Prospect | 20.03.2018
Across Europe’s seas, anti-immigrant strategies have found a new target: the rescuers
by Daniel Howden
It was the Ark Explorer’s low “freeboard,” the distance between the ship’s deck and the waterline, that saved the rusted, ageing trawler from the wrecker’s yard. The Ark’s low clearance had helped fishermen haul netfuls of cod and herring out of the freezing North Sea for half a century. It also looked about right for fishing refugees out of the Mediterranean.
In May 2016, the Dutch-flagged 158-tonner was bought by a collective of German political activists called Jugend Rettet (“Youth Rescue”), who wanted to save lives and protest Europe’s migration policies in the Central Mediterranean. Refitted and rechristened the Iuventa, the old trawler and its young crew went on to rescue more than 14,000 people over the following 14 months, taking most of them ashore in Italy.
Together with professional search and rescue operatives and doctors from charities such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the mounting death toll in the Mediterranean has drawn a new generation of activists away from anti-globalisation protests and on to the high seas. Among them was Julian Koeberer, a bearded, well-mannered film student from Frankfurt, who set off to shoot a film about refugees for a film school diploma and found himself drawn to volunteer on the Greek island of Lesbos in 2015.