Mayday: histories of maritime rescue and repulsion
The internationally recognised radio distress signal, ‘Mayday’, came into the English language in 1923 in response to increased air and naval traffic over the Channel. Replacing the S.O.S call, Mayday, the phonetic pronunciation of M’aidez, French for ‘Help me’, is recognised by seafarers today. ‘Mayday’ captures the moral and legal duty of ships to rescue a person or persons in danger at sea. Such obligations are enshrined in the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea and the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea. Yet despite this duty and language of rescue, the response to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) rescue operations in the Channel last week, namely the accusation that the RNLI was in some way assisting people trafficking, reveals how this international obligation has been vilified by politicians and tabloids, as well as defended and upheld. The RNLI has entered the spotlight because of a change in the legal language of the UK government's new Nationality and Borders Bill: a minor change which is set to have major consequences for search and rescue operations in the Channel. In short, the phrase 'for gain' has been removed from the stipulation that a criminal offence occurs when a person 'knowingly (and for gain) facilitates the arrival or attempted arrival in, or the entry or attempted entry into, the United Kingdom' of a potential asylum seeker. This leaves organisations such as the RNLI, who save the lives of people in the Channel 'knowingly' but not 'for gain', vulnerable to charges of facilitating 'illegal' entry into the UK—a crime which is set to carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. In this post, I highlight four past blogposts which engage with the politics of maritime rescue and repulsion.
In May, Imogen Dobie examined the proliferation of search and rescue organisations and challenged the rhetoric of crisis in which ‘search-and-rescue projects are recent, risky ventures that represent an “unprecedented” response to “unprecedented” migratory flows’. Instead, her post argues that maritime rescuers make use of history to legitimise their work and to present it as an ‘act of established routine’. Dobie highlights how the founders of SOS Méditerranée have, like the RNLI, had to confront accusations of facilitating illegal immigration as EU member states moved to ‘delegitimise and criminalise’ search and rescue operations. Both organisations rebutted these accusations in ways which resonated with each other. Last week, the RNLI’s statement on its humanitarian work in the Channel appealed to the organisation’s history of coming to the ‘aid of anyone who is in trouble in or around the water... We have done this since the RNLI was founded in 1824’. This echoed the response of SOS Méditerranée’s co-founder Klaus Vogel, who turned to the 1800s and the creation of European states’ lifesaving societies, including the RNLI, following shipwrecks and loss of life during the ‘mass emigration of Europeans to America and Africa’. This tactical and deliberate use of history as an ‘escape-route’ is more than a mere rhetorical tool: it reflects the politically hostile environment in which search and rescue operates.
Katy Budge’s 2018 post probes this wider context by taking the ship Aquarius, the joint venture of MSF and SOS Méditerranée, as its departure point. In June of that year the Aquarius found itself in the media limelight as Matteo Salvini announced he was ‘shutting the ports’. After three days at sea, the Spanish government invited the ship to disembark in Valencia. As Budge argues, the episode illustrated the ‘impotence of the international law on rescue at sea in the face of politicking by national governments’. It also highlighted the paradox that while seafarers have a legal (and moral) obligation to assist those in distress, there is no such legal imposition on states to permit disembarkations.
The recent attack on the RNLI repeats last summer’s media panic about migrant boats in the English Channel. In her post, Becky Taylor grappled with the UK’s ‘well-established tradition of repelling refugees’. In 1938 Jewish refugees and political dissidents fleeing Germany and Austria ‘[paid] to cross the Channel in motorboats’. British newspapers fanned the flames of hostility, decrying the ‘pouring’ in of ‘stateless Jews’ into the country. At state level, deportations were ordered for those who landed ‘illegally’. Those who assisted were also punished: two foreign seamen received three-month prison sentences for bringing ashore a German Jewish refugee. Here we can locate the historical roots of the criminalisation of solidarity—which, as Budge’s post pointed out, has resulted in distress calls being ignored not only by maritime authorities, but also by commercial vessels owing to the risk of persecution and the costs of delay.
It is within this vacuum of non-response to distress signals that we can situate the actions of non-state actors. Dobie, Budge and my own post share the exodus of Vietnamese ‘boat people’, beginning in 1975, as a point of historical reference. Budge draws attention to May 1979 and the rescue of 1003 people from the South China Sea by the UK-flagged cargo ship the Sibonga, which for two weeks was refused entry into Hong Kong (at the time under British rule). This episode also concerns the history of humanitarian actors. As Dobie points out, SOS Méditerranée made use of the example of German and French NGOs who assisted Vietnamese ‘boat people’ to strategically defend its own actions by appealing to historical precedence. This very precedence took the form of MSF’s campaign un bateau pour le Vietnam (‘a boat for Vietnam’) and the launch of its ship L’Ile de Lumière in April 1979. Despite the favourable reception among French media outlets and political circles, the project drew criticism from within its own ranks: MSF’s vice-president lamented the exploitation of the ‘misfortune’ of the Vietnamese by ‘a handful of Parisian intellectuals’. Such critique serves as a reminder than beneath the veneer of neutrality, humanitarianism is imbued by its socio-political context. This rings true today with the RNLI fending off accusations of ‘non-neutrality’ by defending the organisation’s ‘humanitarian work of the highest order.’
Adopting Karen Akoka and Aubépine Dahan’s analysis of evictions of camps in Northern France, maritime rescues and pushbacks can be framed as sites of ‘spectacle’. On the one hand, the spectacle is perpetuated by a hysterical press and state rhetoric promising tough action (set against the distorted narrative of a ‘tradition of welcome’; on the other, by an expanded non-state search and rescue response, which has been obliged to appeal to history to defend and legitimise its actions in the face of state hostility. Yet within this staging we risk obscuring its principal actors, refugees and asylum seekers, described variously as ‘rescuees’ or ‘expellees’, and at times as both.
This web of power relations, and the use of historical truths and distortions in the context of forced migration, merits further attention. As the UK government’s Borders Bill passes through parliament, Refugee History is seeking to explore histories of non-state responses—look out for our forthcoming call for submissions.
The header image shows an RNLI lifeboat with several recently rescued people aboard (their faces are blurred). Source: RNLI, via this BBC News story.
With thanks to Hari Reed for selecting these posts from the Refugee History archive, and to the authors for their engagement with these overlapping themes.
