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At 3.30 pm between Friday and Saturday, Louise Michel declared an emergency: 219 people and a body in an old patrol boat transformed into a humanitarian boat cannot stay there. Unless the ship’s governance is at risk. In the end, the boat launched a week ago by the street artist Banksy with ten crew members was in turn rescued: while at least three NGO boats ran to their aid, it was the Italian Coast Guard who intervened: 49 out of 219 Migrants – 32 women, 13 children and 4 men, all “vulnerable” subjects – were transferred to the Italian patrol boat which, after having also brought the body on board, headed for Lampedusa. An operation that, the Coast Guard clarified, was unleashed at the request of the MRCC (the maritime rescue operations room) of Malta precisely because of the declared emergency but also because of the imminent worsening of the sea conditions. Banksy’s boat took 89 people on board three days ago, but just 24 hours later he had to rescue another 130 adrift in a rubber boat in the central Mediterranean, in the Sar (search and rescue) area of the competition. from Malta. A very difficult situation was generated on board to the point that 33 were left in one of the two lifeboats of the ship and in the other the body of the dead migrant was placed: “They told us that during the voyage they had already lost three traveling companions – says Louise Michel – and if we add the corpse that we have with us, four lives have disappeared because of “Fortress Europe” ». Chief of Mission Lea Reisner spoke of “scandalous behavior.”
Even before the Italian patrol boat’s intervention, Louise Michel had been joined by the Astral sailboat, the Open Arms support ship, among the first last week to return to sea for the central Mediterranean.
Then there were the Sea Watch 4, which for a week in turn has been waiting for the “pos”, the safe harbor, for the 201 people on board, and the Mare Jonio, which in the morning sailed from Augusta, where it was stopped for 6 months. At night, all the other migrants who were on Banksy’s ship are transferred to Sea Watch 4, which now has 350 people on board. Banksy himself spoke about Louise Michel’s mission with a video on Instagam: “I bought a boat because the European authorities deliberately ignore requests for help from non-Europeans.” With the first 49 disembarked, the emergency remains for the humanitarian ships that returned a few days ago in the central Mediterranean.
Sea Watch 4 has repeatedly asked Italy, Malta and also Germany, the flag country for ships and NGOs, for a safe harbor. So far in vain. At sea, waiting for the “pos”, a container ship of the Danish Maersk, the Etienne, has also been for 25 days: it has 27 people on board who were rescued on August 5 at the request of the Maltese authorities that then, the port . Yesterday, both UNHCR and IOM launched an appeal calling for “the immediate disembarkation of more than 400 refugees and migrants” from the three ships. “The lack of an agreement on a regional landing mechanism – UNHCR and IOM pointed out – cannot be an excuse to deny vulnerable people a safe haven and the assistance they need, as required by international law.” On the other hand, the situation at sea facing Libya remains difficult. Yesterday Alarm Phone, the “migrant switchboard”, denounced the lack of assistance of an inflatable boat with about 55 people on board, off the coast of Maltese waters: “With our Moonbird reconnaissance plane” – said the NGO Sea Watch – We saw a Maltese patrol boat 2 miles away but it did not respond to our requests and left.
In the next few days, other NGO ships will be in the area: the Open Arms, which left Spain on Friday, and Mare Jonio himself: the continuous arrivals of Tunisians in Lampedusa had overshadowed the dangerous departures from Libya. The relays and shipwrecks of these days remind us that we are still leaving that tormented country.
