Five rescue operations since Thursday have saved 268 people, including minors and pregnant women, north of the Libyan coasts.
Le Monde with AFP
The Ocean-Viking, a humanitarian ship of SOS Méditerranée, has rescued 268 people since Thursday, August 25 during five migrants who are mostly in overcrowded wooden boats between Libya and Malta, announced The NGO Friday.
“Many have high exhaustion and dehydration levels” and “serious sunburn”, detailed the NGO, whose headquarters are in Marseille. Several minors including unaccompanied minors, pregnant women and even a three-week baby are now taken care of by SOS Méditerranée and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Federation on the Ocean-Viking.
Tuesday, the ambulance ship had explained that it had spotted four empty boats in this area including one without an engine. But “without communication from the maritime authorities, the fate of people on board remains unknown,” she said.
Since the beginning of the year, 1,161 migrants have disappeared in the Mediterranean, including 918 in the central Mediterranean, the most dangerous migratory route in the world, according to the International Organization for Migration (OIM). The UN agency estimated the number of deaths and missing in 2021 to 2,048 in the Mediterranean, including 1,553 for the central Mediterranean alone.
States ignore the calls for distress
In a joint declaration made on August 3, 2022, several NGOs operating rescue boats in the Mediterranean asked “the Member States and the associated States of the European Union to set up an adequate research and rescue fleet, Directed by the States, dedicated and proactive in the central Mediterranean, as well as rapid and adequate response to all distress calls, and a predictable landing mechanism of survivors “.
The EU ended its controversial operation to combat human trafficking in the Mediterranean in 2020, replacing it with Operation Irini, which focuses on the maintenance of the United Nations embargo on the weapons for Libya. The rescue of migrants has since been left to the discretion of states, but NGOs complain that countries ignore distress calls or even work with the Libyan authorities to send migrants to it.
Each year, thousands of people fleeing conflicts or poverty try to join Europe crossing the Mediterranean from Libya, whose coasts are some 300 kilometers from Italy.