Mediterranean Human Flotsam
"[The 2015 death toll] could well top 30,000."
"We just want to make sure people understand how much more ... rapid these deaths have been coming this year than last year."
Joel Millman, spokesman, International Organization for Migration
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| www.japantimes.co A large trawler overloaded with people drifts Wednesday in rough seas in the Mediterranean. Cypriot emergency services launched a mission Thursday to rescue . |
What a conundrum for Europe. Decades and decades ago, the world viewed China's increasing population and its endemic poverty and the dysfunction of the Communist system with one wave after another of mass killings, and shivered in fearful anticipation of a "yellow peril" washing onto the shores of Europe and North America as desperate Chinese teemed quiveringly in a great tide of migrants to cast their futures elsewhere than in China.
That absurd scenario never did materialize, but countless Chinese have made their way to Europe and North America, and they have settled there, and prospered there, and enriched their adopted countries immeasurably by their presence, their industrious ways, their native intelligence, their culture and their heritage, and their commingling with the indigenous populations, along with other immigrants also fleeing state persecution, conflicts and poverty.
Now it is hapless Africans and Middle Easterners who flood onto rickety boats to make the 14-hour passage across the Mediterranean, pushing off from mostly Libya to journey to Europe through Italy, Malta and Greece, overwhelming those countries' capacities to deal with the human tide of misery. And nowhere is the helplessness and guilt more acute than in the very countries that have no wish to accept more immigrants or refugees than they already have with their populations turning anti-immigrant in response to being overwhelmed.
The guilt and misery of doing too much or not enough to restrain people from attempting the crossing, even as thousands of the migrants have been perishing in the seas, their overcrowded vessels capsizing, swallowed by the Mediterranean which has become a mass graveyard for people fleeting conflict, misery and poverty is one thing. The justified fears that the Islamist-fuelled mass migration will lead to infiltration of Europe by terrorist jihadis posing as migrants is yet another.
In 2014, over three thousand migrants met their end on the high seas en route to Europe; each year the numbers who drown, increase exponentially. "We estimate some 50 children died in the hold with their mothers" Andrea Iacomini, Italian spokesman for the United Nations Children's Fund stated respecting the latest incident. It is estimated that 12,000 children arrived at centres in Italy in 2015, roughly 3,500 of whom have simply gone somerhere leaving no trace behind.
"We don't even have these kids' fingerprints We believe many end up in the hands of the Mafia and other criminal gangs, often acting as couriers for drug traffickers", said Mr. Iacomini. And perhaps the children think of themselves, regardless of being couriers for drug traffickers, as having found a better life for themselves than their countries of origin promised them. And just as likely, not, for some of the children would also be trafficked as sex slaves.
Italy has arrested over a thousand human smugglers, most representing the boats navigators, and not those people behind the smuggling rings, the leaders, the chiefs, the heads, the brains behind these human trafficking enterprises.
Labels: Africa, Chaos, Conflict, Europe, Italy, Middle East, Migrants
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, April 22, 2015
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