Preying On The Desperate
"We started to see the arrival of this type of cargo ship packed with refugees in the late autumn and since then there have been about ten of them."
"At first we wondered if it was a one-off, but it now seems to be a trend. The smugglers typically acquire a decommissioned cargo ship, pack it with migrants and then abandon their passengers at sea, telling them to call the rescue services. In the case of the Blue Sky M, some refugees claimed that the crew chose to mingle with the migrants."
"We don't know where they are buying the boats. But we know they are flying in crew, sometimes from a long way away One crewman came from Murmansk in Russia. It's big business."
Ewa Moncure, Frontex, European Union border control agency
The plight of those in need makes them vulnerable to the suggestibility that there are solutions at hand for their problems as refugees or as migrants anxious to escape what surely appears to them to be their own hell on Earth. They dream of a far better place, places where civil strife and sectarian bloodshed are foreign, where people live in the security and peace that is being denied them. Everyone languishes in misery, as helpless pawns when conflict impairs civility and hope.
And sometimes a flicker of hope shines so brightly at the promises that payment to the vultures that prey on them will provide for them, that they will agree to gamble with their lives and the lives of their families for the opportunity to break away from the stifling curtain of bleak hopelessness. To board a ship that may become a floating or sinking mass coffin, in the expectation that their faith will bring them to a better place, where fortune will smile and life has value.
So it is that ships designed to carry livestock are packed with refugees, with women and children risking everything in the hope that they will survive a treacherous journey to be rescued from their unfair fate as hostages to predatory, violent clashes between government agencies and vicious non-state militias. One ship after another full of hundreds of Syrians fleeing the butchery of the country's president; the Shiite regime destroying its Sunni population.
But there are also Palestinians from Gaza sick of their unending plight, held hostage to the ambitions of Hamas, and Libyans fleeing that country's civil war of vicious bloodletting; the world of Islam is upending itself in its paroxysms of butchery, each 'side' glorying in the carnage it commits, proudly showing the world in the use of technology just how capable they are of out-brutalizing one another, through crucifixions, mass rape, beheadings, and mass slaughter.
Tens of thousands of the millions of refugees that the Middle East and Africa are producing have been directed through human smuggling rings toward Europe. The human smugglers charge exorbitant fees to desperate people, to place them on barely seaworthy vessels, aiming them on automatic pilot for shorelines to enter Italy and hopefully proceed to the European interior, an escape from the horrible dysfunction of an Islam busy devouring itself.
There are the human carrion-eaters known as smugglers and there are countries such as Turkey whose authorities wave through the boarding of a thousand Syrians on a vessel heading for Italy as being nothing unusual for their ports. Turkey's callous disregard for the safety of thousands of people being placed in peril on the seas, and its shrugging disdain for the countries in Europe desperate to stem the tide and cope with those arrived, speaks volumes of its place as a NATO country and aspiring EU member.
Labels: EU, Gaza, Italy, Middle East, North Africa, Refugees, Syria, Turkey
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, January 04, 2015
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