
Europe is bankrolling African migrants, The adventure of the Geo Barents turned into a long, stressful stand-off punctuated with the aid of using moments of frantic effort. For weeks the ship, operated with the aid of using Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), a French-based clinical charity, bobbed in global waters off Libya’s Mediterranean coast. Its team watched for boats complete of migrants—as did patrols run with the aid of using Libya’s coastguard, which has threatened aid-people who try and degree rescues. From time to time, the radio might crackle with warnings. “You ought to sail far from this zone,” coastguard officers might say. “Otherwise immigrants will see you and sail toward you.”
When they noticed a migrant boat, each event might rush to attain it first. For some days, the Libyans received the race. With the assistance of drones and manned planes circling overhead, the coastguard stuck 4 rafts wearing migrants. After a week, though, the MSF team picked off one boat after another. Soon greater than three hundred migrants occupied each inch of the ship`s decks: Senegalese, Sudanese, Syrians—many with horror tales in their time in Libya, which they shared with the Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-earnings journalism company with which The Economist collaborated in this story.
