The SOS Mediterranean rescue boat accosted in a military port on Friday, November 11. The 230 people on board were placed in an international waiting zone.
by Gilles Rof (Marseille, correspondent)
A carmine shell that slides over a sea of oil in the early morning, escorted by military ships coming to meet offshore and overlooked by a helicopter of the maritime gendarmerie. This is the only vision that the French authorities left the arrival in the Rade de Toulon de l’Océan-Viking, rescue ship of the SOS Méditerranée association, Friday, November 11.
After three weeks of navigation in search of a reception port, the boat, its 230 survivors and its 32 crew members touched earth, in good custody, at 8:50 am. The gates of the military port of Toulon remained closed to the press, support associations for migrants, Red Cross and Civil Protection except, and even representatives of SOS Méditerranée, from their Marseille headquarters.
The latter could not find their teams only in the course of the day, after the landing of all the migrants rescued in various operations off the coast of Libya and Malta between October 22 and 26. A total of 173 adults, 13 accompanied minors and 44 unaccompanied minors who were led by bus to a holiday village of the Central Caisse d’Actifies Sociales in EDF, on the Giens peninsula, in the commune of Hyères (Var).
This site was transformed into an international waiting zone by a decree taken the day before by the prefect of the department, Evence Richard, and placed under close surveillance. It is there that the situations of people landed in the next twenty days will be estimated in the next twenty days and their admissibility in the right of asylum procedure. Friday, nearly 400 civil servants, including four mobile forces units, were mobilized by state services to secure the arrival of the Ocean-Viking and remove it from the eyes.
“twenty And one day, it’s a sad record “
The day before, the boat had entered seven in the morning in French surveillance, off Corsica. A choice of road decided by the SOS Méditerranée association, due to the degradation of the medical and psychological situation on board and the uncertainty to finally see Italy agree to welcome the boat. “We warned the medical authorities that we would ask for an evacuation of three people if no safe port was appointed to us at nine in the morning. Playing with the health of these people was unacceptable,” said Louise Guillaumat, deputy director of SOS operations Mediterranean.
On board, the medical team, made up of a doctor, two nurses and a midwife, then is alarmed by several cases. A fever that has remained for three weeks, without reaction to antibiotics, burns caused by exposure, before rescue, to a mixture of salt water and fuel oil, an injury that dates from the period of detention in Libya. Three critical cases which will ultimately be evacuated by helicopter to the Bastia hospital. A fourth person, member of the family of one of the wounded, will accompany the evacuated.
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