(1)
Democracy is not heaven, but dictatorship is certainly hell, and the worst thing about it is that it entrenches in the individual that he has no value at all.
(2)
On the morning of April 19, 2015, everyone around the world woke up to a news that made the headlines of international newspapers, about the sinking of a boat carrying 800 migrants, hours after it set off from the Libyan coast, only to end its course in the middle of the Mediterranean, and all its passengers drowned.
A young German living in Berlin, Jacob Schoen, reads the news in a newspaper at his home like no other. Will migrants fleeing the inferno of war in the Middle East have someone to save them from drowning? The idea is important and worth a try, but its implementation is not easy,” he says.
Study friends and neighbors approach the matter, many of them are enthusiastic about it, and he succeeds in forming a team of 10 volunteers, including himself. The problem now is with funding, and funding is in need of an official institution or association to do that, they agree on a name and logo, and establish their association, they choose the name ( Die Jugend Rettet), which means in Arabic: "Young people are coming to the rescue."
Jacob searches for all reliable ways to rescue migrants in danger of drowning in the Mediterranean. He is shocked during his research when he learns that in 2014 alone, the Mediterranean swallowed 3,000 migrants due to dilapidated immigration boats.
For him and his team, it turns from wanting to help to a mission to save lives that needs more than empathy via Facebook and Twitter posts.
(3)
The team launches a donation campaign to buy a sea boat, whose mission will be to station danger points and retrieve migrants from them. The funding campaign continues until it succeeds by May 2016 in raising about 300,000 euros.
The team buys a fishing boat that's not too big, but it works. They keep the name of the boat as they got it "Luventa" and don't change it.
Jacob and some of his buddies meet experts in the German port city of Hamburg for advice on what might be the next step, and it is agreed that the boat will have 13 crew members, including Jacob, for the first voyage.
The boat moves on the morning of July 24, and the first voyage arrives at a point near the coast of Malta on the Mediterranean. The team is happy to find a boat carrying migrants that had just left the Libyan coast, and because who saw is not as if he heard, Jacob was injured when Seeing the migrant boat with fear and tension, he had not thought that it would be so majestic, the migrants begin to board his boat, and then he moves to the nearest point in Italy at Sicily.
He decides to repeat the process again during the second week after the first operation. He and the team are surprised that the outcome of the two rescue operations is 1,300 migrants who were about to drown in the Mediterranean. The task becomes more mature in their minds. The situation in Libya and Syria is getting worse day after day in those years. Migrants are increasingly fleeing across the sea.
One morning in October, the three policemen arrive at a police station in Trapani, Sicily, to report a possible connection between the Juventia's crew and gangs of smugglers from Libya.
(4)
Things are getting complicated in Europe. Politicians, in all their directions, see immigrants as a burden that their country must get rid of. They decide more difficult laws to deal with illegal immigration. Italy decides to punish those who approach its shores. Rescue boats are stopped, and the coast is more dangerous than before.
The group is carrying out the third rescue mission for a flight carrying 427 migrants, while rumors and suspicions about its mission are circulating in the corridors of the Italian government, especially the coast police, to start a new phase of the crisis.
The police takes the initiative to summon the members of the group from time to time, and subject them to an investigation into the nature of the rescue operations they are carrying out, while hinting at their suspicion of their cooperation with international smuggling gangs, without formal accusation.
On September 10, during one of the ship's rescue missions, the crew is surprised by the large number of more than 600 migrants, and things are about to get out of control, until a British rescue boat named (Vos Hestia) arrives in a group of boats that arrived to help, carrying a group of people on board. From the migrants to relieve the pressure of the boat, the boat is led by 3 Coast Guard policemen, one of them sees 3 black people, they leave the Juventia and board a boat suspected of returning to Libya again, only the three policemen suspect that there is a pre-agreement between the group boat And the smugglers to receive the migrants, and let those responsible for the smuggling go back, while the crew of the Juventia ship did not know anything about this, they were only concerned with saving that large number in any possible way.
One morning in October, the three policemen arrive at a police station in Trapani, Sicily, to report a possible connection between the Juventia's crew and gangs of smugglers from Libya.
(5)
The ship's crew rejects all the accusations against him, and requests the testimony of an Irish ship that was among the rescue groups to confirm the truth of what they say, but the city's police continue to feel suspicious, deciding to appoint an officer from the division force to be part of the British ship's crew to monitor the Juventia from time to time.
Just a month later, the coast guard department in Rome sends an invitation to the team to meet and make an agreement to cooperate in rescuing the migrants, a move the ship's team didn't understand at the time, but in the end they accepted, and actually made the agreement in order to be an important facilitation on their path.
Things turn frighteningly in the spring of 2017, just a few months after their investigation, when an Italian opposition politician named Salvini appears on a talk show to announce that witnesses have assured him that migrant rescue ships are smuggling weapons and drugs into the country from smugglers' boats, and that a secret deal It was held between Italian intelligence and rescue ships to run those operations.
In fact, Salvini had no evidence or witnesses for what he said, but wanted to throw a stone with which to move water in his favour, in the endless political disputes over the migrant reception crisis.
The three policemen decide to contact politician Salvini and inform him of their suspicions, which they say the police have not taken seriously.
Salvini then appears in front of the media and announces that he has obtained confirmed information from reliable sources confirming his accusation to the rescue team that owns the Juventia ship, and then decides to take a more escalatory step by using the whole issue in the struggle of his party calculated on the extreme right in his debate in front of the ruling left.
Things get out of hand, and the Juventus boat team's dream turns into a nightmare in no time at all.
Far-right activists begin to spread across the coasts of Europe by December 2016 to impose what they call a state of surveillance, and several months later a shadowy Dutch foundation called Gefira - claiming to "protect the indigenous peoples of Europe from extinction" - publishes a report in which it says Migrant rescue operations are a form of fraud.
And the idea starts spreading virally across social media platforms.
The public prosecutor of the city of Sicily, Carmelo Zuccaro, announces the opening of an investigation into the activity of rescue organizations, after which he comes out, declaring that it is merely a suspicious activity between civil organizations and smuggling gangs, to destroy and weaken the Italian economy.
Then an Italian blogger posted on Facebook a video he called "The Truth Behind Migrants", in which he says that many immigrants entered Sicily and Rome to work and control taxis for economic gain at the expense of the state.
The video goes viral, and the snowball keeps rolling.
(6)
In May 2017, the ship's crew was subjected to the most obvious and direct reaction by expelling them twice from the rescue points, and preventing them from receiving and rescuing migrant boats, but at that time their number had exceeded 14,000 migrants, who had already succeeded in rescuing them despite all the strikes and attacks that continued on Over the course of long months from several parties.
By the summer of 2017, the Italian Minister of the Interior, Marco Minniti, would announce a document binding on all rescue teams, obligating them to move directly with those they rescued to Italian ports, and to permanently refrain from transferring them to large ships, to prevent any smuggling operations, so that the arrival of migrants would be subject to the inspection of the Italian authorities directly in the ports.
The Juventia group refuses to sign the document, declaring that it will increase the number of drowned people, and will disrupt everything they do in order to save the lives of migrants, so that the group becomes the focus of attention in front of the Italian media screens, and some begin to announce that this refusal is nothing but the fear of losing the group's financial interests obtained from smuggling, and a large section of Italian society is already beginning to treat them as a source of danger to Italian society and its economy.
By September the boats of the various rescue organizations, with all their names, begin to disappear from the ports and refrain from any missions.
The bullet goes straight out of the gun in June 2018, with the official accusation of the 10 Juventus boat team of participating with smuggling groups in harming Italian society and its economy and smuggling prohibited goods, and they end up in an Italian prison under the umbrella of a case in which the sentence may reach 20 years in prison.
Pietro Gallo, one of the three policemen who raised the case in the beginning, appears to announce that he never said that the Juventia team had an affair with the smugglers, and that it was only a hunch, and that their conversation with the politician Salvini was in search of his support for humanitarian aid and philanthropy in Europe.
In our present moment, we cannot say: We are in the process of a sad or happy end. The rescue crew is languishing in prison awaiting his fate, but the story is not over yet, and it still carries with it the hope of surviving a dream that aimed at nothing but saving the lives of those fleeing from Hell. War, poverty and the aftermath of colonialism, who will save the saviors?