How does the Alarmphone work?

While thousands of tourists, mainly from the Global North, cross the Mediterranean on ferries with ease each year, others have to risk their lives when they want to cross over to the European side.

In the past two months, the period that this report covers, the WatchTheMed Alarm Phone was frequently alerted to situations of distress in all three regions of the Mediterranean Sea. We were engaged in 38 distress cases, of which 18 took place in the Central Mediterranean, 7 in the Aegean Sea and 13 in the Western Mediterranean (please find links to the individual reports of the past two months below). While in most cases the safe arrival of all travellers could be confirmed, in some cases we had to witness the loss of life and human rights violations.

During the interception the migrants’ boat capsized. The survivors witnessed that the Marine Royal did not rescue all passengers, but only 5 of the 8. The Marine Royal then left the three dead bodies behind.

Despite mass drowning and illegal push-back operations by the Greek coastguards in the presence of Europe’s border agency Frontex, we experience how EU institutions, national governments, and the mainstream media remain largely silent. Whereas past mass shipwrecks caused at least some reactions, even if often hypocritical ones, the silence that we now witness points to the normalizing of border cruelty and migrant deaths.

Following accounts given by the survivors, why was a rescue operation not immediately started by the Turkish Coast Guard after it first arrived on scene at the GPS location?