NGOs criticize Europe for migrants drowning in Med. Sea

ANKARA

International NGOs on Saturday criticized Europe after at least 172 migrants drowned in the Mediterranean Sea.

“The racist violence of the European border regime inflicts pain & trauma on peoples & communities around the world. We promise we will keep fighting to abolish it,” tweeted Alarm Phone, an NGO that helps migrants cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.

“Europe's border regime will keep killing if not stopped. State actors & @Frontex only seek to protect borders rather than people. They need to be abolished & replaced by a Civil Rescue Coordination Centre that has the objective of rescuing people rather than killing them,” it said, referring to the European Border and Coast Guard Agency.

Alarm Phone said 130 people who called the group in distress “were left to drown by the European and Libyan authorities” and 42 people on a third boat are still missing.

A German NGO, Sea-Watch, on Friday said: “130 people drowned - EU authorities & @Frontex knew about the distress case, but denied rescue. The #OceanViking arrived on scene, only to find 10 bodies.”

A search and rescue team member, Alessandro, who was on the Ocean Viking, said on the SOS MEDITERRANEE website: “Outside, somewhere in those same waves, a dinghy carrying 120 people. Or 100, or 130. We will never know, because they are all dead.”

Alessandro said the search and rescue operation resumed at dawn but no coordination or help was provided from any state.

“If an airplane had crashed in the same area, the navies of half of Europe would have been there, but they were just migrants, soil for the Mediterranean cemetery, for whom it is pointless to run, and indeed we were left alone,” he said.

At least 172 people were killed in three different shipwrecks in the central Mediterranean Sea, and the number drowning in the world’s deadliest crossing has more than doubled in 2021, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Friday.

“Over the past three days, we have received reports that there were at least three boats,” that have sunk “in the central Mediterranean,” said IOM spokeswoman Safa Msehli at a UN news conference.

She noted that the IOM was quoting tolls given by NGOs operating rescue ships in the area.

On one of the boats, there were 130 people, a second was carrying two, while a third vessel that sank, 40 people were believed to have perished.

“This actually brings the death toll in the central Mediterranean alone to close to 500 people, which is almost three times as many as the death toll in the same period of last year,” said Msehli.

“In the Mediterranean as a whole, there have been 523 recorded deaths. If we add the numbers from yesterday, that's 650 recorded deaths.”

She said in the central Mediterranean alone, “which remains the deadliest sea crossing,” there were, as of Thursday, close to 500 deaths, compared to 149 in the same period last year.