Unguided ships

The use of large, seagoing vessels as the “delivery vehicle” provided by people smugglers in the Eastern Mediterranean, sees this terrible trade enter a new dimension. The fact that these ships, laden with refugees and asylum seekers, are deserted while underway by their crews, leaving the vessel on auto-pilot, also shows a cruel carelessness about the lives of those who have embarked.

In some respect the wretched “passengers” are probably safer in that in both of these latest cases, diligent work by the Italian Coast Guard brought them safely to port. It took no little skill in getting aboard a rolling vessel in rough weather, but just suppose this had been impossible before the ship had crashed into a rocky coast?

Hundreds might have lost their lives as they fought to get up the hold ladders as the ship broke up. And what if this unguided missile had collided with another ship, whose bridge team was under the impression that they would be following the collision regulations?

There would appear to be no sign that the events that persuaded nearly 200,000 people in 2014 to take these risky routes into Europe and some sort of safety, are anywhere nearer resolution. Are we to look forward to more old ships making a landfall on southern Europe, as the people smugglers adopt a more ambitious business case? This is an international problem that demands international solutions if this grim trade in cargoes of desperate people is ever to be stopped.

It is one thing for people to be crammed onto crowded fishing boats, leaving from small harbours and open beaches. The use of sizeable short-sea ships, to put it charitably, in the autumn of their lives, would seem to suggest an altogether bigger operation, involving proper port facilities and arrangements for marshalling and boarding so many hundreds of people.

One might have thought that local police and coast guards might have been alerted by such activities in the place of departure. Or is the business rather better organised, with local law enforcement squared by the people smugglers, who clearly have the resources available to buy ships?

It is fairly certain that unless there is some major policy shift that enables the transport of these desperate people to be properly regulated, the people smugglers will continue to prosper. There is also no reason to suppose that the number of casualties – the poor people who don’t actually make it across the Mediterranean – will be any less in the coming year. It is also highly likely that commercial vessels will continue to find themselves involved in dramatic rescues on the high seas. But if we are going to see more incidents of several hundred poor souls crammed into elderly short sea ships “fired” off towards the coasts of Europe by unscrupulous criminals, it will require a very sharp lookout on any Mediterranean passage in the coming months.
Source: BIMCO