plein, pour ou contre la « relocalisation » des migrants en vertu de l’accord européen, des centaines de réfugiés espèrent un jour pouvoir passer les murs de barbelés érigés par Budapest à la frontière entre la Serbie et la Hongrie. À leurs risques et périls.

    Frontière serbo-hongroise, envoyé spécial.- Ce sont les oubliés de la frontière. Syriens, Afghans, Pakistanais, Algériens, Marocains, Camerounais, Congolais, Maliens… En quarantaine dans des no man’s land entre la Serbie et la Hongrie, ils attendent au pied de la clôture de barbelés de pouvoir entrer dans l’espace Schengen. La liste est longue. L’appel a lieu une fois par jour, mais à n’importe quelle heure. Les familles ont la priorité. Trente personnes sont autorisées à passer dans un tourniquet et à pénétrer dans les « zones de transit » : quinze à Horgos-Röszke, quinze à Kelebija-Tompa. Sur un rempart formé de cinquante-deux conteneurs climatisés, policiers et soldats hongrois montent la garde. Cachés derrière des lunettes de soleil, ils observent le camp en Serbie. Tentes, huttes de branchages et de couvertures pour s’abriter contre le soleil et la pluie. Ce jour-là, à Horgos, on recense 264 personnes, dont 45 femmes et 122 enfants. Des ados jouent au cricket avec une batte taillée dans une planche. Le vent fait voler la poussière. Il est 18 heures, l’heure de la prière. Des hommes ont accompli leurs ablutions. Les ONG humanitaires ont donné les soins, distribué la nourriture, plié bagage.

    La frontière entre la Serbie et la Hongrie © Marija Janković La frontière entre la Serbie et la Hongrie © Marija Janković
    « Saviez-vous que les attaques de Paris ont été commises par des migrants ? Que depuis le début de la crise migratoire le harcèlement sexuel a augmenté ? Que plus de 300 personnes sont mortes en Europe dans des attaques terroristes ? » Panneaux d’affichage, spots publicitaires à la radio et à la télévision… De l’autre côté du rideau de fil de fer, le matraquage bat son plein. Un référendum est prévu le 2 octobre. Les citoyens hongrois devront se prononcer sur l’accueil de 1 294 réfugiés assignés à Budapest, selon l’accord entre les États membres de septembre 2015 ayant abouti à la décision de « relocaliser » par quotas cent soixante mille réfugiés en Europe. « Voulez-vous, oui ou non, que l’Union européenne décrète une relocalisation obligatoire de citoyens non hongrois sans le consentement du parlement ? » La campagne est enclenchée : « Seuls les Hongrois peuvent décider avec qui ils veulent vivre en Hongrie. »

    Lire aussi

    Hongrie : la politique du pire de Viktor Orbán Par Antoine Perraud
    « Une question démagogique et populiste », estime Mark Kékesi, professeur de socio-psychologie à l’université de Szeged (sud de la Hongrie) et l’un des fondateurs de l’association de solidarité MigSzol. « Le Premier ministre, Viktor Orban, proclame que l’arrivée de réfugiés musulmans met en péril l’identité chrétienne de l’Europe. Il traite le problème d’un point de vue religieux et dogmatique. C’est devenu une affaire d’État. Toute la communication est centralisée à Budapest. À l’en croire, nous sommes sous le feu roulant de l’ennemi : les migrants du Moyen-Orient et les eurocrates de Bruxelles. Il s’agit bien sûr d’un coup marketing. Grâce à ce référendum, sa cote remonte dans les sondages. Entre-temps, le pays s’enfonce dans une crise grave — hausse du chômage, dégradation de l’enseignement, des soins de santé — et son parti (Fidesz-Union civique hongroise, national-conservateur) est éclaboussé par des scandales de corruption. »

    « Dans les zones de transit, la procédure est parfois très expéditive », témoigne Omi, un Afghan de 17 ans, à Horgos. « Serbian police, no problem ? No problem, very good… » Dans ce cas, la Serbie est un pays sûr. « Go back to Serbia ! » Selon Budapest, dix-huit mille migrants ont traversé la « frontière sud » depuis le début de l’année. Talonné par son opposition qui demande à quoi bon avoir dépensé un million de dollars pour une « passoire », Viktor Orban a déployé les grands moyens. Depuis le 5 juillet, dix mille policiers et soldats patrouillent dans la zone : 175 kilomètres de barbelés coupants surveillés par des drones et des hélicoptères. Miradors, sentinelles… Les contrôles sont fréquents et les « migrants illégaux » qui se font attraper dans un rayon de huit kilomètres après la frontière – mais quel est le tracé précis de cette ligne ? – se font repousser manu militari de l’autre côté de la clôture, à un ou deux pas en deçà de la démarcation entre la Hongrie et la Serbie, sans autre forme de procès. Le 6 juillet, le Haut Commissariat des Nations unies pour les réfugiés (HCR) a dénombré cent vingt expulsions. Le même jour, un pic de sept cents personnes a été enregistré au camp de Horgos, trois fois plus que d’habitude… En une semaine, deux mille cinq cents demandeurs d’asile potentiels ont été refoulés. Les appréhensions ont diminué à vue d’œil : une quinzaine par jour en août, contre cent cinquante en juin. « Seuls ceux qui ne sont pas informés tentent de franchir la clôture, à leurs risques et périls », commente un humanitaire de Médecins sans frontières (MSF).

    Laszlo Toroczkai © Marija Janković Laszlo Toroczkai © Marija Janković
    « Et pourtant, ça ne suffit pas ! » Laszlo Toroczkai est le maire d’Asotthalom, une bourgade agricole de trois mille âmes située entre Tompa et Röszke. Interdit d’entrée sur les territoires serbe, roumain et slovaque à cause de son activisme en faveur des Hongrois d’outre-frontières, ce fils de bonne famille (né Toth), athlétique et bronzé, est également connu pour avoir incendié avec ses troupes de choc la Télévision hongroise lors des émeutes antisocialistes à Budapest en 2006. Fan de Donald Trump, partisan des armes à feu, défenseur des « honnêtes citoyens hongrois », c’est lui le premier qui aurait lancé l’idée d’une barrière frontalière, à l’exemple de la grande muraille États-Unis-Mexique. « Mais la solution n’est pas parfaite, admet-il. Ce qu’il faut, c’est une clôture électrifiée, des projecteurs, des caméras, un système d’alarme… » Son profil Facebook attire plus de quarante mille visiteurs. Les photos qu’il poste de jeunes Afghans et Pakistanais capturés par « ses » gardes champêtres en tenue militaire font un tabac. « Des agents auxiliaires, assure-t-il. Cinq ou six hommes qui dépendent du gouvernement local, encadrés par la police… »

    Zsolt, 38 ans, est un colosse aux muscles d’acier. Un « vrai », un « dur », un « tatoué ». Ancien videur de boîte de nuit, ce géant barbu est préposé depuis deux ans à la garde des propriétés rurales dans la commune d’Asotthalom. « Ce que j’aime, c’est la nature, dit-il. En ville, trop de junkies, trop de dealers. » Son nouveau job : protéger les frontières de l’Europe. Circuler à moto ou à bord d’un gros 4 x 4 dans les chemins sablonneux à l’affût de « migrants illégaux ». Il a fait ses classes en traquant les Albanais du Kosovo, l’hiver 2014-2015, quand un exode massif a vidé ce petit pays, qui venait de fêter les sept ans de son indépendance, de 10 % de la population. « Je travaille en solo. Si je surprends quelqu’un, je le conduis à la police. » Son uniforme paramilitaire n’est pas marqué à son nom, ni à son matricule. En août, il a fait « mauvaise chasse ». En juillet, il a épinglé vingt-cinq proies à son tableau. Avant, entre cinquante et cent… « Parfois, je tombe sur des jeunes entraînés à se battre, avoue-t-il. Là, je suis forcé de recourir à la violence. »

    Zsolt © Marija Janković Zsolt © Marija Janković
    « Des victimes de passages à tabac, nous en recueillons tous les jours, constate un responsable du Commissariat pour les réfugiés en Serbie. Bras cassés, morsures de chiens… La police ouvre une petite porte dans le grillage. On ne sait pas où ni quand. Ils ne préviennent jamais. Qui ? Combien de gens ? Ce matin, il y avait encore deux Kosovars… » Durant les six premiers mois de 2016, la Hongrie a enregistré plus de vingt-deux mille demandes d’asile, dont une majorité déposée par des Afghans (37 %) et des Syriens (15 %). Officiellement, à peine cent individus en situation irrégulière ont été renvoyés en Serbie. Parmi eux, trente-trois Serbes, vingt-six Kosovars et dix-neuf Albanais… Les autres, Syriens, Afghans, Irakiens ou Somaliens, tous ceux dont la demande a été rejetée dans les limbes juridiques des « zones de transit », ne comptent pas.

    « Nous, les Africains, on passe toujours après. Même au camp, on mange les restes. » Basile est camerounais. Il traîne à Horgos depuis le début de l’été, après avoir quitté la Grèce. « Nous étions au nombre de vingt-huit, dont un Camerounais, trois Maliens et un Congolais. Nous avons cisaillé les barbelés et nous sommes entrés en Hongrie, en plein jour. Subitement, trois policiers nous ont interpellés. Les renforts sont arrivés. Ils nous ont pulvérisé du gaz sur le visage, craché dessus et donné des coups de matraque. Nous avons couru et nous sommes repassés par le trou dans le grillage, en nous écorchant les mains. Le frangin congolais a voulu récupérer son sac et ses téléphones. Un policier l’a suivi et a braqué son arme sur lui, comme s’il allait tirer. » Le 13 juillet, Human Rights Watch (HRW) publiait un rapport : « Des gens qui entrent en Hongrie sans autorisation, y compris des femmes et des enfants, ont été violemment battus et renvoyés de force de l’autre côté de la frontière. » À Belgrade, la capitale serbe, MSF a signalé une augmentation des blessés. Le 24 août, pour la première fois, le chef de la police nationale hongroise, Karoly Papp, a reconnu que des « hommes en uniforme » avaient fait subir de mauvais traitements aux réfugiés. Quatre poursuites judiciaires ont été engagées.

    En mars 2016, l’Union européenne a confié à la Turquie la défense de sa frontière extérieure. Or, depuis le « putsch manqué » du 15 juillet, quelque chose a changé. Plus de quatre mille candidats ont débarqué à Chios, Leros, Lesbos, Samos. À peu près soixante mille réfugiés se trouvent dans une quarantaine de camps en Grèce. Beaucoup dorment dehors. Selon le secrétaire d’État à l’immigration, Ioannis Mouzalas, « environ quatre mille » ont refusé de demander l’asile et devraient poursuivre leur route vers l’Europe du Nord.

    © Marija Janković © Marija Janković
    La Bulgarie, qui a érigé une clôture de barbelés sur 130 de ses 259 kilomètres avec la Turquie, a demandé un renfort de trois cents hommes à Frontex. « J’espère que mes collègues européens sont conscients que la Bulgarie et la Grèce risquent d’être confrontées à un énorme problème » si l’accord UE-Turquie venait à être dénoncé, a averti le 12 août le premier ministre bulgare, Boïko Borissov, soulignant la « vulnérabilité » des deux pays. Selon le ministère serbe de la défense, en juillet-août, plus de trois mille migrants irréguliers ont été interceptés à la frontière avec la Macédoine, où les réseaux mafieux de passeurs ont été réactivés. La Serbie, dont la capacité d’accueil est évaluée à six mille places, compte aujourd’hui quatre mille six cents réfugiés. En Croatie, le ministère de l’intérieur a publié les photos d’un nouveau centre de transit, près de la frontière serbe, d’où les migrants seraient transférés à Zagreb, ou déportés en Serbie. La Slovénie a prévu de consolider sa barrière de barbelés avec la Croatie. À Ljubljana, les consultations entre le gouvernement et les ONG vont bon train, et les centres de réception, fermés en mars, ont rouvert.

    « Maintenant, je ne sais plus quoi faire », soupire Golamat, un Afghan de 29 ans, échoué à Horgos après avoir connu Idomeni et les camps autour de Thessalonique. « J’étais 196e sur la liste, je suis 121e. Ça fait un mois que j’attends. J’ai peut-être vu dix hommes entrer dans la zone de transit, huit en sont ressortis par la petite porte… » Le 26 août, le premier ministre Orban a annoncé à la radio qu’il allait fortifier son arsenal sécuritaire : un second système de défense, « plus robuste », à côté de la « barrière à installation rapide ». Last but not least, on demande des surveillants pour la rentrée : à partir du 1er septembre, trois mille « chasseurs frontaliers » – non pas gardes-frontières – seront recrutés. « Des policiers, des soldats et des armes ! »

    https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/020916/contre-les-migrants-la-hongrie-matraque-plein?onglet=full
    #Balkans #asile #migrations #réfugiés #murs #barrières_frontalières #Serbie #frontières #Bulgarie #violence

    • Over the Line. Bulgaria Welcomes Refugees With Attack Dogs and Beatings

      Abdul Bashir was resting when the police dogs came. He and 11 others were in the dense mountainous forest that joins Turkey and Bulgaria. They had just crossed to the Bulgarian side, for the second time in a month, stepping over the low-hanging wire that divides the two countries. The dogs came out of the woods behind them. Abdul Bashir saw one attack a man in his group, biting his shoulder and dragging him across the ground. The man was bleeding.


      https://theintercept.com/2016/11/03/bulgaria-welcomes-refugees-with-attack-dogs-and-beatings

    • Violence at the Hungarian border

      This winter, as temperatures dropped to 20 below zero, the level of violence at Hungary’s border with Serbia increased sharply, with many describing acts that can be only seen as torture. People of all ages, some as young as 13, were beaten, stripped naked and ordered to lie face-down in the mud, snow or water for as long as an hour. Their clothing was taken or destroyed. Water poured down their necks. Eyes pepper sprayed. Batons struck against genitals. Forced selfies with laughing officers. All this performed by people in “dark blue uniforms” – official Hungarian border police.

      Over the past two years, the Hungarian government has been running a “xenophobic scapegoating campaign" against migration, according to the Helsinki Committee. A 175 kilometer long fence has been setup along the Serbian-Hungarian border, while parallel efforts have been made to prevent the possibility of getting asylum through legal paths.

      Meanwhile in Serbia, the number of refugees significantly exceeds the country’s accommodation capacity and is still growing. During one of the harshest winters in years, up to 2000 people have had no alternative but to sleep rough outdoors – on the streets of Belgrade or in the forests of the north. Without a safe place to stay in Serbia and no legal way to travel backwards, they’ve been stuck in limbo.

      For most of them, attempting irregular crossings has become the only option. Nearly all of those who tried encountered systematic brutality and humiliation regardless of their gender, age or nationality.

      Numerous cases of beatings, dog bites and other abuses at the hands of Hungarian border police have been reported by human rights organisations and activists during the past year. Just in the first two months of 2017, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) treated over a hundred people in Belgrade alone, injured by the Hungarian border patrols.

      Although the Hungarian authorities deny all the accusations, the enormous scale and clear pattern of violence leave no doubt: these are not just rare and isolated acts of brutality.

      The stories in this video were collected during January and February 2017. During these 2 months we’ve interviewed more than 20 victims of abuse following human rights reporting guidelines. Informally, we’ve talked with many more.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYxb2rtAohQ&feature=youtu.be

    • Hungary Plays the E.U.

      Hungary’s cruel treatment of refugees has reached a new low. On Tuesday, in defiance of international law, the Parliament approved the mass detention of asylum seekers, including children, in guarded camps enclosed with razor wire. The European Union has said in a directive that “Member States shall not hold a person in detention for the sole reason that he or she is an applicant” for asylum; moreover, Hungary’s treatment of refugee children defies international law.

      https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/opinion/hungary-plays-the-eu.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

    • L’Unione europea e l’«esperimento» ungherese. Migranti in ostaggio

      Il 2 ottobre 2016 il governo ungherese ha invitato i cittadini a rispondere a un referendum che consisteva in un unico, semplice quesito: «Vuoi che l’Unione europea sia abilitata a dare mandato di accoglienza ai cittadini non-ungheresi in Ungheria senza il consenso del Parlamento?». Il vero e il falso di questa domanda si combinavano in una tale ambiguità di senso che il cittadino si trova di fronte a una scelta difficile. Il modo in cui il quesito è stato proposto decontestualizza il problema, poiché in realtà non si tratta di un immaginario cittadino «non-ungherese», ma di persone concrete, detentrici di diritti in quanto profughi e richiedenti asilo.


      https://www.rivistailmulino.it/news/newsitem/index/Item/News:NEWS_ITEM:3862

  • #Europe pressing harder on countries to take back deported migrants

    As Europe reels from a historic rush of migrants, leaders are searching for new ways to reverse the flow by stepping up deportations.

    The quest led to a deal with Afghanistan that envisions a whole new terminal at the Kabul airport to take deportees. It sent German Chancellor Angela Merkel this week on a whistle-stop tour of African capitals, where she promised an influx of euros in exchange for willingness to take back migrants. And it resulted in an agreement with Turkey that critics say means European nations are biting their tongues about Ankara’s human rights abuses to halt refugees from flowing to Greece.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/europepressing-harder-on-countries-to-take-back-deported-migrants/2016/10/12/c822453a-8fb4-11e6-bc00-1a9756d4111b_story.html?tid=sm_tw
    #renvoi #expulsion #réfugiés #asile #migrations #Afghanistan #réfugiés_afghans #accords #diplomatie #externalisation

  • America Is Complicit in the #Carnage in #Yemen - The New York Times
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/opinion/stop-saudi-arms-sales-until-carnage-in-yemen-ends.html

    A hospital associated with Doctors Without Borders. A school. A potato chip factory. Under international law, those facilities in Yemen are not legitimate military targets. Yet all were bombed in recent days by warplanes belonging to a coalition led by Saudi Arabia, killing more than 40 civilians.

    The United States is complicit in this carnage. It has enabled the coalition in many ways, including selling arms to the Saudis to mollify them after the nuclear deal with Iran.

    #Arabie_saoudite #Etats-Unis #crimes

  • [#MSF] Aid Group Stops Seeking EU Funds Over Turkey Migrant Deal - The New York Times
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/06/17/world/europe/ap-eu-europe-migrants.html

    [Médecins Sans Frontières] the Nobel prize-winning medical aid organization Doctors Without Borders announced Friday that it will no longer seek European Union funding, in protest at the EU’s much-maligned migrant deal with Turkey.

    The EU deal is the latest in a long line of policies that go against the values and the principles that enable assistance to be provided,” Secretary General Jerome Oberreit told reporters in Brussels.

    Doctors Without Borders, he said, “will no longer request funds from the EU and its member states.

    EU money totaled around 46 million euros ($52 million) in 2015, about 8 percent of the organization’s total budget.

  • Investigation finds that Green Berets fought in Afghan city without proper maps - The Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/05/09/investigation-finds-that-green-berets-fought-in-afghan-city-without-proper-maps/?tid=sm_tw

    The Army Special Forces unit that fought its way into the Afghan city of Kunduz after it was seized by the Taliban in October initially did so without proper maps, according to recently declassified documents.

    The documents, released last month, were part of a heavily redacted report on the Oct. 3, 2015, bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital that killed between 30 and 42 civilians. The investigation, aside from piecing together why an American AC-130U gunship targeted and destroyed a medical facility, revealed a host of issues that beset a small team of Army Special Forces soldiers and their Afghan counterparts as they pushed into a city held by a large Taliban force.

    #la_faute_aux_cartographes #cartographie #guerre @visionscarto

  • (Du 30 avril) On the Ground in Aleppo: Bloodshed, Misery and Hope
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/world/middleeast/syrian-city-torn-by-war-shows-jarring-resolve-to-try-to-live-normally.html

    Mr. Assad, the president, faced new accusations of war crimes after airstrikes hit Al Quds hospital, on the rebel side of Aleppo, on Wednesday night. By Friday, rescuers said they had pulled 55 bodies from the rubble, including 29 children and women, some of whom had been in labor, according to one aid group. Doctors Without Borders, which had been supporting the hospital, denounced the bombing as “outrageous.”

    Residents in government-controlled areas have learned to fear the “hell cannon,” an improvised form of rocket fashioned from modified propane gas cylinders and packed with explosives and metal objects that is used by some insurgent groups, including those that receive American assistance.

    Both sides have been ravaged by bombardments, although only the government has fighter jets and helicopters at its disposal, which have reduced broad swaths of rebel territory to rubble.

    Disregard for civilian life is universal. On Thursday, after the hospital attack, rebel rockets rained on virtually every district of government-controlled Aleppo in a fierce barrage that claimed dozens of casualties. Taxis and ambulances screeched to a halt outside the city’s Al Razi hospital as desperate relatives rushed bloodied and dust-covered people, many of them children, into the emergency ward.

  • The Washington Post Says Doctors Without Borders Is Silly to Worry About the Impact of the TPP on Drug Prices | Beat the Press | Blogs | Publications | The Center for Economic and Policy Research
    http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/the-washington-post-says-doctors-without-borders-is-silly-to-worry-about-the-i

    The humanitarian group, Doctors Without Borders, along with many other NGOs involved in providing health care to people in the developing world, have come out in opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) over concerns that the deal will make it more difficult to provide drugs to people in the developing world. Their argument is that it will raise drug prices by making patent protection stronger and longer and by making it more difficult for countries to scale back protections that they may come to view as excessive and wasteful.

    But the Washington Post editorial board tells us not to fear, that the TPP is actually “a healthy agreement.” The gist of its argument is an analysis by Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Thomas Bollyky, which finds that there were few incidents of large increases in drug prices for countries following the signing of previous trade deals. 

    As I noted in a previous post, this analysis almost seemed designed not to find substantial rises in prices. Bollyky looked at changes in drugs prices immediately after a trade deal took effect. The problem with this approach is:

    "In most cases, the rules in these agreements will only apply to new drugs, and even then to a subset of new drugs, for example patent protection for a drug that is a combination of already approved drugs. They may also allow for the extension of patent terms beyond the date where they would have expired under pre-trade deal rules, but here again the impact will only be felt gradually over time.

    “Furthermore, the date of a trade deal with the United States may not be the key factor in pushing up drug prices. The United States signed a deal with South Korea in 2012 that required stronger patent and related protections, but most of these conditions were already law as of 2009 due to a trade agreement Korea signed with the European Union.”

    In other words, this before and after approach is a bit like weighing people the day after they gave up drinking sugary soda to determine whether this decision will affect obesity. It’s not serious stuff.

    There is evidence that prior trade agreements have affected drug prices. As I noted in that earlier post:

    "An analysis of the impact of the rules in the 2001 trade agreement between the United States and Jordan found that it had increased annual spending on drugs by $18 million by 2004. This is slightly less than 0.16 percent of Jordan’s GDP in that year, the equivalent of $28 billion annually in the U.S. economy today.

    “There is a similar story of sharply higher drug spending in Morocco, which signed a pact with the United States in 2006. In Morocco, spending on drugs went from $662 million in 2009 (0.7 percent of GDP) to $1.4 billion (1.4 percent of GDP) in 2015.”

    To be clear, Bollyky does have a limited point in his piece, any specific trade deal should not be viewed in isolation. It a process of creating ever stronger and longer patent protections, which mean ever larger gaps between the protected price of drugs and their free market price. (For some reason, none of the modelers ever factor in the negative impact of higher drug prices into their analysis of the economic impact of these trade deals.)

    In this sense, the TPP should be understood as working alongside other steps, like the Obama administration’s pressures on the Indian government to give up flexibilities granted under TRIPS, to ensure that U.S. drug companies can get ever higher prices from their drugs as protections are extended more broadly around the world. For people who are concerned about public health and would prefer a less corrupt and more efficient mechanism for supporting drug research, this sounds like a really bad deal.

    #arnaque #manipulation #libre_échange #pharma #Etats-Unis