One day in 2010, the woman with the red fingernails received the first call. She was standing in her kitchen when her white cellphone rang. The display showed “00888” — the first five digits of an unknown number.When the woman answered, she was assaulted by shrieks. Four hundred and twenty-five Eritreans were drifting in the Mediterranean. The ship was leaking; water was creeping up the walls.
One of the passengers had the telephone number of Meron Estefanos and entered the 13 digits into a satellite cellphone, the one that people smugglers give refugees for emergencies. Estefanos’ telephone began to ring.It was a nightmare, she recalls. “This panic, the people screaming into the receiver: ‘We’re dying, our life is in your hands. Do something!’”
Today, the 40-year old woman with the red fingernails is sitting on a plastic chair in her kitchen, the same place she received the call five years ago.
“At that time I hardly knew how to handle the situation. First I called the Italian authorities. They told me: ‘Call Malta!’ I called up Malta. They told me: ‘Call Italy!’” Seven hours passed until the 425 people knew they would survive, she recounts. The Italian Coast Guard rescued them.
For Estefanos, it was the beginning of a long acquaintance with the ominous numerical sequence 00888, which indicates a call from a satellite mobile on the Mediterranean.
Since the incident in 2010, which was well-publicized in the Eritrean community, many of those who flee Eritrea make sure to carry with them one thing in particular: the 13-digit telephone number of Meron Estefanos.
Estefanos left Eritrea as a child, not as a refugee, but on a comfortable plane ride to Stockholm, where her father had found work. That was 28 years ago.
However, torture, repression and poverty in her homeland produce an endless stream of refugees. The shrill echo of it resounds daily through her mobile phone in faraway Stockholm.
This year alone, she says, she has already received more than 50 calls from boats in the Mediterranean. In so doing, she has likely saved the lives of more than 16,000 Eritreans — a fact Estefanos doesn’t mention in the conversation. She is not interested in such calculations, she says.
“Meron, is it you? Help us, we’re drifting on the sea, the ship’s engine broke down!”
“Go to the compass right away and pass on the co-ordinates.”
“I can’t read the compass!”
“Describe to me which numbers you see on it.”
Meron Estefanos presses the stop button. It is one of many recordings of calls from the Mediterranean stored on her white cellphone.
The phone is lying on the table in her small kitchen. Every few minutes it vibrates: Al Jazeera from Qatar. A journalist from America. Then an Eritrean pastor from Switzerland. “Sorry, I have to take that call, it is because of IS,” Estefanos excuses herself and disappears to her balcony.
‘You stupid, stupid telephone’
Recently, the terrorist militia Islamic State kidnapped 87 Eritreans in Libya. Fourteen succeeded in freeing themselves. With the cellphone pressed to her ear, Estefanos is discussing with the pastor how they can bring the 14 refugees to safety. “What,” she asks when she returns to the kitchen, “would probably be happening in Western TV stations if the IS kidnapped 87 Swedes?” The question still hangs unanswered when her phone rings again.
“You stupid, stupid telephone,” her six-year-old son recently hissed as it rang once again. He is right, admits the single mother (she also has a 14-year-old son). Her commitment to the refugees is hard on the family. “But, if I can save so many lives with only one call?”
Estefanos’s day job is with Radio Erena, a Paris-based station. Her kitchen in Stockholm serves as the studio: There she sits every Thursday at midday with a headset and a notebook for the program “Voices of Eritrean Refugees.”
While Estefanos speaks into the microphone, 5,000 kilometres away thousands of people listen to their radios in Eritrea. They do it secretly, because the Eritrean regime is trying to prohibit Radio Erena broadcasts.
Eritrea — approximately half the size of the United Kingdom — is often dubbed “the North Korea of Africa.” The secretive country on the Horn of Africa, which gained its independence from Ethiopia in 1993, is ruled by President Isaias Afwerki with “ruthless repression” and human rights violations “on a scope and scale seldom witnessed elsewhere,” as the UN concluded in its current report.
About 5,000 Eritreans are fleeing every month, despite knowing they can be shot to death on the border by their own army for treason. If they make it to neighbouring Sudan and further on to Libya, the next round of Russian roulette awaits them: the journey across the Mediterranean to Europe. And here the circle closes with Estefanos and her white cellphone.
But sometimes the circle closes earlier.
Rise of the kidnappers
Around four years ago, news broke in the Western media that human smugglers were kidnapping people — mainly Eritreans — on their way to Europe, holding them incamps in the Sinai Desert in Egypt. The kidnappers were torturing the refugees to extort ransom money from their relatives.
Estefanos negotiates with the people smugglers on the telephone, helps organize ransom money and consoles desperate relatives. Her power to convince on the telephone is her weapon. Often, Estefanos says, the horror stories take her breath way.
“In the torture camps in Sinai,” she explains, “the people smugglers used a particularly cruel technique. First they squeezed out the telephone number of the refugees’ families. Then they called them up to demand the ransom money. The deceitful thing about it: While they were on the phone, they were torturing the refugees so that their screams could be heard by their relatives on the other end of the line.”
She vows to haul to court every human trafficker who makes money this way. She collects evidence, records telephone calls and keeps lists of the ransom sums.
“If you kill a cat in Sweden, you end up in prison. Meanwhile I hear stories of refugees who are being tortured every hour. And the whole world is just watching.” This sentence was uttered by Estefanos in an award-wining 2013 Israeli documentary about the torture camps in Sinai. How many people smugglers has she brought to court since then?
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