Every year thousands of immigrants or refugees leave their homelands and travel many miles by sea in an attempt to find better living and work conditions or seeking international protection against threats to their life. These desperate people very often risk their lives using overcrowded, old and decrepit vessels as they try to reach to their destination (in most of cases are the Southern European countries). Many of them do not manage to reach their final destination as accidents are common and many lives are lost at sea. 

The purpose of this article is to highlight the problem caused from the illegal movement of migrants and refugees via sea and to focus to the effects it has on merchant shipping and yachts sailing in the Mediterranean Sea.

By Dimitris Raftogiannis

The fight against ISIS in Syria and Iraq is continuing resulting in big loses for the terrorist organization. It loses territory, strongholds and hundreds of its fighters. The fight for Mosul is over with ISIS forces suffering heavy casualties. At the same time the offensive against Raqqa, its capital city, continues. The loss of Raqqa to alliance forces will be a major blow to likely determine the future of the so called caliphate. The caliphate is being crushed but its collapse will have serious consequences for the West as its fighters will travel to western countries as well as unstable regions to continue jihad one way or another.

Some months ago the former FBI Director James Comey acknowledged “the caliphate will be crushed…” and the result “will be a terrorist diaspora sometime in the next two to five years like we’ve never seen before.”

Maritime Security is a quite complex goal to achieve, due to the variety of threats and challenges it entails. At the high end of the spectrum of these challenges we can find the ‘traditional’ interstate disputes, mainly focused on the threat or the actual use of force against sovereign entities. The aforementioned threat of use of force is mostly linked to the external aggression due to maritime disputes, threats to States’ sovereign rights or generalized armed conflicts, with the case of South China Sea being the most indicative contemporary example. The low end of the spectrum has to do more with law enforcement and transnational, cross-border maritime crimes and it involves mostly non-state rather than state actors. According to the UN1 definition, these threats include illegal fishing, deliberate damage to the environment, trafficking related crimes by sea, piracy and armed robbery at sea, and finally maritime terrorism.

Photography: Pablo Ferrero

Nowadays it is commonly accepted that we live in a world where not clear periods of war or peace exist, so there are not defined interim periods of peace between them. Nevertheless, the whole modern world, with the menace of new asymmetric threats, seems to be in a state of constant disruption. This new kind of “asymmetrical” war is certain that it is not governed by the doctrines of war theorists, such as Mahan and Clausewitz, who spoke of tactics and strategies in the context of a constitutionalized war of earlier times. Modern foe at sea is now terrorism and illegal activities in the form of pirates, smugglers, fanatic religious groups and all kinds of illegal groups that prove to be particularly dangerous and effective in their incessant activity. The 20th century saw the birth and development of the phenomenon of terrorism, as we perceive it today. The rapid technological progress that has become accessible to most people through international trade and communications has helped to develop this phenomenon. Moreover, piracy, as it is today, constitutes the greatest threat in the seas. Unlike the pirates of the old age, whose sole purpose was material profit, modern pirates, beyond that, have ideological foundations and there is clear evidence that they have a political and religious agenda as well as links with terrorist groups.