On the evening of May 22, 1988, a hundred and ten Vietnamese men, women, and children huddled aboard a leaky forty-five-foot junk bound for Malaysia. For the price of an ounce of gold each—the traffickers’ fee for orchestrating the escape—they became boat people, joining the million or so others who had taken their chances on the South China Sea to flee Vietnam after the Communist takeover. No one knows how many of them died, but estimates rose as high as one in three. The group on the junk were told that their voyage would take four or five days, but on the third day the engine quit working. For the next two weeks, they drifted, while dozens of ships passed them by. They ran out of food and potable water, and some of them died. Then an American warship appeared, the U.S.S. Dubuque, under the command of Captain Alexander Balian, who stopped to inspect the boat and to give its occupants tinned meat, water, and a map. The rations didn’t last long. The nearest land was the Philippines, more than two hundred miles away, and it took eighteen days to get there. By then, only fifty-two of the boat people were left alive to tell how they had made it—by eating their dead shipmates.
It was an extraordinary story, and it had an extraordinary consequence: Captain Balian, a much decorated Vietnam War veteran, was relieved of his command and court-martialled, for failing to offer adequate assistance to the passengers. The captain’s lawyer argued that Balian had been under urgent orders to deploy to the Persian Gulf—the Iran-Iraq War was at its climax—and he had to keep moving. But the military jury was unmoved. Balian had been in a position to save lives and he didn’t, and he was found guilty of dereliction of duty.
That judgment comes to mind with the reports of mass drownings in the Mediterranean, in what has been the deadliest season ever for boat people there; they are displaced Syrians and Eritreans, along with Somalians, Sudanese, Senegalese, Gambians, and other West Africans, who have fled war and persecution and privation to risk their lives on overcrowded, unseaworthy vessels, in the hope of finding refuge in Europe. Libya—parts of which are now under the control of isis—is the busiest launch point, and to get there most of the migrants have already undertaken a harrowing journey. Many have endured abduction, imprisonment, theft, molestation, and disease. Giving up a thousand dollars to a trafficker—a standard fee—and squeezing onto a boat that might sink may seem the least risky part of the endeavor. But, every year, people drown in the waters between Africa and Europe. And this year almost two thousand have died, including, last week, nearly eight hundred on one ship, which capsized and sank en route to Italy. Before that horrifying incident, this year’s death rate for Mediterranean boat people was ten times higher than it was for the same period a year ago. Now it’s thirty times higher, and that increase is attributable to Europe’s dereliction of duty.
Italy’s southernmost islands, Lampedusa and Sicily, are the obvious first ports of call. Before 2011, when the U.S.-led nato coalition helped to overthrow the Libyan dictator, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the Italian government had paid him billions of euros to secure his borders against such migration. But, once he was gone, and Libya fell into disarray, the boat people started going to sea. The deaths began to mount, and when, in October of 2013, some three hundred people drowned in a wreck off Lampedusa, Italy was spurred to spend nine million euros a month—and to deploy a good part of its Navy—on a humanitarian search-and-rescue mission called Mare Nostrum (Our Sea).
The results were immediate: after a year, a hundred and fifty thousand people had been rescued. Mare Nostrum had made crossing the Mediterranean safer—and easier. For that reason, late last year, the European Union called for an end to the mission. Britain’s Foreign Office minister, Joyce Anelay, explained that search and rescue creates “an unintended ‘pull factor,’ encouraging more migrants.” Mare Nostrum gave way to a “border protection” operation, with a monthly budget of only three million euros. At the same time, the burden of responding to people’s calls for help shifted to private and commercial ships, some of which simply turned off their radios, in order to evade the task.
Humans are land animals, and different countries have different laws about the obligation to rescue others on land. In the United States, there is effectively no obligation: if you come upon a person, or many people, in distress—marooned or battered, blistered or bleeding, hopeless or dying—in midtown Manhattan, or in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and you do nothing to help them, that doesn’t make you an outlaw, just reprehensible. But, if you have such an encounter at sea, international maritime law and custom require that you save everyone you can, at least until you can return them to shore. According to the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, the master of a ship, upon learning that “persons are in distress at sea,” is “bound to proceed with all speed to their assistance.” The International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue lays a similar obligation on “State Parties”—to “ensure that assistance be provided to any person in distress at sea . . . regardless of the nationality or status of such a person or the circumstances in which that person is found.”
Still, it took the recent mass drownings to get Europe’s leaders to reconsider their policy. At an emergency summit in Brussels last week, they agreed to reëstablish Mare Nostrum-style patrols at Mare Nostrum-level funding. But, with anti-immigrant sentiment running high across the Continent, they spoke more about tightening border controls and mounting a military campaign against traffickers. In other words, they seemed to be avoiding the fact that, as long as human beings are prepared to risk everything for a better life, there will be boat people, and that when dealing with them the law of the sea is the place to start: rescue first, then sort out the rest on land. When it comes to the drowned and the saved, we know dereliction and duty when we see it. ♦
