Anatomy of a Rescue: We Spoke To a Kiwi Pulling Refugees Out of the Mediterranean

Last year, the United Nations recorded 5000 refugees and migrants who drowned during the dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean. Often, those who do make it are plucked from the sea by rescue boats.

Shaun Cornelius is a New Zealand logistician who works for MSF on one of the rescue boats–the Aquarius*–and recently won the UNESCO Peace Prize. He spoke to VICE as they sailed south of Sicily, down towards the coast of Libya in the Mediterranean sea. The ship will spend the next week just outside Libya’s territorial waters, scanning for the rubber dinghies and converted fishing boats that carry thousands of refugees out into open ocean.

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This year the Aquarius has rescued 5353 people, including nearly 100 pregnant women, and 1100 minors– 98 percent of whom were unaccompanied. They’ve taken on 60 children under the age of 5, and had one baby born on board.

VICE: Hi Shaun. So tell me about a rescue – what does it look like, how does it play out?
Well, the probability of a boat being spotted becomes very high early morning, because the boats tend to depart Libya under cover of darkness around midnight or early morning – because that’s when their best chance is of evading the Libyan authorities. So they come out then, and maybe 5-6 hours later they’ll get out into international waters if they’re lucky, and anytime after that there’s a chance of us or some other vessel encountering them.

As we get closer to the vessel, we launch the two fast rescue boats. Those will head out with a crew on them and approach the vessel in distress. The vessels we find are often rubber boats or sometimes old wooden fishing boats that have been converted. Typically if it’s a rubber boat it might have anything between 100 and 140 people in it. The wooden boats sometimes have up to 700 people in them.

“Until they have lifejackets on, they’re very vulnerable. Most of them can’t swim and will drown very quickly if they end up in the water.

What sort of state are they in, by the time you reach them?
The boats are usually in pretty bad shape, barely seaworthy, often very low in the water, water coming over the sides, flooded inside and the people are just packed in in a way that’s pretty unbelievable. These boats are designed for 40-50 people and they’ll have at least three times that in them. So the people are usually pretty distressed and traumatised from being in this boat on the verge of sinking for 4-5 hours. They see us coming and it’s a pretty tricky situation, because the last thing we want is for them to all move to one side of the boat and it tips over, or the side collapses and it fills with water. So our rescue boat will go round in a circle, and as we move closer we have cultural mediators—staff that are multilingual—and they’ll be telling them to calm down, telling them what’s going to happen, reassuring them they’re safe. Once everybody looks stable, one of our boats will move in closer, and a medic will try to assess what the condition of the people is, and look for any vulnerable people, young children, babies, pregnant women, people with injuries or unconscious. The next step is to get lifejackets on everyone in the boat—until they have lifejackets on, they’re very vulnerable. Most of them can’t swim and will drown very quickly if they end up in the water. Once they’ve got lifejackets on, the priority cases get pulled out onto one of the rescue boats, and we start shuttling them back to the Aquarius.

“They’re sitting up to their hips in seawater in the bottom of the boat. They spill fuel, and it spreads through the water of the boat so people end up sitting in this mixture of seawater and gasoline which very soon starts taking their skin off.

And what happens next?
They come onto the deck, get their lifejacket off, they’re supported by people because they’re often very shaky from being cramped up into the boat, not used to standing. They’re often very seasick. Maybe intoxicated with gasoline fumes, they have injuries, and often they’re very emotionally distraught as well.

One of the problems that sometimes occurs is people have gasoline burns. They sit in the boat, especially the women and children tend to be packed into the centre of the boat so they’re sitting down low in the raft. Usually the raft will take on water, so they’re sitting up to their hips in seawater in the bottom of the boat. And they have fuel in the boat in plastic jerry cans. They’re very cheap jerry cans, often without a lid, just a rag. And they spill fuel, or the cans leak—and it spreads through the water of the boat so people end up sitting in this mixture of seawater and gasoline which very soon starts taking their skin off. People end up with these really bad chemical burns. So we shower people, wash them down.

What frequently happens is we finish one rescue and we’re immediately directed to another one, or we might sight two boats at once—so it becomes a pretty crazy situation on deck, with people coming on, processing them, medics flat out. Then we have the problem of finding enough space for people on the boat. The ship was designed as a survey vessel, with accommodation for 50-80 people depending on double bunking. That accommodation is for the crew, the staff. And elsewhere on the ship we put people wherever we can find space for them. So we have pockets of people parked around various locations on the ship, and as the ship fills up we have to move people around, from one area to another, push people in, get them to pack in – but a lot of the places people are sitting is exposed, so if we get rough weather it becomes tricky. Once we have people on board it’s pretty full on. Everyone’s working 24 hours a day. You get short periods of sleep. That continues until we get into port.

Have you ever reached capacity? Had to leave people behind?
It’s been very close to that. When I’ve been on the ship, the maximum we’ve had on it is around 700. To me that seemed like totally packed—there’s not really enough space for anyone to lie down and sleep, people are sitting with their knees pulled up, or standing. And that’s ok for a little while but people are totally exhausted, they want to lie down and sleep. If you’re on the boat a couple of days, that’s very tough. But earlier this year when I wasn’t on the ship, they had nearly 1000 on—and I can hardly imagine it. They did multiple rescues, and there was no alternative really, other than packing the people in and taking them on. The only alternative would have been to abandon those people in the boats. That was really the limit, and it actually becomes dangerous. People are packed in so tight, it’s impossible to get to anybody, or move around.

Some other rescue boats over Easter had the situation where they were completely full, and they had other rafts they couldn’t take people on board from, and there was no backup, so they just stayed where they were—one boat had five rafts around it, another boat had seven rafts around it. They put out mayday calls, and eventually other ships were diverted to the area. But it was a very tricky situation, the weather was starting to get rough.

“They seem at first appearance to be typical young girls: pretty happy, normal teenagers. But once we start talking to them, this whole tragedy unfolds, around trafficking of young women.

On a more personal level, can you tell me about any experiences or encounters that have stood out to you?
The thing that’s probably the most distressing thing that I see on the boat is the groups of young women that come on board. We see this often, especially young women coming out of Nigeria, and they seem at first appearance to be typical young girls: pretty happy, normal teenagers. But once we start talking to them, and the cultural mediators start talking to them, and finding out their stories, this whole tragedy unfolds, around trafficking of young women.

They’re effectively groomed and recruited in Nigeria, told they can go to Europe and get jobs and send money back to their families. Their families are roped into the whole scam as well, they often raise money and go into debt to get the money to get their children to Europe. But then once they leave Nigeria they just completely become victims handed from trafficking group to trafficking group, onsold from one group to another, and as they do so they incur a debt that goes with them. Eventually they end up getting to Europe with phone numbers to contact associates of the smuggling gangs. They think they’re getting jobs, but once they get out they have this huge debt over them, and the only way they’re going to work it off is going into prostitution. They’re coerced and entrapped by a whole web of forces: threats of violence against their families, shame at what’s happened, often they’ve been raped and abused, and sometimes video is taken of this which is used to shame them and shame their families, and extort more money. Some are entrapped by Nigerian voodoo practices, where they’ve gone into blood bonds with minders, and people controlling them—and they firmly believe if they go against the people controlling them there’ll be consequences for their family. MSF puts a big effort into identifying these girls, trying to gain their confidence and understand their stories, and provide opportunities to get out of this web they’re entangled in.

The rescues have been a bit of a political football over the last year, with some people saying you shouldn’t facilitate rescues because it encourages people to leave in unsafe vessels. How to you guys reckon with that?
Yeah, it is a tricky question. The reality is there’s been migration across the Mediterranean occurring for hundreds, probably thousands of years. This is just the latest permutation of it, facilitated by the breakdown of law and order in Libya, which has created a path. There are no border controls, Libya is controlled by criminal gangs and corrupt government organisations which can be paid off by smugglers. They’ve created this highway of people coming through and they’re pushing them out into the Mediterranean. They don’t really care whether the people make it to Europe very much, it’s simply a money making business. So sure, the fact there’ are boats out there picking people up probably has some impact on the flows coming through. But the reality is if there was no NGOs coming through there would be very large numbers of people still coming, and the death rate would be just astronomical. Just appalling.