In August 2022, Jérôme Tubiana and Khaled Mattawa boarded the Geo Barents, a rescue vessel run by Doctors Without Borders, and participated in the rescue of migrants on the Mediterranean Sea.
They detailed their experiences through diary entries recently published in the New York Review of Books.
Along with describing the perilous journeys of the migrants that are rescued, Tubiana and Mattawa detail how the European Union is working with the Libyan Coast Guard to prevent the arrival of migrants to Europe.
“The EU perceives its policy in the Central Mediterranean as a success. Arrivals from Libya decreased from 165,000 in 2016 to seven thousand in 2019, and arrivals between 2017 and 2021 combined barely exceeded those of 2016 alone,” writes Tubiana in one of his diary entries. “On the other hand, the rate of migrants returned to Libya increased during the same period from 7 percent to nearly 50 percent. In the past decade, over 20,000 died in the Central Mediterranean.”
A number of the rescued migrants describe in detail being kidnapped, trafficked and held for ransom in Libya.
Click here for the New York Review of Books piece (requires subscription).
Mattawa teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is the editor of Michigan Quarterly Review.
Tubiana has advised Médecins Sans Frontières’s programs for migrants and refugees since 2018.
The Immigration and Refugee News Digest 