After studying politics, law and international relations, Quaden specialised in humanitarian aid in crisis areas such as Syria and Iraq. Although she has been involved in sea rescue on land for years and has seen many pictures of the missions, "but to find an inflatable boat like that in the big wide blue of the sea - that is moving. You look into these people's eyes and everything else suddenly loses its meaning," Quaden says, summing up the formative impressions.

At the beginning of March, the German rescue ship Sea-Eye 4 set off from the port of the Spanish municipality of Burriana towards the search and rescue zone in the central Mediterranean. Beforehand, the 25-member crew, consisting of navigators, medical staff, rescue coordinators, technicians and cooks - many of them volunteers - spent a week preparing for the mission.

"You keep a long lookout, waiting for small inflatable boats. But in the dark and with strong waves, you can hardly see the boats at short distance, even through binoculars," Quaden reports. Very few refugees have satellite phones with them that they can use to contact "Alarmphone", a hotline for boaters in distress. "They give their GPS data there and Alarmphone passes the message on to the nearest rescue ships." Another option, he said, is to locate boats through aerial observation by organisations such as Pilotes Volontaires.

Fishermen reporting inflatable boats to the emergency hotline is the rarity, as is the rescue of refugees by cargo ships, he said. "Many freighters steer clear of the dinghies so as not to pick up people," reports Quaden. During their mission, however, a special case occurred: A cargo ship with a Ukrainian captain decided to rescue 34 people from distress at sea and not to take them back to Libya, citing the Geneva Refugee Convention.

However, because the ship was heading towards the Libyan port city of Benghazi, the captain asked the shipping company to contact a rescue ship nearby. The Sea Eye 4, which was east of Tripoli at the time, made its way to the refugees. "People pay with their lives when they get on a boat like that," says Quaden. Using speedboats, the team brought the rescued to them. Many were hypothermic, seasick and traumatised by the flight.

"We were told that a boat with pregnant women and children had left Libya, and we set off," the sea rescuer recalls of another situation. Near Tripoli, the crew first found a grey inflatable boat with 74 young men on board. Some of them had to receive medical treatment in the on-board hospital. The refugees come from Egypt, Nigeria, Sudan, South Sudan and Syria.

"I speak very little Arabic, but I tried to respond to the needs of the people and provide them with blankets and food," said the sea rescuer. Among them, she said, were also unaccompanied minors, the youngest only 14 years old. While the crew cared for the rescued, the ship kept a lookout for more rubber dinghies.

Because no exact position of the boat with women and children was known, the team had to call off the search. "In the end, we decided to head north to a safe harbour with the 106 people we had on board in the meantime," Bonn reports.

Later, her crew learned that the boat they were looking for had been brought back illegally by the Libyan coast guard and had crashed, killing many people. A freighter picked up the survivors of another crashed boat nearby and brought them back to Libya as well. A total of 96 occupants from both inflatable boats drowned in the Mediterranean.

The Libyan coast guard is known to act inhumanely, Quaden points out. According to Amnesty International, parts of the coast guard work together with smugglers. Former prisoners of the detention centres in Libya report torture and forced labour. People are blackmailed and robbed.

Those who are "lucky" make it onto a rubber dinghy, the Bonn woman explains. It is a lucrative business for smugglers and coast guards: people are promised large boats, and they have to pay several thousand dollars for the crossing. At the port, they are then forced onto the small, cheap boats, sometimes at gunpoint, according to the sea rescuer.

According to EU law, coastal regions such as Malta or Sicily must offer safe harbours to rescue boats. "However, civilian rescue ships still have to wait for days for ports of disembarkation for people seeking protection from Africa or Asia," Sea-Eye criticises in its latest press report. Quaden has also experienced this: "The most beautiful moment was when on 6 April, after five days of stand off off the Sicilian port of Augusta, we were finally able to tell the people: 'We are allowed to dock!' - Even though I knew that immediately after their arrival in Europe the merciless mill of the EU asylum system would come crashing down on them.“

The events after their arrival in Sicily are particularly memorable for the Bonn woman: The refugees disembarked one by one, she says, where a number of uniformed police and Frontex staff wearing black military sunglasses awaited them alongside aid organisations. "The glasses are meant to avoid eye contact and create distance," says Quaden.

After a Corona test, he says, a forensic photographer took pictures of the people, each with a numbered tag in their hands. "After that, they were put on buses. Unaccompanied minors they took to a centre for children, the adults were put on a discarded ship."

Today, no one from Quaden's team knows what happens next for the people on land. That is why she would like to see more transparency and cooperation between those involved. "Sea rescue is the top class of emergency humanitarian aid. If the EU member states fulfilled their legal obligation, it would not have to be handled by non-governmental organisations, which usually work on a voluntary basis," says the aid worker from Bonn.

Quaden praises, "It's nice to see people in Europe showing solidarity with Ukraine." However, as a young man with a southern appearance, one has little chance of a fair asylum procedure, says the helper. The reason is racist tendencies in Europe. Opponents of refugees, some of whom threaten aid workers personally, are not uncommon.

We must not continue to look the other way; the "Mediterranean graveyard" is still a bitter reality, she warns. According to the international organisation for migration "Missing Migrants", 526 people lost their lives trying to cross the sea in 2022. In addition to donations for private sea rescue organisations, it is also important to exert political pressure to put an end to the deaths, emphasises Quaden.

Original text: Abir Kassis

Translation: Mareike Graepel