11 October 2024
„…We have built a transnational and multilingual collective that is committed to stay at the side of people who enact their right to move…“
To mark the 10th anniversary of its foundation, the Alarm Phone will organise in October 2024 an assembly and public activities in the city of its southernmost member group: in Dakar in Senegal. In the weeks that follow, public events will be organised also in several cities in the north. Alarm Phone will also publish a 10 years booklet, from which we document here the introductional text:
“The Alarm Phone turns ten years old. For 3,650 days and nights, we have been on shift. During these shifts, we were alerted to over 8,000 boats from all corners of the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic region or the English Channel, directly by the travelers or their relatives and friends. This means, on average, at least two distress cases reached us every single day over the past ten years. Some days we were on stand-by, with no call coming in. On other days, twenty or more boats called us from the sea.
When the idea for the Alarm Phone was born after the shipwreck of 11 October 2013, and when we launched it after extensive preparations a year later, nobody could have imagined such scale and intensity of need and engagement.
During our shifts, we witness time and again how voices on the other side of the phone line become desperate and panicked, or how they fall silent and the contact breaks. We experience nearly daily how relatives contact us, asking us about boats that have disappeared. Over the past ten years, death at sea has become our companion. Many times, facing such cruelty by the murderous border regime, we feel helpless anger.
At the same time, we realise again and again how we can often accompany boats and empower autonomous landings in Europe. Days and nights of communication with the people on board, in various languages, ultimately leading to their safe arrival. Or, in other cases, how receiving information from the boats in distress, and forwarding it to the civil fleet, can contribute in decisive ways to successful rescues.
Over the years, our activist hotline has grown. By now, we are more than 300 activists, and our network is composed of a very diverse noborder crowd. Our members have various backgrounds and face different living conditions and realities. We live in dozens of places all over Europe as well as North- and West-Africa. We have built a transnational and multilingual collective that is committed to stay at the side of people who enact their right to move.
Some have left our network. Many could no longer stand repeatedly experiencing traumatic situations during shift work and decided it was time to leave. Others have taken a break and then returned. While we have thus faced continuous fluctuations in our network, we have nonetheless grown and consolidated over time.
The Alarm Phone learns from direct experiences of crossing the sea and subverting borders by some of our members or our friends. Due to our relationships with members of communities on the move, we also learn from their lived experiences and struggles, as well as their tenacity to overcome violent borders in the search for a better life. We thus, first and foremost, want to thank those who move determinedly across borders for your trust when reaching out to us via the phone.
We know that we have become, and will continue to be, a disruptive force, challenging the inhumane border regime. We have pushed authorities into unwanted rescue activities, when they would have chosen to leave people to die. Our disruption has become amplified through the many collaborations we engage in, with other noborder activists, NGOs operating at sea and on land, with lawyers, journalists, some compassionate politicians even. Collectively, we try to prevent every illegal pushback and seek to make every person in distress count.
Currently, we face a harshening wave of racism, authoritarianism and inhumanity – all over Europe as well as in North Africa and elsewhere. We have to fear that the border regime will become even more brutal in the years to come. We can only struggle on in a broad alliance of progressive forces. Thus, our second ‘thank you’ goes out to all networks and actors with whom we have cooperated over the past decade. All those who are part of the civil fleet, who send rescue ships and airplanes to find people in distress, and all others with whom we share the fight for safe passage and global justice.
For our tenth anniversary, we publish this book, which is the fifth of its kind. In it, we share articles, analyses, interviews, and poems. We offer an account of how the Alarm Phone started and how it developed. We highlight the struggles against criminalization and the struggles for memory in the form of CommemorActions, alongside families and friends of the missing. We present sister projects of our network and show maps, graphics, and photos. Together, these fragments speak for our common perspective: We will continue with our solidarity on the routes and build and extend infrastructures for freedom of movement.
Never forget, never give up! This is and will remain our motto in our struggle for freedom of movement and equal rights for everybody. We will not give up the hope for a future, in which our archive of violence against people on the move will serve as the basis for a systematic interrogation and condemnation of state crimes against humanity, as the basis for demands of accountability and compensation.
As Alarm Phone, we will move on in contested spaces and we will follow the tenacity of people on the move as a transnational nodal point of a network that undermines and overcomes a racist and exploitative system of global segregation. No border lasts forever. Solidarity will win!
Booklet – https://alarmphone.org/en/campaigns/ten-years-alarm-phone/
