“We had to do something”: 10 years on the Med’s rescue hotline

 “We had to do something”: 10 years on the Med’s rescue hotline | openDemocracy

A woman looks at her phone after landing on the Greek island of Kos in 2015

 |  Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images. All rights reserved

One night in December 2022, Alarm Phone received a call. The person on the other end of the line said they were one of around 100 people crammed onto a small inflatable motorboat in the Mediterranean, around 160 kilometres North of Tripoli. They were in trouble.

Several hours later, the Ocean Viking, a vessel operated by SOS Méditerranée, rescued 113 people based on Alarm Phone’s information.

“We are thanking you very much. And we are feeling happy,” said one survivor, a woman from Senegal.

Alarm Phone began taking calls on 11 October 2014. A volunteer organisation funded mostly by private donations, it operates a rescue hotline for people to call when they are in distress at sea. Typically these are people seeking shelter in Europe, trying to navigate the barriers put in place to block them.

The group has no rescue capacity itself. Its volunteers gather as much information as they can from the caller and relay that to state maritime agencies and charity rescue organisations.

Alarm Phone turns 10 years old today. For a decade now it has directed rescue ships to people in distress at sea. From the looks of things, its services will continue to be needed for many years to come.

The birth of a rescue line

Alarm Phone emerged from various groups working on migration and borders in the early 2010s. Successive uprisings and the resulting brutal crackdowns across several Arab nations had led to an increase in people trying to reach Europe and an increase in people dying along the way. “With death increasing and a clear lack of rescue, there was a feeling we had to do something,” said Maurice Stierl, an Alarm Phone member.

There were, for a time, European rescue operations on the Mediterranean in this period. The most notable of these was Italy’s Mare Nostrum, which ended in late 2014. But much more common was an informal tactic which became known as ‘left to die’. This ​​de facto policy of non-assistance by European agencies was contrary to international maritime law. Thousands of people perished because of it.

It was during this time that activists and civil society groups, including people with lived experience of crossing Europe's deadly borders, were trying to find a way to prevent further deaths at sea. What would become known as the civil fleet – a collection of civilian rescue vessels patrolling the Mediterranean – had not yet emerged.

We sometimes had weeks with a hundred boats calling us from the Aegean Sea

The idea of a hotline grew organically from the seed of one man’s idea – Father Mussie Zerai. An Eritrean Catholic priest who had himself sought asylum in Italy, Zerai had for years been receiving calls from people in distress.

“It started with an Italian journalist who gave my phone number to refugees locked up in the Misrata (detention) centre,” said Zerai. “Once freed, they took the sea journey. When they found themselves in danger they called me.”

Alarm Phone took Zerai’s work and expanded it.

“I (told) them a call centre was needed,” Zerai said, “with shifts of volunteers who speak different languages ​​to receive calls and report to the competent authorities for the rescue.”

“We started to build these systems,” Stierl explained. It took time to build up the technical infrastructure and procedures. “We had to build a lot of the manuals that we use from scratch.” After a year of preparation, the hotline opened and the phone began to ring.

Within a year it began to ring a lot more.

“We set up the system in October 2014, and then 2015 happened” Stierl said. Over a million people sought shelter in Europe via the sea in 2015, five times as many as the year before. Despite the political backlash that was to follow, Stierl said he has fond memories of witnessing that historic moment.

“People were able to break through a very deadly border regime. And by moving in such numbers, it also meant that the crossings became safer,” Stierl said. “Of course, it was hard. We sometimes had weeks with a hundred boats calling us from the Aegean Sea.”

In the last three months of 2014, Alarm Phone received around ten calls. The next year, over 1,200. Since its founding, the hotline has been staffed without interruption and, by October 2024, has taken more than 8,000 calls.

Someone will always pick up

There are hundreds of Alarm Phone volunteers across Europe and Africa, grouped into teams working shifts of around 4-8 hours.

“The first thing you do is set up all the different phone systems so that you're connected with a central number,” said Jacob Berkson, a volunteer in Brighton. “Then you take a bit of time to get yourself up to speed and take a handover from the previous shift. And then, generally, I hope that calls don't come in, because it's always stressful. But they usually do.”

When a call does come, the team tries to learn as quickly as they can where the people in distress are, the condition of their boat and their wellbeing, and any other information that might help a rescue vessel find them.

These conversations often take place in the most inclement conditions possible.

The boats are crowded well beyond capacity and are almost never seaworthy. Life jackets and proper navigational equipment are rare, while rough weather, mechanical issues and medical emergencies are to be expected. And they wouldn’t be calling if they weren’t in danger.

Alarm Phone is like a megaphone for those whose voices are often ignored

“You're trying to build trust very fast with people who are often in a panic situation,” said Berkson. In his roughly six years with Alarm Phone, he’s gotten better at getting to business while keeping people calm.

“I learned that 'Hello friend' is quite a nice opening to use when you answer the phone. That's not something the state would ever say,” he said.

Once they’ve gathered enough information, the team relays it to state maritime agencies and the civil fleet, which has grown to dozens of charity organisations and vessels. For Alarm Phone, the ideal outcome is that people are rescued before their boat capsizes, or before they are seized by the EU-funded Libyan Coast Guard and pulled back to Libya, where they face extreme danger and abuse.

The shifts take a mental toll. People often have to take time away from volunteering or leave completely.

“It's just a matter of bad luck,” says Maurice Stierl. “You can have a shift where nothing happens and then next time a couple of hundred people drown.”

Berkson remembers one call that came in during lockdown:

“It was about two in the morning. There were people screaming. They said they were on a boat and then the call cut. They phoned back and I realised that someone had lit a match over the fuel tank to check the fuel level. Of course, it set the whole boat on fire.

“It was just horrible, the screams. That shook me up, and still gives me nightmares.”

The survivors were taken back to Libya. “Not everybody died, at least,” Berkson said.

After a shift, “it takes a few hours to kind of have a drink and, you know, look at the football scores or whatever to calm down,” Berkson said. “I find it becomes really hard to then talk to anyone else who's not involved in the network, because your mind is constantly on what's happening in the Mediterranean.”

Alarm Phone is effectively the intelligence agency for an ecosystem of organisations working to prevent death at sea. They provide an invaluable resource to civilian rescue organisations operating in the Mediterranean.

“Alarm Phone is like a megaphone for those whose voices are often ignored,” said Fulvia Conte, a search and rescue team leader with Médecins Sans Frontières. “Almost half of the rescues we have done were made possible due to Alarm Phone. Without this initiative, our spotlights would not know where to look, our rescue boats would not know where to go, and many stories would remain untold.”

Without Alarm Phone’s work, Nicola Stalla from SOS Méditerranée said, “the number of lives lost at sea would be even higher than it already is.”

Saving people, despite the state

Alarm Phone’s relationship with state authorities has always been somewhat tense, and it has only worsened with time. Both Berkson and Stierl noted that many coastal agencies are becoming less responsive to them.

This has coincided with a hardening of Europe’s borders and the targeting of rescue and solidarity actors for prosecution. Civil fleet vessels have been detained, sometimes for months at a time, and the organisations operating them fined tens of thousands of euros. These and other policy innovations at the EU and member state level have had the practical effect of fewer rescue boats operating in the Mediterranean.

Celebrating Alarm Phone’s 10-year anniversary is a sad reminder of the cruel consequences that EU migration policy causes to people on the move

At the same time, Europe’s de facto policy of non-assistance too often persists. In just one of many examples, in June 2023 a boat capsized near the Greek coast. Over 500 people perished. It emerged later that various European agencies were aware of the boat in distress for hours before it sank, but delayed their engagement until it was too late.

The only people to face trial over the incident were several asylum seekers who had survived the shipwreck, in a now-dismissed case. Many other people seeking shelter through similar routes have faced prosecution, as well as the groups working to support them.

European authorities have also been observed pushing people in distress away from their territory, contrary to their legal obligations. Maurice Stierl remembers the “Easter Massacre” of 2020 as a particular low point. Twelve people perished and 51 more were pulled back to Libya, allegedly at the behest of the Maltese authorities. The Greek authorities have been known to use blunter methods: simply pushing people out of boats and letting them drown.

At the EU level, the dominant policy strategy is to pay regimes such as those in Libya and Tunisia to prevent people leaving, with a blind eye to the violence used. There is also new legislation on the way threatening more prosecutions.

“I am concerned about the impact and risk of criminalisation for civil society that the new (legislation) will have, including on the work of humanitarian actors in the area like Alarm Phone,” said Saskia Bricmont, a member of the European parliament with the Greens/EFA bloc.

“While praising the important work of Alarm Phone, celebrating their 10-year anniversary is a sad reminder of the cruel consequences that European migration policy causes to people on the move," she said.

As well as running their hotline, Alarm Phone work to document what happens along Europe’s borders, including when European authorities ignore or fail to meet their responsibilities. The group regularly publishes accounts on social media, releases reports and takes part in commemorative events for the departed.

“We want to watch those who are controlling the borders,” said Stierl, “because they usually act with impunity and are totally unaccountable when boats are sinking or people are drowning. So we want to at least hold them to account.”

“EU states want to conceal what is happening in the Mediterranean,” said Laura Meschede, with the German NGO Sea-Watch. “Again and again, Italy and Malta ignore the calls for help from people in distress at sea. It would be convenient for them if nobody ever found out about them. Alarm Phone prevents that by always being reachable for the people in distress. In doing so, it is continuously resisting the EU states’ desire to let people drown quietly and secretly.”

Father Mussie Zerai, the Eritrean priest who inspired Alarm Phone, says he is happy to see how it has grown.

“They did an excellent job. I congratulate them for 10 years of service to humanity.”