#Mediterranean refugee deaths

[sparksinthenight]

“In the last ten years, hundreds of children have been killed undertaking this journey. These deaths are as preventable and unnecessary as they are tragic. Since 2014, at least 2,508 people have died in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.”

https://www.unicef.org/eca/press-releases/second-deadly-shipwreck-aegean-sea-week-claims-lives-two-more-childre

[12changeling]

please block #oceangate if you don't want to see me keep reblogging about this because I'm so morbidly tuned in to this and the parallels to the refugees' ship in the Mediterranean

[parasiticstars]

@wasabikitcat my sincerest apologies if you didn’t want this posted, I’ll take it down ASAP if you ask, but you’d summarized my ramble perfectly

And we both know people will be like “but they deserved it”.

Therein lies the rub— what are our boundaries for when people deserve it? What nebulous boundaries account for such disrespect? Yes, it’s a show of the sheer pent-up disgust we (general we) feel about the ultra rich, and the dumbassery they do when they could actually do something important, but as aforementioned, I feel it’s a sign of some sort of moral decay to society in general.

And think about it. Look at the post above this. Some people in the government decided war refugees were part of those undeserving of basic decency too. 700 of them.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so shocked at the ages-old idea of someone having to earn basic decency/respect (or at least deserve not having a gruesome death actively wished upon) being perpetuated by the next generation that claims to be more empathetic and better than the ones before them. I’m not asking for mourning or sympathy for the ones who died on that submersible, but bare basic human decency— even if not for them, but for the despair their families are in.

We can hate the rich and wish such a pointless death didn’t have to happen at the same time.

hey friendly reminder that “the loss of any human life is an inherent tragedy” and “the ≤1% paying a quarter of a mil. a head and signing a contract that explicitly mentions ‘death’ to disturb a mass grave while shoved in a literal bluetooth cheap-ass metal cylinder made by a company that eschews safety got exactly what they signed up for” AND “we shouldn’t have wasted taxpayer money to find a crumpled up Pringle’s can during several refugee crises” are all opinions that can and should co-exist.

Of course, we shouldn’t be so gleeful in their horrific deaths, especially there was a literal teenager that didn’t even want to go in there. Internet anonymity be damned, it’s the death of basic empathy. And of course, we should rightfully be outraged that watching a bunch of ultra-rich blow their money to do something objectively incredibly stupid (to a MASS GRAVE with human fucking bone dust and preserved shoes, I cannot stress enough) is what’s hitting headlines and what people care about.

However, if you have any sort of basic human decency and a morality view more complex than that of a six year old, I’m sure you can easily reconcile all three valid opinions.

[idkimnotreal]

people being glad that some billionaires died would maybe benefit from watching contrapoints’s video “envy”. if this is a moral issue, for me, it’s simple:

1) do you believe wealth is immoral?

2) if so, upon being wealthy yourself, would you donate all of your wealth away, or do you believe you would? not just a percentage to charities; those billionaires who died on the sub probably already did that.

if 1) is a yes but 2) is a no, then it’s just hypocrisy. i know i wouldn’t get rid of wealth if i became wealthy so i’m not gonna pretend i’m any different from those people. the only actual difference between us is that they hold more power than i do, but in their place i’d do the same.

the ussr went wrong from the moment they murdered an entire family in the name of socialism or the state or the proletariat or whatever. the only way to change humanity is through empathy. unconditional empathy. otherwise power always ends up concentrated again, like it infamously did in the ussr.

[canadianabroadvery]

Alagon - Italy - 20 June 2023

A Midmediterranean night's dream

Tales without happy endings

[lyesander]

Not crazy about people writing off the Titan submersible incident as some schadenfreudic buzzstory they can rag on for a handful of internet funny points. I get the frustration, I really do. At least three of the passengers had to shell out $250,000 a ticket for a glorified deep sea Disney ride. The CEO of OceanGate is a capitalist wackjob who has been complaining about and bypassing safety regulations for years, despite multiple warnings, and now the retrieval is taking up time and resources from multiple countries that could have been put to better use. But one of the crew members on board was also the nineteen year old son of another passenger. I doubt his involvement extended much beyond “I’m going on a fun trip with my dad.” Another was an unaffiliated researcher who joined the expedition to collect environmental samples for DNA analysis. Not everyone on board was a high-rolling corporate yuppie. (And even if they were, it’s still a pretty objectively horrific way to die.) Instead of memes, I’d rather see this prompt a discussion on the ethics and potential regulation of scientific tourism.

The above also doesn’t change the fact that this is dragging media attention away from more pressing issues, such as the sinking of the Andriana. I guess “THE TITANIC CLAIMS ANOTHER FIVE VICTIMS” is a more colorful headline than “the EU’s xenophobic migration policies have led to the deaths of hundreds of migrants seeking asylum in Italy, and an active cover up is now taking place, headed by Greek authorities.” Seeing all this energy be funneled towards dragging this tiny capsule out of the Atlantic when up to five hundred refugees - mostly women and children - were locked in the hull of a ship and left to suffer the exact same fate, while Coast Guard vessels looked on and did nothing (or even had an active role in the capsize after a botched attempt to tow it, according to some testimonies), illustrates the sway money and race have in what we pay attention to. It’s a gruesome example of inequity in action.

I had compared what happened to the Titan to the Kursk incident, but the Andriana doesn’t have the luxury of being a freak accident. Over 25,000 migrants have disappeared or drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean since 2014, with over 2,000 deaths taking place in 2022 alone. Those are staggering numbers. Protests have broken out across Greece over the past week in the wake of the tragedy, advocating for migration reform.

While these sorts of mass casualty events tend to leave us feeling disheartened and helpless, there are ways to help. Below is a link to SOS Humanity’s donation page. Reputable search and rescue organizations such as SOS Humanity or SOS Mediterranée built their mission statements around helping migrants like the ones on board the Andriana. Donate if you can, spread the word if you can’t.

[socialistsephardi]

Gaza’s water and sewage treatment facilities also require electricity and fuel. Without them—and with airstrikes ongoing—sewage is flowing into the Mediterranean Sea. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, more than 130,000 cubic meters of untreated sewage a day were released into the Mediterranean Sea from Gaza in October, with dire consequences for the environment.

These latest developments are pounding Gazan ecosystems that had already been experiencing severe environmental degradation for decades. For instance, while there are some wastewater treatment facilities in the West Bank, the situation was dire in the Gaza Strip even before the current outbreak of violence, because of the Israeli blockade. That blockade has been near total since 2007, and has restricted the entry of materials and fuel needed for infrastructure. Wastewater management infrastructure is outdated, and sewage polluted Gaza’s aquifer and coastal waters. Some 97 percent of Gaza’s water is unsuitable for human consumption, and polluted water is the source of 26 percent of all illnesses—and before the war, the leading cause of child death in the territory.

Poor water quality and quantity are not only a result of Israel’s targeted policies and the unequal distribution of resources. They are also side effects of the destruction of Gaza’s already flimsy infrastructure during rounds of conflict over the last decade and a half. For instance, in 2007, a river of sewage overflowed in the Gazan village of Umm Naser from a collapsed earth embankment, killing five people. Corruption in the Palestinian Authority and Hamas helped cause the disaster, but an even bigger cause was Israel’s massive, sustained bombing attack on Gaza in the summer of 2006, which led to the destruction of sewage treatment facilities and infrastructure in Gaza.

While the 2006 conflict was devastating, it pales in comparison to the current assault. It is estimated that Israel dropped 25,000 metric tons of bombs on Gaza in the first month of this year’s war, a weight equal to the two nuclear bombs (combined) dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. The bombs have struck 12,000 targets, the majority of which appear to have served a civilian purpose. “

[txttletale]

Hi! Do you think you could link me to some resources about the problems/ evils of the EU? Would love to find some but it's hard to know what's reliable when I have no base knowledge in this area + you seem very well informed :)

sure. let's start with what the EU does to its own member states--in 2009, the EU bailed the greek government out of severe debt on the condition that they establish brutal austerity measures, cutting public spending and welfare. these measures served to immiserate and destroy the lives of thousands of greek people:

Greek mortality has worsened significantly since the beginning of the century. In 2000, the death rate per 100,000 people was 944.5. By 2016, it had risen to 1174.9, with most of the increase taking place from 2010 onwards.

[forbes]

Since the implementation of the austerity programme, Greece has reduced its ratio of health-care expenditure to GDP to one of the lowest within the EU, with 50% less public hospital funding in 2015 than in 2009. This reduction has left hospitals with a deficit in basic supplies, while consumers are challenged by transient drug shortages.

[the lancet]

The homeless population is thought to have grown by 25 per cent since 2009, now numbering 20,000 people.

[oxfam]

the most brutal treatment, however, the EU of course reserves for migrants from the global south. the EU sets strict migration quotas and uses its member states as weapons against desperate people fleeing across the mediterranean. boats are prevented from landing, migrants that do make it to land are repelled with brutal violence, and refugees are deported back to countries where their lives are in lethal danger. these policies have led to many, many deaths--and the refugees and migrants who do survive are treating fucking inhumanely.

After a perilous journey across the desert, Abdulaziz was locked up in Triq al-Sikka, a grim prison in Tripoli, Libya. Why? Because the EU pays Libyan militias millions of euros to detain anyone deemed a possible migrant to Europe [...] A leaked EU internal memorandum in 2020 acknowledged that capturing migrants was now “a profitable business model” [...] in Triq al-Sikka and other detention centres, “acts of murder, enslavement, torture, rape and other inhumane acts are committed against migrants”, observed a damning UN report.

[the guardian]

Volunteers have logged more than 27,000 deaths by drowning since 1993, often hundreds at a time when large ships capsize. These account for nearly 80% of all the entries.

[the guardian]

Refugees and asylum seekers were punched, slapped, beaten with truncheons, weapons, sticks or branches, by police or border guards who often removed their ID tags or badges, the committee said in its annual report. People on the move were subject to pushbacks, expulsion from European states, either by land or sea, without having asylum claims heard. Victims were also subject to “inhuman and degrading treatment”, such as having bullets fired close to their bodies while they lay on the ground, being pushed into rivers, sometimes with hands tied, or being forced to walk barefoot or even naked across a border.

[the guardian]

In September, Greece opened a refugee camp on the island of Samos that has been described as prison-like. The €38m (£32m) facility for 3,000 asylum seekers has military-grade fencing and CCTV to track people’s movements. Access is controlled by fingerprint, turnstiles and X-rays. A private security company and 50 uniformed officers monitor the camp. It is the first of five that Greece has planned; two more opened in November.

[the guardian]

i could go on. i could cite dozens more similarly brutal news stories about horrific mistreatment, or any of the dozens of people who have killed themselves in the custody of border police under horrific conditions. the EU is a murderous institution that does not care about the lives of refugees and migrants or about the lives of the citizens of any member state that is not pursuing a vicious enough neoliberal political program

[crimeronan]

hyperempathetic followers can now rest easy knowing the oceangate missing people have been dead for days and didn't feel a thing when it happened. low empathy followers can be bummed out that they found the wreckage so we can no longer gleefully imagine the passengers slowly freezing to death. normal followers (everyone in the middle) can be reasonably irritated that untold money was spent going after these idiots when poor disenfranchised people die all the time. if you learned about the migrant tragedy in the mediterranean sea thru this that's good (i did too), it's ALWAYS a good time to love and support refugees, migrants, n impoverished people. we have FAR more in common with them than we do the rich.

[sixty-silver-wishes]

ngl the wildest (and imo the most interesting) thing about this whole titanic debacle was seeing the increasingly complex moral arguments that came out of it, and how fiercely people defended their own arguments. Should we pity the passengers or be glad they’re dead? Should we only pity some of them? What about the refugee boat in the Mediterranean; should we pity the drowned refugees but not the people on the Titan, or should we pity them all the same? Should we pity people who die a horrible death without being able to say goodbye to their families, even if they knew what they were getting into? Which lives do we and society consider valuable and which ones do we not? If billionaires wouldn’t pity us in the same situation, do they still deserve our pity anyway? Is the 19 year old a child or an adult, and how does that factor into our sympathy for him? Would our answer change considering the fact that his aunt said he was scared to go and just wanted to please his father? How much blame does the company carry? The passengers? The media? Who’s a good person and who’s a bad person? Are there any good or bad people?

No matter what opinions people take, I keep seeing people saying that their argument is correct and nuanced, and the opposite argument lacks nuance and is poorly thought out. It makes me wonder how we’ll look back on this in the future. I’m not interested in arguing about it on this post, just stating it’s been interesting seeing how the arguments unfold.

[sparksinthenight]

”Since 2014, nearly 31,000 people have died or disappeared while migrating across the Mediterranean. This includes hundreds of children. The majority are fleeing violent conflict and poverty.”

https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/child-found-floating-alone-sea-wearing-life-jacket-made-tyre-tubes-after-44-other-0

[tearsofrefugees]

[fatehbaz]

Hmm. Alarming trend in mass incarceration in Central America.

Also: Very disingenuous wordplay here.

Where do we begin?

-- Very disingenuous for multiple outlets to run with "the West”. Though this initial AP article does specify that this refers to the Western Hemisphere, the choice to run headlines with “West” kinda implies that there are no other island prisons in “The West” (as in the European Union, the United States, Australia, etc.).

-- One of the most infamous incarceration schemes on the planet is Australia’s “Pacific Solution,” a “solution” to refugee migration centered on the imprisonment of asylum seekers on island prisons, including the infamous prisons at Nauru and Manus, both opened initially in 2001, and re-fortified after 2012. (Nauru is extremely isolated, in the South Pacific, 3000 kilometers away from the Australian coast; the Manus detention centre is far away off the northeast coast of Papua.) Since 2012, over 3,125 people have been sent to Nauru while over 4,180 people have been sent to Manus. (The “last refugee held on the Pacific island of Nauru under Australia’s offshore detention policy” was “evacuated” to mainland Australia only on 24 June 2023, not even a month prior to this headline.)

-- Obviously the EU incarcerates refugees on Mediterranean islands, notoriously at Moria on Lesbos, whose international reputation as the home of Sappho has been supplanted by its reputation as a de facto prison for asylum seekers. In October 2015, over 10,000 people landed on Lesbos in just one day. In 2017, the island averaged 2,500 arrivals per month. By 2019, humanitarian investigations showed that over 10,000 people were being held in a facility with a maximum capacity of 3,000. In 2020, fires left over 12,000 refugees on the island without shelter. By December 2021, Doctors Without Borders raised alarm that over 2,200 refugees were living in “dire” conditions on the island. As of early 2023, Lesbos (along with Kos, Leros, Chios, and Samos) is hosting over 4,500 people who are stuck in “reception and identification centers.”

-- And in the Western Hemisphere? The US prison at Guantanomo, also on the coast of an island in this same sea.

-- One of the most notorious island prisons was the early twentieth century French penal colony on the periphery of the Caribbean region at Guiana (run by a France, a “Western” power, in the Western Hemisphere), known internationally as “Devil’s Island.”

-- The federal government says the prison will be built “in harmony with nature.”

-- A prison ... in harmony with nature.

-- An island prison in the Caribbean, a region fundamentally and intimately connected to centuries of imprisonment, plantations, Indigenous genocide, antiBlackness, racial castes, and chattel slavery, all achieved and enforced through the bounded, isolated geographic containment structure allowed by islands.

-- And this is extra-worrying, because it seems it’s a regional trend, evidently for Honduras, El Salvador, and Colombia.

-- Merely a few days before this headline about Honduras, international outlets were profiling Honduras’s direct neighbor, El Salvador, with headlines like “Inside El Salvador’s new ‘mega prison’” (Al Jazeera) and, within the past couple months, headlines like “Prisoners are being tortured to death in El Salvador’s prisons” (VICE News).

-- From less than a week before this AP headline, we have BBC: “El Salvador’s secretive mega-jail.”

-- Don’t forget nearby Tapachula’s detention of asylum seekers.

Still discussing implementation of literal island prisons despite our collective familiarity with carceral archipelagoes.

[nanshe-of-nina]

Women’s History Meme || Kick-ass Women (7/10) ↬ Sayyida al-Hurra (1485 – 1561)

Such a woman as Sayyida al-Hurra, a Moroccan of Andalusian origin, found no better way to ease the humiliation of defeat than to launch into piracy. She displayed such talent at it that she soon became Hakima Tatwan (governor of Tetouan). The Muslim historians treat this second al-Hurra, like the first, with the same disdainful silence: ‘One finds practically no information in the Arab sources about this queen, who exercised power for more than thirty years [916/1510, the date of the accession to power of her husband al-Mandri, to 949/1542, when she was deposed].’ According to Spanish and Portuguese sources, al-Hurra was their partner in the diplomatic game. She played a key role for many years as governor of Tetouan and as the undisputed leader of the pirates in the western Mediterranean. One of her allies was none other than the famous Turkish corsair Barbarossa, who operated out of Algiers. But corsairs were not her only allies. After the death of her husband she married the king of Morocco, Ahmad al-Wattasi, the third king of that dynasty (932/1524 to 966/1549). In order to show him that she had no intention of giving up her political role in the north, she requested that the king leave his capital of Fez and come to Tetouan for the marriage ceremony. This was the only time in the history of Morocco that a king got married away from his capital. Her family, the Banu Rashid, was a family of Andalusian notables, who like many others decided to return to North Africa after the fall of Granada. The life of Sayyida al-Hurra began amid the anxieties of exile and the uncertainties experienced by all the Andalusian refugees who fled the Inquisition. Her family settled in Chaouen, and there she married al-Mandri, who belonged to another great Andalusian family living in the neighbouring town of Tetouan. Many emigre communities let themselves be deluded by the idea of a return to Andalusia. Conducting expeditions against the Spaniards became the obsession of the bravest among them, and piracy was the ideal solution. It allowed the expelled to obtain quick revenues (booty and ransom for captives), and at the same time to continue to fight the Christian enemy. The history of the rebirth of Tetouan is linked to, and reflects that of, the family of al-Mandri, al-Hurra’s husband, who became head of the community of Andalusian exiles. — The Forgotten Queens of Islam by Fatima Mernissi

[useless-catalanfacts]

A woman in Llançà (Comarques Gironines, Catalonia) does a flower offering to the sea during a maritime procession on the day of the Virgin of Mount Carmel. Photo from festes.org.

The 16th of July is the feast of Virgin of Mount Carmel (Mare de Déu del Carme in Catalan), the patron saint of the sea and protector of all the people who work at sea or travel by sea. For this reason, many coastal towns and cities hold processions at sea, where the people who have ships or boats (traditionally it was fishermen, but nowadays people who might have a recreational boat also join) parade at sea following a boat that carries a statue of the Virgin of Mount Carmel, believed to bless the waters.

Besides being a holiday for fishermen, sailors, and everyone who works at sea, the feast is also in remembrance of those who lost their lives there. During the procession, people who have lost a relative or a dear person at sea throw a flower bouquet to the water in their memory. Working as a fisherman or a sailor has been for centuries one of the common jobs in our coast and necessary to give us food, but it was very dangerous. It's because of this danger that the worship of Virgin of Mount Carmel (equivalent to the goddess of the sea in other cultures) is so widespread in the Catalan coast and the name "Carme" (meaning "Carmel") has been for centuries one of the most popular female names in Catalan and other languages of coastal Southern Europe ("Carme" in Galician, "Carmen" in Spanish and Italian, "Carmela" in Italian, "Karmela" or "Karmen" in Croatian, etc).

_____________________________________________________

Nowadays, there is another situation that causes a huge amount of death at sea. Refugees and migrants coming from Africa try to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe. Because of the legal difficulties in crossing the border legally, many migrants end up trying to cross the sea in bad quality boats usually run by mafias that don't care about their safety, so large amounts of people are crammed into small boats and often drown. In 2023 alone, 6,618 people died at sea trying to reach Spain. If you would like to help rescuing them, consider making a donation to the NGO Open Arms or purchasing something from their online shop. This non-profit non-governmental organization based in Catalonia has been rescuing migrants at sea for years, becoming one of the referent organizations in this.