On November 20th 2021, members Utopia 56, a French association dedicated to providing support for migrants in difficulty, spent several hours exchanging, through phone text messages and calls, with a group of people in distress while attempting a clandestine crossing of the Channel from France to Britain.
The group had with them the phone numbers of maritime rescue services. “We’ve called all the numbers but they are not answering,” said a man on board the dinghy, cited in records of the exchanges seen by Mediapart. “I don’t understand what their problem is,” added the man.
“Stay calm, someone will come,” advised a Utopia 56 volunteer. “Call [emergency services number] 112 and we will call the French coast guard.”
Nikolaï (last name withheld), from Utopia 56, recalled the events, explaining that his association were able to get through to the French maritime surveillance and rescue centre, the CROSS, situated on the Channel coast at Gris-Nez, and which subsequently organised the rescue of the migrants. “But one can ask oneself what would have happened if that was not the case,” he said.
Just four days later, in the early hours of November 24th 2021, at least 27 people died while attempting the same crossing to Britain, after their inflatable dinghy sank into the icy Channel waters. The dead were men, women and children of various nationalities; Iraqi Kurds, Afghans, Ethiopians, an Iranian Kurd, a Somalian, an Egyptian and a Vietnamese. Their bodies were found in French waters by a fishing boat in the early afternoon.
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That tragedy led to the opening of a judicial investigation in France, which centred on the response that night of the CROSS maritime rescue centre at Gris-Nez, situated between Calais and Boulogne-sur-Mer, which is operated by French navy personnel. In November 2022, French daily Le Monde revealed the contents of a report by police, acting in the framework of the judicial investigation, which detailed how there was no attempt by the CROSS centre to organise the rescue of the migrants – despite repeated calls from the sinking dinghy over a three-hour period in the small hours of that November 24th.
Not only was a boat never sent to them, but the recordings of the conversations between the CROSS and the migrants show the latter were treated with disdain. In one extract, a female navy operator reacts to a call from a man from the sinking boat who explains the group were by then in the water, saying they were “finished” and begging for help, before the communication was lost. The CROSS operator then commented to a colleague: “Ah well, you can’t hear, you won’t be saved […] You’ve got your feet in the water? Well, I didn’t ask you to leave [for Britain].”
In May this year, five of the CROSS navy personnel – three women and two men – were officially placed under investigation for “failing to assist a person in danger”.
The revelation of the comments made by the CROSS operator dealing with the man in distress caused shock among the numerous associations that work with migrants on the French Channel coast, and also among maritime rescue services. Interpreted by some as inhuman, by others as the result of overwork and incompetence, the records of the events provided an illustration of the experiences of migrants taking to the sea.
Questioned by the judicial investigation, the operator said she had to decide between incidents of varying gravity, between an emergency or a distress. “For me, distress is when there is really a human life at risk,” she said, adding that some migrants at sea want “just to be accompanied to British waters”. She also spoke of the strains of unusual working hours, including night shifts, of “incessant” phone calls and not having the means of checking each phone number.
Following the November 2021 tragedy, two men involved in maritime rescues, one of them from the French lifeboat service, the Société nationale de sauvetage en mer (SNSM), agreed to be interviewed by Mediapart. Julien (not his real name), a volunteer with the SNSM, suggested that the operator's attitude could be a case of “people with less common sense, or who’ve decided to place themselves on one side and not the other”. He also suggested, “without minimising the incident”, that the CROSS staff were overworked. “The person was perhaps caught in the rush, or had already dealt with a certain number of calls,” he said. “They have to grade [incidents], there can be mistakes, but you don’t mess around with that.”
When weather conditions are fair on the Channel coast, normally a window lasting two or three days, the CROSS and maritime rescue services can be alerted to several hundred attempts at the clandestine crossings. To avoid being stopped beforehand by police patrols on the shoreline, the migrants are increasingly leaving from isolated spots, taking what Julien called “enormous risks”. He said the human traffickers, who the migrants pay for supplying the boats and equipment, try to load large numbers of people onto the dinghies. “It’s becoming more and more perilous,” he said.
“In normal conditions, we manage to carry out rescues because we have sufficient means,” he added. “But at one point, if we find ourselves in the rush with such [high] numbers to deal with, we can be there with our equipment and rescue techniques alright, but we can’t manage.” He recalled a rescue mission at the end of 2021, off the Côte d’Opale on the same stretch of Channel coast in north-east France, when several of his colleagues were dropped into the water to save the occupants of a rubber dinghy whose outboard motor had fallen off. The incident was reported at around 11 pm and the sea temperature was about 7 degrees Celsius.
The rescuers had reached the boat in around 30 minutes, and took the migrants off “in bundles of three” at a time. All aboard were saved, but Julien said it came close to being another disaster, and was only avoided thanks to the rescuers who swam through the chilling sea.
Most often, maritime rescue crews number six, and eight when possible, including a skipper, a mechanic and at least one swimmer/diver. “The day we came close to a catastrophe there were 11 of us,” he said of the incident at the end of 2021. But he said that sometimes the rescuers number only four.
Alain (not his real name), has been involved in maritime rescues in the Channel for the past five years. He said the zone they cover is “enormous”, and that there are some days when the crews do nothing other than put to sea. He spoke of the “human drama” they are faced with, and what he said were sometimes examples of “cynicism as much from the French authorities as that from the English authorities”.
He recalled an incident in September 2021 when 40 people were in an inflatable dinghy that was in danger of collapsing, amid thick fog. The rescuers went to their aide in two Zodiac craft, and “accompanied” the migrants’ dinghy into British waters. But it began to lose air.
The rescuers began taking the people off the boat one by one. “There was shouting in every direction, but we managed to calm them down,” he said. “One must above all not panic because we are the rescuers. Even more difficult, you have to recognise that it’s a mass rescue and that you can’t save everyone.” But that time they succeeded in getting everyone into their Zodiacs.
He also recalled another rescue mission, also involving around 40 migrants in trouble. When they arrived at the scene, some of the migrants were in the water, and several without life jackets. “We saved in priority those without jackets,” he said. “But the others had to wait for us to return because we hadn’t the space on our boat. By a stroke of luck, the SNSM picked them up in the meantime.” He added that the CROSS “really had the fear that there would be deaths”.
There is also danger that arises in incidents when there are discussions at sea about which country has the responsibility for saving people. Alain cited one case involving 26 people aboard a rubber dinghy that was losing air. “We told them to cut the engine and we picked them up. There was baby of only a few months old, it was an absolute emergency.” A British rescue boat was in the zone, but began turning back to port when it saw that the group had been rescued.
“The migrants began shouting because their dream had been shattered,” said Alain. “It was placing us in danger to calm them down and ensure that no-one jumped into the water out of despair.” After close to an hour of discussions between the CROSS and its British counterpart, the British boat returned to pick the group up. “More than 45 minutes on the high seas with a baby of a few months on board,” Alain underlined.
He wonders what became of the baby. He said he often thinks of the children he was involved in saving. Smiling, he brought up a photo on his mobile phone of a little girl saved from the waters.
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“We’re faced with dramatic situations,” Alain continued. “These people put themselves in danger because they have nothing left to lose, and they hang on to the crossing to continue to live, just to live.”
He insisted that he and his colleagues are given no “instructions” beforehand on the matter of distinguishing which side gets involved in a rescue according to whether it is in French or British waters: “We have never been told ‘if they’re in English waters don’t intervene’. November 24th [2021] was a failure and folk only talk of that but, all the same, there are people who take their job to heart, and put a lot into it.” He said that if there were a lot of boats that needed rescuing at one time, “everyone goes there, the French, the English, the Belgians”.
During rescue missions, the SNSM checks for obstacles that may surround the boat in trouble, like sand banks or very strong currents. “We approach the boat very gently, we evaluate the state of the people, their numbers, if there are children, if there are women, if they are pregnant,” explained Julien. He remembers rescuing a handicapped boy, who was soaked and had to be carried, a challenge given the heavy weight of the youngster. There was also a baby aged just a few weeks old, who was little bigger than the spread of Julien’s hands.
Often when the rescuers arrive, the people aboard the stricken boat suddenly stand up upon seeing them, causing the floor of the dinghy to crack “like a box filled with glass bottles”, sending them into the centre. Some of those who are rescued have been at sea for a couple of days, Julien said, “in shorts and with bare feet”, often exhausted.
The rescuers are affected by such experiences. They can find themselves at sea for eight hours in difficult weather conditions. “The aim is to rescue people alive,” added Julien. “But it can also happen that they are dead, and picking up a drowned person who has been in the water for three days is something else.”
He estimated that the number of rescue incidents in this part of the Channel, where the distance between France and Britain is at its shortest, has been multiplied tenfold over the past three years. Meanwhile, the numbers of migrants arriving at the English coast has soared over recent years, prompting announcements by the British government on hardening the conditions they are met with, including the until-now ill-fated project of sending asylum seekers to be processed in camps in Rwanda, and housing them on barges instead of hotels to reduce costs.
Julien believes that the French and British governments have become lost with their obsession about controlling migration movements. As illustrated by photos taken by journalists and holidaymakers, some French police officers arrived on the beaches to prevent the clandestine crossings, leading to tense scenes. As a result, and to avoid injuries or worse, they are now no longer authorised to intercept a dinghy once it has been placed in the sea.
Alain said that the tens of thousands of people rescued is “a miracle given the lack of means” to do so. He said that the SNSM volunteers are sometimes rewarded medals for their bravery, but their requests for the supply of adequate equipment to do their job continue to be ignored.
He said that nothing had changed following the tragedy of November 24th 2021. Julien warned: “The leaders are in offices, carrying out politics and business, while we are in the field and saving lives. If they give us boats which don’t match the task, we won’t succeed.”
Last Wednesday, two migrants died after their boat sank while attempting to cross the Channel from France to Britain.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse