It is less than a hundred meters from the fine sand of the public beach of Umm al Qaiwain, the capital of the eponymous emirate which is part of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
But the crew of Mt Iba, an oil tanker flying the Panamanian flag, cannot lounge there.
In fact, it's been almost four years since sailors have been stranded off the Emirati coast aboard this boat that has become one of the worst examples of ships abandoned by its owners.
A phenomenon largely exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“It's hell,” said crew members contacted by the British daily The Guardian on Monday (February 15th).
“We are like modern slaves,” Vinay Kumar, an engineer on board, told Reuters.
“The only thing we have left is prayer,” he told The National, an English-language daily in Abu Dhabi.
Kafkaesque situation
At the end of January, two anchors from Mt Iba broke and the ship, which was almost out of fuel, drifted for hours before running aground on a sandbank off Umm al-Qaiwain.
Since then, the five members of the crew have been waiting for the Emirati authorities to find a hypothetical solution to their Kafkaesque situation.
They are within a few fathoms of freedom, but cannot get ashore because international maritime laws prohibit the crew from abandoning a stranded ship that is carrying a risky cargo, such as oil.
By breaking these rules, they would also risk losing all rights to the more than $ 230,000 in arrears of wages owed to them by the ship's owner, the Emirati oil company Alco Shipping.
Finally, the highest ranking among the crew, the chief engineer, is a Burmese national who has problems with papers.
His passport has expired since he embarked and he fears it will be difficult to renew it on time with the political crisis currently shaking Burma.
And if he goes ashore without proper papers, he risks being sent directly to prison.
This seemingly inextricable situation is only the culmination of a nightmarish odyssey that began in 2017. It saw the sailors of Mt Iba fall victim to an unscrupulous carrier, collapsing oil prices and, and finally, the pandemic.
Falling Oil Prices and Covid-19
The crew initially had no particular reason to be wary of Alco Shipping.
“It was one of the largest oil carriers in the United Arab Emirates,” recalls The National.
It employed more than 500 people, had 20 ships and its annual turnover was around one billion UAE dirhams (220 million euros).
From the start, however, living conditions aboard the Mt Iba, which was carrying around $ 4 million worth of oil, left much to be desired.
So much so that the NGO Human Right at Sea, alerted by the crew, had already drawn up a report in July 2017 highlighting the numerous violations of the rights of seafarers on board this tanker.
Wages were already being paid in small quantities, and Alco Shipping only very irregularly sent food and fresh water.
The company is also accused of having threatened with legal action the members of the crew who would be tempted to complain about their situation to the Emirati authorities.
The situation only worsened for the sailors thereafter.
The fault, first, with the price of oil, which begins a long decline from 2018, which weighs on the finances of Alco Shipping, forced to put the key under the door in 2019. Consequence for the crew: he has not been paid for 32 months.
It has not received food since March 2020 and the five people on board have had to make do with emergency supplies of rice and chickpeas to survive, reports The National.
The owner has promised to find a buyer for the Mt Iba and to pay the wages with the money from the sale.
He even seemed to have found a candidate at the end of 2019, but that was without taking into account the pandemic.
The potential buyer, a Greek shipowner, was unable to carry out the usual checks to assess the condition of the vessel because of movement restrictions.
The sale therefore seems to hang on the whims of the pandemic, just like the fate of the sailors.
Explosion in the number of abandoned ships
They are not the only ones who find themselves stranded at sea because of the pandemic and with ship owners with absent subscribers.
The phenomenon of abandonment of ships exploded with the health crisis.
“There were 76 new cases, affecting more than 1,000 sailors, in 2020 alone, according to data from the International Maritime Organization [which depends on the UN, editor's note]”, underlined in December 2020 Lloyd's List, a British information firm for professionals of the sea.
This is almost twice as much as in 2019. Above all, it is the first time in four years that the number of ships abandoned by their owners - that is to say those which do not meet the legal obligations towards the ship. crew - is on the rise again.
“The United Arab Emirates are the country with the most ship abandonment - 7 in 2020 - followed by China, Taiwan, Turkey and Italy”, summarizes Lloyd's List.
A sad first place which can be explained by the fact that the UAE is not a signatory of the Maritime Labor Convention, ratified by 97 countries since its adoption in 2006. The risk of legal action against the Emirati owners who abandon their ships is therefore less.
These ship abandonments can have catastrophic consequences for crews that go far beyond loss of income.
“The International Red Cross had to intervene to evacuate people who were seriously ill and stranded on a boat whose Greek owner had gone bankrupt,” reports Lloyd's List.
Not to mention the ecological consequences of ships that cannot return to ports.
These wanderings will increase the environmental bill for maritime transport of goods, which was already one billion tonnes of CO2 released into the air each year.
The pandemic has made it possible to realize that all these sailors, qualified in December 2020 as “essential but often invisible actors of globalization” by Annick Girardin, the French Minister for the Sea, are also too often invisible victims of the health crisis.
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