New tragedy in the Mediterranean. At least sixty people have died aboard a rubber boat trying to reach Italy from the Libyan coast. This is what the survivors who were rescued this Wednesday by the humanitarian ship Ocean Viking, of the French NGO SOS Mediterranée, have said, who claim that they were in the central Mediterranean for a week without having received help despite the fact that planes and helicopters flew over them.
The boat left a week ago from the Libyan port of Zawiya but on the third day of sailing the engine stopped working, “leaving their boat adrift without water or food for days.” It could be the same one that Alarm Phone, an organization that receives calls from migrants with problems, warned a few days ago, which warned that there were 75 people at risk. Among the deceased were women and children, who died of hunger, thirst or as a result of fuel burns from the boat.
As explained by SOS Mediterranée, when they found them the situation was very complicated, of “extreme physical and mental vulnerability”, due to the harsh conditions they had endured during the last week that they had spent without food on the high seas and seeing traveling companions, some of them family and friends. All of them required medical attention, and two of them were found unconscious and in critical condition and had to ask the Italian coast guard for help to be evacuated. Finally, they were taken to a hospital in Sicily by helicopter. Others were suffering from hypothermia and almost all were extremely dehydrated after drinking only some sea water to stay alive.
“I found a man who has lost his wife and his one-and-a-half-year-old son,” said NGO spokesperson Lucille Guenier. The boy died during the first days of navigation, his mother, on the fourth. They were all Senegalese and had been in Libya for more than two years.”
After this complicated operation, the Ocean Viking carried out two other rescues following the instructions of the Italian coast guard. In total she has 224 people on board, who are heading towards the port of Ancona, 1,450 kilometers away, the one assigned by the Italian authorities to disembark. This follows the policy of Giorgia Meloni’s Executive of choosing remote ports to discourage the presence of NGOs in the Mediterranean but, according to the organization, the long journey only carries a risk of worsening the medical conditions of the survivors. “Some still wear oxygen masks to recover,” they point out.
The spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Flavio di Giacomo warns that this tragedy shows that the migrant relief system in the Central Mediterranean is still “vastly insufficient” and more must be done to save lives. The Italian opposition has also been quick to criticize the Meloni Government for what, according to the Democratic Party’s head of immigration policies, Pierfrancesco Majorino, is the “shameful umpteenth massacre without rescue.”