Quelle: The Guardian

Ten times as many refugees have arrived in Europe by boat so far this month as in the whole of last January. Patrick Kingsley talks to some of the arrivals on the Greek island of Agathonisi and observes the rescue of a sinking dinghy

“Help,” shouts Ahmed, a Syrian doctor. He stands up in his inflatable dinghy, surrounded by 39 other refugees, and calls out to an approaching rescue boat. “We are sinking.”

A few metres away, bursting from the dark cockpit of the orange rescue launch, captain John Hamilton at first hopes that Ahmed is exaggerating.

Ahmed’s rubber dinghy is clearly deflating, but it bobs only a few hundred metres from the crags of the Greek coastline, and at first glance it still looks stable. In this situation Hamilton, a former officer in the Maltese navy, would usually aim to escort the leaking boat to land. Attempting an immediate rescue would risk a capsize in open water, making the situation worse.

“Can you follow us?” Hamilton shouts, emerging into crisp sunshine on the Aegean Sea. “You can go slowly.”

“I can’t, I can’t,” replies Ahmed, who barely needs to raise his voice, so close are the two vessels by now. “The air is going. There is water on board.”

This much is now apparent to Hamilton, who finally has a clear view of Ahmed’s boat. The dinghy is deflating far more quickly than he thought. Its tiller does not respond to the struggles of its pilot, a young medical student with no prior nautical experience. With waves swelling as high as a metre and a half, water laps over the tubes of the boat’s sagging sides. The rescuers have only a few minutes to get the refugees into their own cramped vessel.

So Hamilton changes his plan and turns to one of his three crewmates. “Throw them a rope,” he says, with new urgency in his voice. All 40 Syrians, including a dozen children, could soon be in the turbulent water.

Even in the depths of winter, this desperate scene is still a daily phenomenon in the few miles that separate the Turkish coast from Greece’s easternmost islands. Last year an unprecedented 850,000 asylum seekers risked this dangerous route, but only 1,694 did so in January 2015. A year on, the monthly total is already more than 10 times higher, less than halfway through January.

Already around 40 people have drowned in these straits this year. The first of them died just off this tiny island of Agathonisi, one of the furthest from the Turkish coast and from a working coastguard boat, and therefore one of the deadliest destinations for refugees.

It’s for this reason that in recent weeks John Hamilton and his colleagues have relocated to these waters. They work for Migrant Offshore Aid Station (Moas), a charity founded in 2014 by two Italian-American entrepreneurs, Chris and Regina Catrambone. For two years they have been based in the southern Mediterranean, saving the lives of people being smuggled from Libya to Italy.

Shortly before Christmas they relocated to this remote part of the Aegean. Invited by the Greek coastguard, they parked a huge mothership off Agathonisi and began patrolling its stormy waters with two speedboats named after Alan and Ghalib Kurdi, the two Syrian toddlers whose deaths prompted global outrage in early September.

“People aren’t stopping, that’s very clear,” says Chris Catrambone by phone from south-east Asia, where he is organising Moas’s next project, the rescue of drowning Rohingya refugees. “They’re not slowing down, and people are dying. And it’s our collective responsibility to not allow two-month-old children to be floating on the sea and washing up on the beach.”

The absence of a slowdown comes as a surprise to many. Europe has become even frostier towards Syrians, especially in the aftermath of the Paris atrocity and the attacks on women in Cologne. Yet Syrians arriving on Agathonisi on this day say they are fully aware that they face increasing hostility.

Historically, refugee flows to Europe have ebbed substantially over the winter, when storms make the journey far riskier. Yet still they come in all weathers, with Moas conducting rescues this week in both calm waters and decidedly stormier ones.

To explain why, Mahmoud Obed, a 27-year-old Syrian metal worker newly arrived on Agathonisi, takes out his mobile phone. He flicks through his pictures until he finds one of a destroyed house. This was his home, he says, bombed a fortnight ago by pilots from Russia, which has allied with the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad. Next, Obed scrolls to a second photograph of rubble, the homes of his four neighbours.

“I left because of the Russian bombs,” says Obed. “Every day they are bombing. Russia says they are attacking Daesh but we are civilians. And they are liars.”

Not everyone landing on the Greek islands is Syrian. Roughly one in four are fleeing war, extremism and poverty in Afghanistan, and one in 10 are from Iraq. A smaller minority are thought to be jobseekers from countries such as Morocco and Algeria. The majority, though, are from Syria. This month, 57% of arrivals to Greece have documents that say they are Syrian, though not all of them will be genuine.

Some of the Syrians, like Obed, have come straight from their homeland. Others fled the war at an earlier stage and are on the move again because no Middle Eastern country will give them the rights they are legally due as refugees.

Tuzar Masaoud, a 31-year-old mechanic who has reached Agathonisi with his wife and one-year-old son, says they spent three years in Jordan, where more than 600,000 Syrian refugees do not have the right to work, in contravention of the 1951 UN refugee convention.

For a while, Masaoud could weather this limbo. He worked illegally painting cars, and his pitiful salary, topped up with UN subsidies, was just enough to live on. A year ago, the UN nearly halved their support, but still Masaoud ploughed on in the belief that the UN might formally resettle him in the west if he was patient enough.

Yet Masaoud’s story ultimately shows why the west’s failure to formally resettle significant numbers of Syrians has helped accelerate the migration to Europe rather than prevent it. “The UN said wait, wait, wait – it might take three, four, five years,” sighs Masaoud, his tracksuit still wet from the sea. “And we can’t wait that long. In Jordan you can’t live.”

So Masaoud gave up on Jordan, and on Syria. Most importantly, he gave up on the UN’s resettlement scheme, realising that Europe would never welcome him voluntarily, and he decided to force Europe’s hand by sailing here to Agathonisi. Under the 1951 convention, now that he has arrived there is little that Europe can do to send him back.

On waters a mile to the south, another group of Syrians are following in Masaoud’s wake – but face a fate far worse. This is Ahmed’s boat of 40 Syrians, air hissing from its deflating tubes.

To die so close to Europe would be the cruellest end, given all they’ve had to overcome to get here. Ahmed was tortured in the war, his wife and children killed. Beside him, Mohamed Hanan, a Kurdish tailor travelling with three young children, fled the advance of Isis. Then they risked the gauntlet of the now-shut Turkish border, braving the bullets and rifle butts of Turkish border guards.

In Turkey, 15-year-old Mohamed Hajy worked in a sweatshop to earn money for the crossing. Once they all finally left Turkey four and a half hours ago, they were intercepted by Turkish coastguards, who only agreed to turn a blind eye after a half-hour impasse on the high seas. Now, as the boat begins to sink, these varied traumas might all have been in vain.

But not if Moas can help it. Hamilton’s crew fling two ropes to either end of the stricken dinghy and use them to pull the two boats side by side. Time is running out. At the back of the boat, rescue swimmer Ripley Davenport begins to haul the children off the raft. First comes Mohamed Hanan’s youngest, eight-year-old Aref, and then his elder two, Abdelrahman and Amina. At the other end, a baby is passed to Ivan, another Moas sailor whose surname has been withheld, followed by some of the other children and women.

The most vulnerable now safe, pandemonium ensues, with Hamilton, Davenport and Ivan hauling in everyone whose limbs they can reach. Inside, the driver Mimmo Vella jockeys furiously with the steering wheel in his left hand and four engine levers in his right. Vella has to keep the two boats side by side while blocking the heaving surf with the hull of the launch. Watching the scene from the darkened cockpit as refugees pile in beside him, Vella begins to well up.

Outside it is a blurry chaos. Little Aref Hanan gets flattened underneath a scrum of bodies, until a passenger drags him out of the crush and into the cabin. There he vomits, as his sister Amina looks on in a daze and brother Abdelrahman calls for his father. The boats roll up and down, side to side. At one point Davenport becomes a kind of human gangplank, falling backwards to allow a survivor to crawl across him to safety.

One by one this jumbled mass of humans is being hauled inside the launch, a young woman spreadeagled here, an old man tumbling there. It is the definition of desperation, a screaming melee – until suddenly, after four minutes of carnage, the shouting stops.

The floppy dinghy lies limp on the water, empty. The orange speedboat sways gently next to it, full. All 40 people have been saved.

The silence of relief hangs across the now-crammed cabin. Vella starts up the engine again, and the boat thrums once more towards the little port of Agathonisi. On the steep slopes that line the bay, wild goats munch obliviously on the grass of the hillsides. Inside the launch, the rescuers and the rescued quietly digest the wonder of what has just happened. The indignity of a refugee’s life will begin again as soon as the survivors are handed over to the local authorities. For now, though, they can all reflect on the joy of being alive.

Hanan, the Kurdish tailor, gazes at his three children. They sit exhausted just inside the cockpit while he leans on the doorframe.

“Thank you,” he says to a nearby crew member, and he begins to cry.