Impunity in the Mediterranean

As the Conscience burned, the crew immediately radioed a distress call to Malta.

They claim that parties unknown came on the radio claiming to be the crew and no longer needing assistance.

This helped hamstring assistance, but lawyer and activist Huwaida Arraf, who was helping coordinate the aid operation, says that Maltese authorities dragged their feet on offering a rescue. She adds that they eventually offered to evacuate the crew, but leave the ship abandoned.

Activists including Thunberg pleaded with Maltese authorities to help. Malta denied the crew’s request to dock. Instead, the crew asked to shelter inside Maltese territorial waters, where the risk from a second attack may be lower. This too was denied, “completely inexplicably,” says Arraf.

Days later, Maltese inspectors boarded to check the ship for weapons or contraband. At the time of writing, the Conscience was preparing for repairs to be undertaken at sea, unable to find any port where the crew could be confident that they could continue their mission.

This is an extreme incident but not an isolated one. Malta consistently abrogates its responsibility to render aid at sea, seemingly without accountability.

Two months ago, thirty-two people fleeing Libya took shelter on an oil platform where they became trapped. One had died during the crossing. Maltese authorities stubbornly refused to coordinate a rescue, until they were ordered to help by an emergency United Nations Human Rights Committee ruling.

On a previous rescue rotation, I have witnessed Malta’s authorities responding to requests for urgent communication on a distress case by telling responders to send an email, supposedly because they were clogging the emergency line.

Where Italy routinely attempts to limit or delay its responsibility to rescue, fellow European Union member state Malta more often simply refuses to assist at all.

This week’s story of a stricken ship full of aid stranded at sea is simply the latest and most striking in a long line of incidents.

Technologies of Power

At Malta’s Luqa airport sits a runway where Heron drones take off to surveil the Mediterranean for Frontex, the EU’s border agency.

The Herons are designed and produced in Israel. They were field-tested in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, the 2009 Israeli offensive that killed at least 1,400 Palestinians — a horrific assault, yet one that pales before the current nightmare.

The year before, Arraf and her organization had managed to open a sea route to Gaza, bringing aid ships to shore at least five times. Things quickly changed. Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey began to block vessels from embarking, presumably responding to Israel’s urging.

Then in 2010, Israeli forces killed nine people on a civilian ship attempting to break the Gaza blockade and deliver aid.

In The Palestine Laboratory, author Antony Loewenstein describes how Israeli military and surveillance technology is tested in occupied Palestine before being exported to war zones, police forces, and borders around the world.

In the Mediterranean, the Heron drones surveil the world’s deadliest migration route, in which thousands die preventable deaths every year.

European states seek to use the dangerous sea as a barrier, enabling them to shirk their commitments to providing protection to people who need it.

Frequently, Palestinians forced from their homeland are among those trying to cross the Mediterranean.

The night of the attack on the Conscience, I was at the London premiere of a documentary named Escaping Libya’s Detention Industry, made by lawyers and forensicists.

In the United States, the Trump administration had just floated a proposal to send migrants to Libya.

In the film, a refugee who had escaped torture in Libya’s brutal migrant detention centers tells the story of how his small boat was circled by a drone.

When Libya’s militia-riddled “coast guard” arrived to drag him back to incarceration, they told him that the drone belonged to Frontex, who had reported it to them.

This is a routine story. Last year, Human Rights Watch had to launch a campaign demanding that Frontex do the bare minimum of sharing the details of boats in distress with civilian sea rescue ships as frequently as they do the Libyan authorities.

Europe is deeply complicit in regimes of rights abuses including violence, torture, and modern slavery in the region from Libya to Egypt to Tunisia and beyond.

And at sea, the zone of impunity continues to widen.

Nearly two years ago, on a rescue mission in the central Mediterranean, I was on a ship that nearly responded to a distress case in the Greek rescue zone. Ultimately we were too distant to be of use.

A hundred refugees who had embarked from Lebanon were allegedly threatened with firearms and kidnapped by a rogue Libyan militia boat known as the Tariq Bin Zayed (TBZ) before being ransomed. The TBZ has also received Frontex cooperation.

The kind of piracy at European shores that should have sparked an international incident passed with barely a whimper, in another story of an increasingly lawless ocean.

Guns on the Deck

The Conscience’s SOS was overheard from the bridge of Humanity 1, a civil rescue ship on its way to disembark nearly seventy people recovered from boats in distress — a journey made longer by Italian obstruction.

Rescue organizations were quick to condemn the attack. But while refugee boats, aid shipments, and civil rescue missions are hampered, weapons steam across the high seas to be fired into Palestine, mostly unimpeded.

Shipping giant Maersk alone has brought over two thousand military shipments to Israel. These include parts for the F-35 fighter jets that have dropped onto Gaza 2,000-pound bombs capable of leveling neighbourhoods — now the subject of a UK High Court challenge aimed at ending British participation. (The UK has just been revealed to have sent thousands of military items despite an export ban.)

Last December, following pressure from Palestinian and international campaigners, the Spanish government announced its intention to bar two Maersk shipping containers from docking as planned in the port of Algeciras.

In response, the United States opened an attempt to fine Spain millions of dollars. Greece, meanwhile, continues to open its ports to weapons shipments, with dockworkers having to take action to block Israel-bound munitions.

To the east, UK surveillance flights take off from the base at Akrotiri in Cyprus to observe what remains of Gaza. This is somehow justified in the interests of British “national security.” Yet, the family of a former British soldier killed carrying out aid work in Gaza has been unable to access the footage taken.

Israel is the most egregious, but far from the only, example of weapons being shipped across the Mediterranean to regimes engaged in violations of human rights and international law.

There are the patrol boats and equipment sent by Italy, France, and the EU to Libya’s so-called “coast guard” to aid its war on migration. There are firearms sent to the ruthless security forces of the Sisi regime in Egypt, and helicopter parts sent to Turkey for use in the Syrian Civil War along with equipment for its violent migration control regime.

Often, this produces the very refugees Western states work so hard to keep out.

According to new figures, global arms sales this year have seen the steepest rise of the century so far. Ships of mercy are attacked, and ships of death and profit sail on.

Lawless Waters?

The ships that are harassed and blockaded by states with supposed humanitarian commitments cross oceans that are wounded in many ways. Our oceans are rendered by contemporary capitalism as a trade route, a battlespace, and a resource bank.

The Mediterranean, a busy inland sea freighted with centuries of exploitative politics, is a striking example of these dynamics.

States deplete and compete over its natural resources; send missions of extraction and militarization through it; and prevent people from crossing it.

On its contested, warming, acidifying surface play out deeply connected stories of human movement, environmental upheaval, and military and political struggles.

In Alex Colas and Liam Campling’s Capitalism and the Sea, the authors argue that maritime exploitation decisively shaped our destructive, internationalized model of international capitalism.

They point to the emergence of an insurance industry intended to promote predictable profits through mitigating the uncertainties of maritime life, and how this was inextricably entangled with the commodification of human cargo through the Atlantic slave trade.

During this period, the sea was also the birthplace of modern international law. Such innovations underpinned the imperial advance; from Hugo Grotius’s early defence of state-backed piracy to Francisco De Vitoria’s arguments for the legitimacy of maritime conquest.

Yet attempts to tame the untamable ocean with reason also yielded progressive potential. For example, the universal duty to rescue people in distress at sea comes from this period. It may be shaken now, but it remains essential to international protection.

It seems apt that the sea is once again a battleground for the meaning of international law, collective responsibility, and shared morality.

“States are obliged to render aid,” says Arraf. “States should be bringing their own aid ships and insisting on access. Instead, I’ve hardly heard any condemnation [from states] of coming to Europe to bomb an aid ship.”

“It’s dangerous, and it reaffirms impunity. Israel can go anywhere it wants, attack anything it wants, and kill anyone who gets in the way of its plan.”

If humanitarians can be attacked on the high seas at European shores without consequences, a new watermark on the Western establishment’s creeping abandonment of its professed norms will have been reached.

For decades, liberal societies justified their use of power with reference (sometimes more cynically than others) to human rights, humanitarian commitments, and universal justice.

Now governments on both sides of the political spectrum think little of ignoring the pronouncements of international institutions, gutting aid agency budgets to spend on arms races, and disregarding the contributions to public debate of both humanitarians and people affected by crises.

The morning after the Conscience incident, aid agencies released testimonies, data, and grim stories of the impact of two months of Israel’s full-scale blockade of food, fuel, and shelter entering Gaza. Israel has now given up even its shallowest pretenses of abiding by its humanitarian duties.

Maybe this time, such stories will help broaden the coalition for accountability. Maybe there is a limit to the number of people that can be bombed, boats sunk, arms sold, deaths ignored, across a long, fragile shoreline.

That would be a lot to hope for, but it is also the least anyone can demand.

Against a backdrop of entirely preventable human misery, the images of the fire on the Conscience in the May Day night burn like a desperate warning beacon, an alarm call for us all.