Free the rescue ships or send our own

For yet another day the Sea-Watch 3 and the Lifeline NGO migrant rescue vessels remained stuck in port in Malta and unable to render their life-saving operations after the Maltese government forbade them exit from its territorial waters. The government even upped the ante yesterday and blocked a plane operated jointly by Sea-Watch and Swiss Humanitarian Pilots, and which has been instrumental in the rescue of 20,000 people over its lifetime. In so doing, the NGO charged yesterday, the message was that ‘witnesses are obviously not welcome’ to observe what is happening out there in the great blue expanse of Malta’s patch of the sea. The NGO also observed that the central Mediterranean is facing ‘the deadliest days since records started’ being kept.

This situation is so unacceptable on so many levels, actually on every level save for the Matteo Salvini doldrums, a place that we as a nation do not want to even visit let alone exist within. The Italian and now the Maltese, governments are blocking private rescue boats they blame for encouraging human traffickers to launch unseaworthy boats loaded with migrants toward Europe. NGOs, however, deny having any link to smugglers in Libya or elsewhere, and say

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they are being forced to leave unattended the busy migrant sea transit route where deaths are mounting.

But it all ‘started’ out so well and, after more than a little posturing, Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat struck a rather singular and promising one-off agreement for different countries to take varying numbers of the Lifeline’s 200 plus migrants.

But then we go and arraign the ship’s captain on what appear to many as trumped up charges of his vessel having been unregistered. We should at least be thankful for small mercies in that the authorities did not go the whole hog and charge him with human trafficking.

Over the recent Lifeline crisis, Muscat managed to broker what was previously unthinkable: burden sharing, albeit on a small scale, dealing specifically with the arrivals of the Lifeline’s migrants who no one was ready to accept.

Muscat managed to strike that one-off deal to share the onus of taking in the Lifeline’s migrants. But, so far, seven member states plus Norway have answered that call: Luxembourg, Italy, France, Ireland, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands. These nine countries deserve commendation for soundness of their moral compass, compassion and good humanitarian sense.

But here we are now in a state of brinksmanship against humanitarian NGOs. This is really the pits. The government may be correct from a legalistic viewpoint, and we are not even so sure about this, to hold the ships in port. But from every other angle this looks awful, simply atrocious. This is, in fact, the stuff that country naming and shaming and boycotts are made of.

Now if Malta is to keep these two ships in port, impounded for all intents and purposes, the least it could do would be to offset their search and rescue absence by sending out a couple of our own patrol boats to cover their beat. That way some of the slack could be picked up while Malta figures out what to do with the rescue vessels. And if we were to intervene in a rescue or two in the meantime, it would all be in the interest of good public relations.

But it seems we are failing miserably on the PR front when we allow virtually anyone with a million euros and a passing interest in the country to have citizenship, while we let the downtrodden die seeking safety as we arraign captains and block ships that would otherwise seek to save people drowning in our backyard.

If there was ever a case of pretzel logic, this certainly is one.