In 2013, after a series of shipwrecks claimed the lives of thousands of people attempting to reach Europe, member-states launched the search and rescue operation, Mare Nostrum. Led by the Italian authorities, the mission focused on the rescue of migrant boats in distress in the Central Mediterranean passage.
Over the course of a year, the Mare Nostrum fleet rescued over 100,000 people. With more and more brought to safety on European shores, EU leaders began to allege that the presence of rescue assets at sea acted as a “pull factor” – incentivizing migrants to risk the perilous sea crossing to Europe. Without the prospect of rescue, they reasoned, migrants would not attempt the journey. Mare Nostrum was thus terminated in 2014 as part of a broader effort to securitize the European border against migrants seeking safety.
The consequences of the move were catastrophic. Irrespective of whether rescue assets were in the area, people continued to flee across the Mediterranean passage; but with no ships on the lookout for them, thousands drowned. For migrants caught in distress during the crossing, the last hope of rescue lay in transiting merchant vessels. But because large commercial ships have neither the equipment nor the expertise to carry out rescues, efforts by well-meaning commercial captains to save shipwrecked migrants were often disastrous. Merchant sailors accidentally caused migrant boats to capsize even as they tried to save them, resulting in so-called “death by rescue.” In April 2015, over 1,200 people drowned in the process of being “rescued” by transiting cargo ships.
Even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that interrupting Mare Nostrum did not reduce the number of people attempting to cross the Mediterranean but merely resulted in more of them dying, EU leaders refused to resume search and rescue operations.
In late 2014, the EU’s border patrol, FRONTEX, launched Operation Triton. Purportedly a replacement of Mare Nostrum, and a response to Italian authorities’ call for assistance in scaling it up to a European operation, Triton in fact involved massive divestment from search and rescue, and a shift in focus to border protection and deterrence.
Under the aegis of Triton, a handful of ships deployed by member-states for the purpose of “border management” patrolled waters within 30 nautical miles from the Italian island of Lampedusa. This left a vacuum of rescue assets in the stretch of sea 150 nm miles offshore Libya, where migrants were most likely to encounter distress. It meant that migrant vessels would have to keep course towards Italy for days before they even entered Frontex’s operational area and stood a chance of rescue by a Triton asset. Given the fragile nature of migrant vessels and inexperience of their skippers, it was almost impossible for them to make it that far.
The architects of Triton – chief among them, FRONTEX’s operation director, Felice Leggeri – were well-aware of the death sentence they were issuing to the thousands of migrants who would attempt the crossing. In the words of the United Nations rapporteur “It’s like saying, let them die because this is a good deterrence. […] To bank on the rise in the number of dead migrants to act as deterrence for future migrants and asylum seekers is appalling.”
Once again, the Italian Coast Guard was left on its own to coordinate rescue operations. Their requests for support from Triton ships were met with objections by FRONTEX’s director of operations, Klaus Rösler, who complained that repeated calls to offer assistance to migrant boats in distress was dragging Triton ships away from their area of operation and from their primary purpose: “control[ling] irregular migration flows towards the territory of the European Union and tackl[ing] cross-border crime.”
Military Humanitarianism
This focus on “tack[ling] cross-border crime” is characteristic of recent tactics of bordering. Operation Sophia implemented by EUNAVFOR in 2015, the 2016 NATO patrol of the Aegean migrant route and Frontex’s Operation Themis (2018) and, most recently, Operation Irini (2020) all launched with the objective of combining border patrol, sea rescue and intelligence gathering to combat the smuggling industry. Shifting responsibility for migrant deaths onto smugglers allowed European leaders to paint Europe’s border security apparatus in humanitarian colors. Under this reasoning, it was not the EU border regime that forced migrants to attempt the dangerous crossing, but smugglers keen to exploit hapless victims; it followed that by targeting traffickers, border officials were in fact “protecting” migrants from exploitation. They did not, however, provide migrants with any safe and legal alternative pathways to Europe.
The militarization of the border made little difference to the success of the traffickers’ business model, but it did make them operate under increasingly risky circumstances, forcing migrants to attempt the crossing under ever more dangerous conditions. Many more drowned.
