Rapporti

Alarm Phone: Analisi del Mediterraneo Centrale, dal 1 Luglio al 31 Dicembre 2022

Alarm Phone, 1 ottobre – 31 dicembre 2019

Maurice Stierl & Hagen Kopp

Marion Bayer

WatchTheMed Alarm Phone 2 Month Report 16th January 2017 – 19th March 2017

Despite mass drowning and illegal push-back operations by the Greek coastguards in the presence of Europe’s border agency Frontex, we experience how EU institutions, national governments, and the mainstream media remain largely silent. Whereas past mass shipwrecks caused at least some reactions, even if often hypocritical ones, the silence that we now witness points to the normalizing of border cruelty and migrant deaths.

EU politicians and institutions will publicly express their sorrow about the many fatalities. They will call for policy-changes and the further militarisation of the sea. They will again blame the smugglers and seek to reinforce deals with authoritarian regime. However, every shipwreck and every death of the past years is a consequence of exactly these European actions and inactions.

Arrivals by boat on the Greek islands have increased again in the last two weeks

Those threatened by deportation, detention and border violence have risen up in self-organised protest. Also we are not getting tired to raise our voices against those dehumanising practices and will continue to struggle for the opening of borders and the freedom of movement for all.

We cannot find words to express our anger, grief and disbelief about these current developments in the Aegean region. More forceful than ever, the EU deploys every means available to deter migration movements and, in the process, is responsible for the unabated dying at sea, and human rights violations within and beyond European territory on a mass scale.

While the European Union, its border agency FRONTEX and NATO have launched a war against unwanted migrants in the Aegean region, people on the move remind European leaders “we are human beings”, and ask them to open borders, as in a recent protest in a camp in Lesvos.

Statist attempts have caused yet another fatal shipwreck: On Sunday the 6th of March, at least 25 travellers died off the Turkish coast, after their wooden vessel had capsized

More and more people are currently arriving in Idomeni and with difficult weather conditions the situation will further worsen if Macedonia, under the pressure of EU member states, remains unwilling to open its borders to allow people to move on.

One traveller died on the 19th of February, when the Moroccan navy rammed a boat while trying to intercept it.

"Many of the protesters voiced the demand for ‘Ferries for all!’ which is also a slogan of a campaign that the Alarm Phone has now relaunched: ‘Ferries not Frontex’."

"On a daily basis, reports about capsized boats and drowned travellers reached us and in several cases the Alarm Phone was directly alerted to shipwrecks with dozens of fatalities."

In the past week, the Alarm Phone was alerted to 37 distress cases in the Aegean Sea and to 1 case in the Western Mediterranean Sea.

Nonostante i disperati tentativi dell'Unione Europea di ristabilizzare il suo regime di confine fatto a pezzi, ci sembra che solo le cattive condizioni meteorologiche possano impedire alle persone in movimento di attraversare il confine marittimo verso le isole greche e non le guardie di frontiera nazionali o le forze di Frontex.

Dozens of travellers died when seeking to overcome the Aegean Sea this week.

In the last two weeks, we were informed about or directly witnessed at least 7 maritime accidents, with more than one hundred deaths, including many children. Not least due to the EU-enforced presence of Turkish police forces at the coast, travellers are forced to take ever more lengthy and dangerous routes

The situation on the island of Farmakonisi is particularly dramatic, as the island is uninhabited except for the military stationed there. Without any reception infrastructure on the island, arriving people are neither fed, nor given water or shelter.

As the rescue vessel had arrived at the spot prior to the accident, why did it not act immediately but waited for almost an hour until the boat had capsized?

We dealt with 38 emergency situations in the Aegean Sea and 1 in the Western Mediterranean Sea. On Wednesday the 11th of November, yet again, many people died at sea. 14 refugees, including 7 children, drowned in Turkish waters when their vessel capsized.

Most importantly, both the distress situations at sea and those on land can be avoided. Once again, the Alarm Phone wants to call for a radical change in European border politics: Only the possibility to enter Europe through safe ways will end the deaths in the Mediterranean.

Gli avvenimenti drammatici del'ultima settimana hanno dimostrato ancora una volta che non c'è alternativa all'apertura delle frontiere europee, per finirla con le innumerevoli e insopportabili morti in mare.

In a shipwreck on Wednesday 14-15 people went missing near Samos and are feared dead and on Sunday a vessel collided with a rock near Lesvos and the bodies of 1 woman and 2 children have already been found and 10 more are still missing. There have been circulating news account of more tragedies, including six more deaths and another person gone missing. Another gruesome tragedy occurred in the Central Mediterranean Sea, presumably with more than 70 casualties. At least 43 bodies were washed up on Libyan shores and another 30 people from the shipwreck are still missing, also feared dead.

"In the past two weeks the Alarm Phone witnessed awful and inacceptable forms of violence committed against travellers at sea. In the Western Mediterranean we directly witnessed how several groups of travellers were forcefully intercepted and detained, with one group being even deported to the Moroccan border to Mauretania. In the Aegean Sea, travellers informed us about six attacks on boats in Greek territorial waters."

"When governments shut down train lines, people started to march instead, occupying highways, breaking through police lines, and thereby enacting their freedom of movement."

This long summer of migration in 2015 has clearly shown that barbed wire fences, military forces and other measures of deterrence cannot stop human mobility. The recent crossings of ten thousands of people have demonstrated the permeability of borders and have led to the (maybe only momentary) collapse of the Dublin system and other control mechanisms of the border regime of the European Union