French sailor saves migrants adrift on Mediterranean

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“They come in waves,” Philippe Martinez says.

wpid-Forty20Migrants20Missing20After20Raft20Sinks20Near20Libya20-20Italy20Coast20Guard.jpg“You might not see any single migrant for 10 to 14 days, and then all of a sudden you see a whole bunch,” the French captain of an oil platform supply vessel tells dpa.

He’s speaking of the rickety boats, usually packed beyond capacity, with migrants that crossed his path in the Mediterranean Sea this summer.

Martinez has been acclaimed as a hero for intervening eight times to rescue hundreds of migrants from drowning.

They are people trying to flee war, persecution and poverty in Africa and the Middle East, their numbers rising every month, risking the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to Europe.

Martinez says he saved 1,840 migrants who had run out of food or fuel at sea, or, in one case, whose boat had begun taking in water.

The sinking ship stands out among the rest in terms of the scale of the tragedy averted. Two days after setting sail from Libya the 15-metre trawler, which was carrying 649 passengers, sprang a leak.

Martinez’ supply ship, The Leonard Tide, arrived at a calamitous scene.

“There were people everywhere, in the engine room, in the hold, on the bridge, the deck, even in the masts,” Martinez says by telephone from his home in the Breton port of Vannes.

“They had no water, and hadn’t eaten in two days,” he recalls.

“They had no safety jackets or life buoys. The heat was stifling. It must have been 38 degrees that day, but inside it was over 50 degrees.”

Martinez moored the listing boat to his and brought them aboard his ship.

Three people were found dead in the boat’s engine room. The remaining passengers, who were later brought ashore by an Italian patrol vessel, escaped uninjured.

Most were men, but the group also included close to 100 women, children and babies.

Among all the faces, one remains etched in his memory – that of an Iraqi Muslim woman, with twin teenage girls and two young boys in tow, whose husband had been killed by the Islamic State jihadist group.

“She was well-dressed with a lot of jewellery and the girls were wearing matching dresses. They seemed well educated and yet their lives had been turned upside down.”

With his black pirate-style bandana and ruddy features, Martinez is the archetype of the salty sea dog, who has seen plenty of misery on countless voyages.

This year has been the deadliest yet for the tens of thousands fleeing countries in Africa and the Middle East. The International Organization for Migration, which calls the Mediterranean the most deadly migrant route in the world, estimates that 3,072 people drowned there in the first nine months of 2014, compared to an annual average since 2000 of 1,500.

But far more were saved – mainly by Italy’s Mare Nostrum programme of sea patrols, but also Good Samaritan skippers such as Martinez.

Unlike many of his peers, Martinez refuses to give into the mix of indifference, fear and fatalism that leads many commercial vessels to sail past stricken migrant boats without stopping.

“Saving lives at sea is the duty of a sailor,” he says.

Not everyone agrees. While most of his neighbours in Vannes praise his actions, there are some who hold him in contempt.

“You think we don’t have enough Arabs and Africans? You should have left them there,” he quotes the naysayers as saying.

Still others argue that the rescues incentivize human smugglers to keep preying on vulnerable migrants.

For Martinez it’s a redundant argument.

“You cannot leave innocent people, women, children, babies to die. No, it’s just not possible.”

GNA

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