Rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean
The History Hour
BBC
4.4 • 912 Ratings
🗓️ 16 November 2019
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2004, a German aid agency ship, Cap Anamur, was sailing to the Suez Canal, when it came across 37 Africans on a sinking rubber boat. The captain, Stefan Schmidt, rescued the men and headed for a port in Sicily to drop them off, but he and his crew were promptly arrested by the Italian authorities. Max Pearson finds out more about the incident and about the migration crisis that faced the European Union in later years.
Also this week, an eye-witness account of secret preparations by Hindu extremists to destroy the mosque in the Indian city of Ayodha in 1992; a grassroots struggle against pollution in America; and memories of the British war poet Wilfred Owen.
(Photo: the German aid agency ship Cap Anamur in 2004. Credit: Antonello NUSCA/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me |
| 0:04.6 | Max Pearson the past brought to life by those who were there |
| 0:08.3 | this week from the 1990s the destruction of the mosque in the Indian city of |
| 0:12.4 | Ayodia spur of the moment or pre-planned. |
| 0:17.0 | I was shocked. |
| 0:19.0 | People were there with all sorts of tools, iron rods, axes, spades, they look like professional demolition workers. |
| 0:25.8 | Also from the 1960s we meet the first Indian woman to win Miss World. |
| 0:30.4 | We'll hear how one American community took on corporate pollution. |
| 0:35.0 | I could see the chemicals in my backyard. |
| 0:37.0 | I could see this orange precipitate coming up. |
| 0:39.6 | I could smell the chemicals and yet we were not being evacuated and I mean it was scary. the a small dark little person very quiet a distinguished air about him even then. |
| 0:57.0 | But before all that an early warning from the past as to what has unfolded and continues to cause controversy in the Mediterranean Sea. |
| 1:05.0 | Right now there is reluctance on the part of countries on the north of the med to take in would-be migrants from the south. |
| 1:11.0 | Italy and Greece in particular, have found their resources stretched |
| 1:14.7 | and have sought to prevent rescue ships that have picked up stranded migrants from docking. |
| 1:19.2 | But this attitude is nothing new. |
| 1:21.6 | Back in 2004, an NGO ship on its way to deliver aid to Iraq picked up 37 Africans from a sinking |
| 1:28.9 | rubber dinghy, the events that subsequently unfolded made international headlines. |
| 1:33.3 | The ship's captain, Stefan Schmidt, has been talking to Alex last |
| 1:36.7 | about what happened to him and his ship, the Cup Anamore. |
| 1:49.6 | On a still summer day in June 2004 a ship was crossing the Mediterranean on its way to the Sioux is canal when the crew spotted something in the water. What happened next would lead |
| 1:55.3 | to a diplomatic incident that has echoes to this day. We just saw rubber boat with a few people in it and we first we thought it was some worker for an oil platform later it turned out to be just a nearly sinking rubber boat with 37 Africans on it. |
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