| Seenotrettung Weekly Reports 2016: Changing Escape Routes: Alarm Phone experiences in the Mediterranean Sea
Bericht des Alarm Phone vom 29. Mai 2016:
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.
Alarm Phone Five-Week Report, 25th April to 29th May 2016
For most of the past five weeks, the Alarm Phone remained largely silent. Whereas a few weeks ago we received dozens of calls from the Aegean region per week, sometimes even per day, the new deterrence measures between Greece and Turkey have resulted in fewer attempted sea crossings and the Alarm Phone was not involved in any emergency situations in this region. In the Western Mediterranean Sea, the Alarm Phone was involved in three instances of successful sea-crossings from Morocco to Spain. In the five weeks that this report covers, we witnessed a remarkable increase of crossings from Libya to Italy and were alerted to 7 cases of boats in distress at sea in the Central Mediterranean. For the first time in months, Syrians and Iraqis were amongst these cross-border travellers trying to reach Italy and in several harrowing shipwrecks hundreds of people lost their lives.
While European politicians and institutions regard the decrease in border crossings in the Aegean Sea as well as the violent expulsions of migrants and refugees back to Turkey a success, it is clear that border violence has merely been displaced, further externalised, and thereby increasingly invisibilised. On the one hand, the Turkish government, its police, military and coastguard forces now enact European border control by deterring people from escaping and by disallowing those exposed to the cruelty of the Syrian war to enter Turkey.
