Call for Donations for the Watch The Med Alarm Phone
4th
of May 2015, Watch The Med Alarm Phone
An emergency
hotline offers support to refugees and migrants in distress at sea
for more than six months now. The project documents SOS calls and
seeks to immediately build up pressure on responsible authorities to
conduct rescue operations, wherever possible.
12th of
April 2015: The first emergency call from the Central Mediterranean
Sea reaches the Alarm Phone at 7:40am. By the late afternoon the
shift teams are in contact via satellite phones with refugees on nine
vessels. GPS data is received, updated and forwarded to coastguards.
Remaining in contact with the passengers is crucial: our teams
frequently pass on information, calm down and encourage them. Most
importantly, our teams repeatedly call the coastguards and build up
pressure until rescue operations are confirmed. On this day, these
practices succeed with regards to all nine vessels. A case on such
large scale has not been experienced before by this transnational
solidarity project.
The Alarm Phone is available already
since October 2014. Since then, about 100 volunteering activists
organise their phone shifts through a self-organised call centre.
They are based in Europe and North Africa and most of them have been
politically engaged for many years along the external borders of the
EU. They have trained with handbooks, have practiced with
inter-active geographical maps and have devised emergency plans.
Throughout the winter period there was, on average, one serious case
per week, and distress calls were received from the Western
Mediterranean Sea as well as the Aegean Sea. In the past few weeks,
the number of calls has surged.
In Morocco, overcoming
the border fences to the Spanish enclaves is becoming increasingly
difficult, also now that push-backs have been legalised. Here, too,
more and more people will get onto boats to reach Spain. Currently,
hundreds of refugees seek to reach Greek islands from Turkey on a
daily basis. For years, the Greek coastguard is known for illegal
‘push-backs’: refugee vessels are systematically towed back to
Turkish waters. The new Syriza government has apparently instructed
to cease these human rights violations. The Alarm Phone hotline is
all the more important if coastguards do not adhere to these
instructions.
The EU border regime has caused more than
1700 casualties in 2015 so far, mostly in the Central Mediterranean
Sea, not least since sea rescue operations were systematically
reduced due to pressures of Western European governments. Without
fundamental changes one can expect that many more will follow. The
responsible politicians stick to their brutal policies of deterrence
and seek to further externalise migration controls to countries of
transit. In opposition, the Alarm Phone demands safe and legal
possibilities of entry and requests ‘ferries not Frontex’ in
order to end the dying at sea. At the same time, there is an urgent
need for everyday support with interventions in real-time if
boat-refugees enter situations of distress at sea.
In
order to continue with our work, the Alarm Phone project requires
further support in order to:
- run the hotline, to reach out
to the satellite phones of boat-people and to charge these phones
online with credit;
- spread the emergency number via visiting
cards in various languages in migrant communities;
- distribute
leaflets with information about risks at sea;
- create materials
for campaigns against Frontex and the border regime;
- undertake
networking and research trips to the different transit regions.
We
therefore ask you for donations that are tax deductible.
You
can find the Alarm Phone‘s frequently updated reports
here:
http://watchthemed.net/
For more information and
materials:
http://www.watchthemed.net/index.php/page/index/12
http://alarmphone.org
Contact:
wtm-alarm-phone@antira.info
Account for
Donations:
Forschungsgesellschaft Flucht & Migration
Sparkasse
der Stadt Berlin
Account Number: 61 00 24 264
Bank code: 100
500 00
IBAN: DE68 10050000 0610024264
BIC: BELADEBEXXX
Keyword:
WatchTheMed-AP
Last update: 12:08 May 17, 2015