International
Campbell Shipping Company Limited
ISTANBUL — Capt. Joshua Peris Bhatt and his crew left Latvia one morning last fall aboard a dry bulk carrier hauling 27,000 metric tons of barley. Destined for Qatar, the ship sailed into the Mediterranean Sea, making it just beyond Italy when it was suddenly told to change course.
A maritime rescue center in Malta informed Bhatt that his ship, Campbell Shipping’s Caprice, was the nearest to another vessel in distress. There were few other details. Just coordinates — a position about two hours from Bhatt’s location — and an estimate that 400 to 500 passengers were aboard the stricken vessel.
Unless the coast guard could somehow get there first, Bhatt understood that he would be in for a massive rescue operation.
But when he arrived at the coordinates, there were no other ships in sight — no coast guard and nothing large enough to hold that many passengers. Just a small fishing boat, bobbing in the distance.
Bhatt checked the coordinates again and put out calls over the radio until finally he got a response.
“Yes, big ship,” a man said. “We have a problem.”
One of the few English speakers aboard the boat, he said the small fishing boat was the one that called for help. The passengers did not have enough food or water, and there were pregnant women on board. Their captain had abandoned ship, taking off in another fishing boat off the coast of Libya. Bhatt couldn’t imagine how such a small vessel could hold hundreds of people and wondered if the whole thing was a ruse. But as he steamed closer, his skepticism turned to shock.
A mass of migrants were crammed into every inch of the vessel — so many that some appeared to be hanging off the side. Through his binoculars, he could make out children.
“They literally lifted up their babies, and they showed me,” Bhatt recalled of the Oct. 22 rescue operation. “It was really difficult to believe.”
But it’s a scene that’s playing out again and again in the stretch of sea between Libya and Italy — the center of the world’s migrant crisis.
Upheaval across the Middle East and parts of Africa is causing people to flee their homes on a scale not seen since World War II. In junked fishing boats and in the belly of dilapidated ships, they are attempting to cross the Mediterranean to reach the safety of Europe’s shores, with thousands dying along the way.
Governments in Europe have failed to keep pace with this human surge, leaving search-and-rescue operations increasingly in the hands of commercial vessels. According to the International Chamber of Shipping, some 40,000 migrants were plucked from the Mediterranean last year by commercial captains and crews piloting everything from oil tankers to cruise ships with their own guests on board.
Captains point out that they are bound by law and human decency to respond to emergencies at sea. But they warn that neither merchant crews nor their vessels are equipped to handle such large-scale operations and that reliance on them puts both migrants and seafarers at risk.
“We are not ready,” said Capt. Bekir Emiral, the operations manager of Turkon Holding, a Turkish shipping company that was called to the scene of three migrant rescues in the past year, most recently in April. “We are container vessels with very limited accommodations. We don’t have enough water or food on board. And what if somebody dies or gets injured? Who will be responsible?”
As summer approaches, the number of migrants attempting to cross to Europe by sea is expected to only increase, and maritime groups are becoming more vocal about the need for beefed-up EU-run patrols.
The EU did decide to boost resources for search-and-rescue operations after the death of some 800 migrants in a disaster on April 19, when a boat capsized off the coast of Libya. Under the new plan, European authorities will target smugglers more aggressively while increasing funding for patrol operations run by the EU border control agency, Frontex.
Capt. Bekir Emiral
operations manager of Turkish shipping company
Still, maritime groups say the proposed measures are a far cry from what’s needed.
According to Patrick Verhoeven, the secretary general of the European Community Shipowners’ Associations, the solution would be a search-and-rescue mission that’s large scale and able to operate far from EU territorial waters where most migrant rescues take place.
Critics have raised concerns that a border control agency — instead of an agency with a humanitarian mission — is leading the charge to respond to the crisis. Ship captains, meanwhile, have complained that there is a lack of clarity on where they should take migrants rescued in international waters.
The lack of such protocol left Bhatt in a tricky situation. The man from the fishing boat refused to cooperate with a rescue unless Bhatt could guarantee he would take them to Italy, but Bhatt had no idea who would accept them. Unsatisfied, the man went silent, the two vessels in a stalemate as waves relentlessly pounded the smaller boat.
With severe weather on the way — a forecast of 7 to 10 meter waves and wind speeds of up to 47 knots — Bhatt pleaded with him to cooperate while Campbell Shipping’s Capt. Rajesh Dhadwal at the company’s headquarters in the Bahamas pressed authorities for permission to take the migrants to an Italian port. If the rescue didn’t begin soon, Bhatt had little doubt the small boat would capsize.
Hours into their standoff and with the sun beginning to set, permission was finally granted for Bhatt to take them to Italy, and the business of rescuing could begin.
Despite fears about security, running out of food and catching Ebola, which was raging in West Africa at the time, Bhatt’s 20-person crew lifted the strangers aboard the ship, until 510 were on board.
The crew went through every towel and bedsheet and nearly all the tea and porridge in its stores.
When a Syrian woman began gasping for air, an officer on the ship injected her with hydrocortisone, on the advice of the International Radio Medical Center, an organization that provides medical assistance to seafarers when there is no else to help.
Bhatt’s superiors, keenly aware of the risks, advised him and his crew to videotape and document as much as possible. “If something drastic happened we wanted to show we did all we could,” said Dhadwal. The Syrian woman was eventually airlifted to a hospital, and when the weather cleared up some 60 hours later, the remaining passengers on the Caprice safely disembarked.
“It is the highlight of our professional careers,” Dhadwal said. “It is something we will tell our grandchildren about.”
While proud of the rescue operation, he concedes that they were exceptionally lucky. Migrants could have died. Ports could have rejected them, leaving the migrants in their care for days and costing the company and its insurers hundreds of thousands of dollars.
These sorts of concerns are circulating throughout the industry, where calls to help with large-scale rescues are becoming more and more routine.
“You cannot stop the boats from coming,” said M. Tansel Karademir, the general manager of the Kaptanoglu Shipping Group, a Turkish company that was recently called to rescue 87 migrants off the coast of Libya. “These people are suffering. They’re trying to save their lives.”
Boat carrying suspected migrants from Afghanistan and Syria sinks off Istanbul; authorities search for survivors
Spanish authorities say about 350 migrants tried to storm border fence into coastal enclave of Melilla
Detention facilities in Texas filled up for the first time, so the state dropped off migrants at Arizona bus stops
About 200 people have died crossing the Aegean Sea since August 2012 as migrants risk the dangerous sea to reach the EU
The number of migrants to Italy has increased threefold as people flee violence in Africa and Middle East
Error
Sorry, your comment was not saved due to a technical problem. Please try again later or using a different browser.