Dying To Escape Death
Italian resources have been swamped with migrant boats this year, people desperate to escape conflict and hardships. The country has implored the European Union for more assistance in the endless rescue missions and housing of migrants. The surge of people coming through from North Africa has been overwhelming. Most of those people are Syrians fleeing the violence in their country.
In the whole of 2013, about 20,000 sea-faring migrants had been picked up. So far this year, over 82,000 such people desperate for haven have been helped by Italy in its search-and-rescue mission it named "Mare Nostrum/Our Sea". That mission was brought into being by the dreadful toll of people dying on the high seas attempting to reach salvation.
Italy must obey EU rules by documenting these migrants to indicate that they reached Italy first, leaving that country with the responsibility to give them haven.
The oceans have been calmer this year and that appears to have led to a greater influx of people willing to risk the arduous and perilous journey. In July the UN refugee agency had estimated that 500 migrants had perished in the Mediterranean over the past six month, in comparison with the deaths of 700 throughout all of 2013.
Now comes word that Italian authorities arrested five men, accused of stabbing to death or asphyxiating dozens of migrants in the suffocating, crowded hold of their smuggling vessel. An estimated 60 men and women were killed and thrown overboard when passengers attempted to break loose from the hold where they had been held prisoner.
Those who survived saw bodies of "friends and relatives, stabbed and stunned" floating helpless in the sea.
Apart from the five arrested on suspicion of murder, another three men were charged with smuggling of migrants. According to survivors, a desperate conflict occurred when people in the hold, suffocating in the heat and lack of oxygen, attempted to re-position themselves on the packed deck. The vicious assault on those seeking relief from the hold led the five men to stab and throw the 60 overboard.
This atrocity was used as a threat that the same fate would be meted out to anyone else who tried to repeat such an attempt. When Italian authorities boarded the ship, twenty-nine bodies were recovered from the hold of the overcrowded re-purposed fishing boat. None of the bodies that were thrown overboard were recovered. About 561 migrants were rescued and brought the city of Messina on Sunday.
The migrants had paid dearly for their passage with some paying the smugglers between $1,000 to $2,000 to be positioned on the packed deck, and for those in the hold between $200 and $500, an even steeper price that included death. When the heat and suffocating fumes drove the people in the hold to attempt escape from their confinement, they were pushed back, the ladder leading to the deck removed, and the portal closed.
Of the five arrested for murder, one was Syrian, two were Moroccan, one was Saudi Arabian and one Palestinian.
Labels: Atrocities, Human Relations, Libya, Refugees, Syria
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, July 24, 2014
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