Rescue trauma haunts Med migrant rescuers

ON BOARD THE OCEAN VIKING: From one operation to the next, it is not the people who are saved but the ones they can do nothing to help who leave the worst mental scars on migrant rescuers in the Mediterranean.

“There is always the one that could not be saved,” says Marie Rajablat, a psychiatric nurse who works with the oten young crews on board charity search and rescue ships.

To help prepare them for the trauma ahead, the crew of the Ocean Viking, which set off from France on Sunday, was given psychological counselling and support.

The vessel, jointly run by the humanitarian groups SOS Mediterranee and Doctors Without Borders (MSF), is on its way to international waters off Libya from where migrants set off in oten dangerous, rickety boats hoping to get to Europe.

From January to July this year, nearly 700 people died while trying to cross the Mediterranean, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Rajablat recalls an incident in January 2018 when a migrant boat sank, throwing about 70 people into the sea, including several babies who were near death.

The victims were plucked from the water to the deck of the charities’ first search and rescue vessel, the Aquarius, where medical teams batled to bring each one back to life with CPR.

“The sailors were traumatised by the fear of not geting them all out (of the water) -- in fact, they saved everyone,” said Rajablat, who spent six weeks on the ship and wrote about her experiences in her book, “The Shipwrecks of Hell”.

The Aquarius saved 30,000 lives during its near three years of operations.

Rajablat built up her experience in that time and slowly put together a team of about 15 people whose job it is to help prepare others like the crew on the Ocean Viking.

Three psychologists in their 60s were in Marseille in the south of France for the first-ever obligatory briefing before the Ocean Viking set off.

At first, the crew members in their early- to mid-30s, “were a litle bit suspicious,” said psychiatrist Marie Lepine.