Sophie Beau is an angry woman. Not only because of the sentence pronounced Thursday, November 3 in the National Assembly by the deputy National Rally Grégoire de Fournas: “Let them go back to Africa!” But also because his NGO, SOS Méditerranée, has been struggling for days and days to ensure that a port welcomes the “Ocean Viking” and its 234 shipwrecked migrants. However, Thursday, November 3, at the time of the incident in the Assembly, they had just officially launched a request to France, Spain and Greece to take their responsibilities in this deadlocked situation with Libya, Malta and Italy. And the incident froze everything.
>> Migrant crisis: four questions about the “Ocean Viking”, the rescue boat of SOS Méditerranée
At Sophie Beau, 49, the family environment has always focused on welcoming, care and migrants. A doctor father and a mother who worked in a social center in the center of Paris which set up literacy classes. As a teenager, she gave literacy classes. Then as a student, she tried hypokhâgne in a very good Henri IV high school. But she turns to her passion, anthropology and finds herself in Mali. A schoolteacher in the morning, she does her ethnological research in the afternoon on this organization of Malians solinke on which she is inexhaustible. It recounts their long tradition of travel, even before the drought and global warming. She studies in particular how the money sent by migrants to the village allows it to develop but also upsets social relations.
Research is not enough for her, she wants to act. After a 3rd cycle in political science, she embarked on humanitarian work but quickly became disillusioned, understanding how good feelings were not enough: “I was doing literacy classes at 10 o’clock in the evening, right in the middle of the golden triangle in Laos, with all the male population affected by opium and sick, and women who were the only ones to hold these villages, working from 4 a.m. to midnight. And no, they weren’t going to class at night, especially since there was a measles epidemic and their kids were dying.” She therefore goes to larger structures such as Médecins du Monde in Marseille, where she takes care of the homeless and Roma. Médecins sans frontières also, in crisis areas in Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, or in headquarters in France and the United States.
Migrants in the Mediterranean, she became aware of this in 2005. During a seminar at Médecins du Monde, while shipwrecks multiplied in the Mediterranean, they realized that no NGO had the know-how to rescue dozens or even hundreds of migrants, in a stormy sea. And then in 2014, she met a sea captain, a German, Klaus Vogel, who, in the merchant navy, was repeatedly asked to calculate routes to avoid boat people. Since the States do not do it either: the duo will join together to set up this NGO. This is the time when a freighter capsizes a migrant boat while trying to rescue it and causes the death of more than 1,000 migrants. The time also when Angela Merkel repeats: “Wir Schaffen dass” – “We’re gonna make it”.
The Aquarius, the first boat they rented, without institutional funding, set sail in 2015. With professional sailors, each with their own speciality, some for the small zodiacs, others to maneuver the big ones. Gradually the process improves. Today there are 40 of them on board the Viking Ocean, also with medical personnel and shrinks. The ship that collected the 234 migrants is now waiting for a port to dock. Which is a legal duty of States, as Sophie Beau reminds us: “What is serious is that it is the duty of people in danger which is called into question, that is to say that we are not talking about racism, it is squarely people in danger of death And all that is framed by maritime law, it’s a legal duty. In fact, it’s not just a humanitarian fad, saving lives is not normally discussed. So it’s not ‘only ‘they are going back to Africa’ because they come from a country, Libya, where they are persecuted.”
From the start, relations with the far right have been complicated. Four years ago, the premises of SOS Méditerranée were invaded by activists from Génération identitaire who have just been sentenced by the courts. This does not stop Sophie Beau who relies heavily on school awareness. Nineteen volunteer branches are set up throughout France, to intervene in schools and educate for citizenship with National Education approval. She cares a lot about it.