Death by Rescue
THE LETHAL EFFECTS OF THE EU’S POLICIES OF NON-ASSISTANCE AT SEA
►http://deathbyrescue.org
The week commencing 12 April 2015 saw what is believed to be the largest loss of life at sea in the recent history of the Mediterranean. On 12 April, 400 people died when an overcrowded boat capsized due to its passengers’ excitement at the sight of platform supply vessels approaching to rescue them. Less than a week later, on 18 April, a similar incident took an even greater toll in human lives, leading the deadliest single shipwreck recorded by the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the Mediterranean. Over 800 people are believed to have died when a migrants’ vessel sank after a mis-manoeuvre led it to collide with a cargo ship that had approached to rescue its passengers. More than 1,200 lives were thus lost in a single week. As Médecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) commented at the time, these figures eerily resemble those of a war zone.
The frantic tangle of Automatic Identification System (AIS) vessel tracks in the Mediterranean following the 18 April shipwreck. Credit: Forensic Oceanography. GIS analysis: Rossana Padeletti. Design: Samaneh Moafi.Beyond the huge death toll, what is most striking about these events is that they were not the result of the reluctance to carry out rescue operations, which has been identified as a structural cause of migrants’ deaths in the Mediterranean Sea. In these two cases, the actual loss of life has occurred during and partly through the rescue operation itself. The detailed reconstruction of these two successive tragedies provided in this report shows, however, that in all likelihood the merchant vessels involved complied with their legal obligations and did everything they possibly could to rescue the passengers in distress. While it could appear that only the ruthless smugglers who overcrowded the unseaworthy boats to the point of collapse are to blame, the report focuses on the deeper responsibilities of EU agencies and policy makers.
REPORT
▻http://deathbyrescue.org/report/narrative
“About the report
The following report, produced by Forensic Oceanography – a research team based within the Forensic Architecture agency at Goldsmiths (University of London) that specialises in the use forensic techniques and cartography to reconstruct cases of deaths at sea – in collaboration with WatchTheMed and in the framework of the ESRC-supported “Precarious Trajectories” research project, seeks to understand the conditions that made these events possible.
It does so by mobilising a vast array of methodologies and techniques. First, the report offers, through a series of visualizations, diagrams and figures, a detailed spatio-temporal reconstruction of various cases of shipwrecks. This work was an exercise in the culling of disparate data that was eventually recombined in an effort to assemble a coherent spatial narrative of the chain of events. The reconstructions provided by the report are in fact based on numerous sources, in particular survivors’ testimonies, distress signals, Search and Rescue (SAR) reports provided by Frontex, Automatic Information System (AIS) vessel tracking data, judicial documents obtained from public prosecutors’ offices in Sicily investigating these cases, and photographs taken during the events by rescue teams. At times, elements of information were also extracted from secondary sources such as news reports and human rights reports by international organizations such as Amnesty International.
The policy decisions that led to these shipwrecks, however, sought precisely to keep state-operated assets at a distance from the area in which these were occurring. Focusing exclusively on the reconstruction of the events, then, would not have allowed for an accurate description of the mechanisms of this form of killing by omission. Therefore, in addition to case reconstruction, the report undertook an analysis that could be characterized as a “policy forensics”. This consisted of a comprehensive textual analysis of various technical assessments produced by Frontex, official statements by policy makers and EU officials, minutes of operational meetings between Frontex and other member states agencies, and transcripts of debates in the European Parliament and in its Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) committee. This endeavour was necessary, first of all, in order to gain a fine-grained understanding of the successive institutional steps that led to the retreat of state-led SAR operations. Secondly, it has allowed us to assess with precision the degree of knowledge concerning the risks to migrants’ lives the actors taking these decisions possessed. On this basis, the report points to the responsibility of the various agencies and individuals that took those decisions.
Finally, the report seeks to attend to the materialisation of these policies at sea, in terms of: the operational zones, operational logics and practices of state actors; how these policy shifts affected the practices of other actors operating at sea, such as smugglers and merchant ships; and the conditions and danger of migrants’ crossings. Here key sources were: spatial analysis of operational zones; interviews with state officials (the Italian Coast Guard, Customs Police and Frontex) concerning their operations at sea; and statistical data referring to migrant arrivals, deaths and SAR operations.
The diversity of sources and types of data required the report to draw upon the methodologies and expertise of a variety of disciplines. The material has thus been analysed in collaboration with experts in the relevant fields of geographic information science, vessel tracking technologies, image forensics, oceanography, statistical analysis, EU policy, international law and migration studies.”
Un nouveau site
Precarious Trajectories – Understanding the human cost of the migrant crisis in the central Mediterranean
▻https://precarioustrajectories.wordpress.com
Palermo Open City: From the Mediterranean Migrant Crisis to a Europe Without Borders? – Precarious Trajectories
▻https://precarioustrajectories.wordpress.com/2016/03/21/palermo-open-city-from-the-mediterranean-migrant-c
Leoluca Orlando is one of the longest lasting and most successful political leaders in post-war Italy. He has been elected mayor of Palermo – a city that was once the stronghold of the Sicilian mafia, no less than four times since 1985 – most recently in 2012 with over 70% of the popular vote. This despite campaigning to rid his city and region of what Orlando refers to as the plague of organized crime. A plague which nevertheless maintains its tenacious hold on important areas of economic, social and political life on the island.
The walls of the Council Chamber in Palermo are studded with plaques to the memories of public servants, priests and ordinary citizens who have been murdered by the Mafia, including several of Orlando’s closest partners. Indeed, it was the murder of Piersanti Mattarella – the then-regional president of Sicily in 1980 – that obliged the young human rights lawyer to abandon a promising university career for the highly dangerous vocation of public office. Piersanti’s brother Sergio is currently the President of the Italian Republic and remains a close friend and confidant of Palermo’s outspoken mayor.
Now aged 68 and three years into what may well be his final mandate, Orlando is fired with a new mission – that of restoring Palermo to its historical primacy as the cradle of a cosmopolitan “Arab-Norman” Mediterranean culture. “The city of Palermo is not a Mediterranean city,” argues Orlando, “it is a Middle Eastern city in Europe” that shares as much in common with Beirut and Djibouti as with Rome or Hamburg.
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