I feel I have lived that same Easter weekend many years now: boats in distress and not enough help at all, while technically help is available.
Right now, not a single rescue ship bc of Covid-19. Refugees still flee the civil war and that won't stop. /1
Right now, not a single rescue ship bc of Covid-19. Refugees still flee the civil war and that won't stop. /1
https://twitter.com/alarm_phone/status/1248850014711013377
Apart from rescue capacity we also lack the possibility to see and report what is going on in the Med. This week a Maltese gov vessel refused to rescue and destroyed the engine of a rubber boat as reported in a call to Alarm Phone. /2
What worries me at large is that authorities use the health crisis as an argument to prevent rescue vessels to go out at sea or find safe ports. Even though Libya now declared it's ports unsafe due to war activities and shelling. /3
European authorities must be willing and able to deal with several crises at the same time: apart from a health crisis we still have wars and conflicts, CO2 concentration reached 418 ppm, biodiversity in decline. /4
What stands in the way is a global crisis of inequality and a crisis of power distribution which actively prevents any solution to these solvable problems. It's not that EU authorities don't understand these problems, they do not want to solve them. /5
And I do not want to play down the tremendous crisis which Covid-19 is and will be in the next months. I am deeply sorry for the huge personal loss of so many lives and I am appalled by the lack of solidarity within the EU, particularly by German and Dutch governments.
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