Refugee boat sinks off Turkey, 58 drown

[Deleted]

:-(

It's a current news item here in Oz as well, I hate to think how many boats are at the bottom of the ocean between Indonesia and Darwin.

www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/refugee-boat-sinks-off-turkey-20-drown/story-e6frf7k6-1226466840381


SOME 58 people drowned when a fishing boat carrying migrants that smugglers had promised refuge in Europe sank after hitting rocks off the coast of western Turkey, officials say.


Nine children were among the dead, according to Turkey's Dogan News Agency. Several dozen survivors, mostly from Iraq and Syria, were able to swim through the Aegean waters to shore, only 50 metres away.

Survivors had told authorities that some people were trapped below the deck of the submerged vessel, and divers launched an operation to try to find them.

Television footage showed several rescue vessels near the dim outline of the submerged boat, which lay just below the surface of the water. Ambulances waited at the top of a cliff, but there were no indications that anyone else had survived.

The group of migrants had previously made their way to hotels in the city of Izmir, where smugglers agreed to take them to Britain. Authorities arrested two Turkish suspects in the smuggling operation, Turkey's TRT television reported.

TRT earlier quoted Tahsin Kurtbeyoglu, a local administrator, as saying 20 bodies were recovered, but the toll rose through Thursday as more bodies were pulled from within the boat's confines. Those who survived were on the deck, rather than below with other members of their group.

It was not immediately clear when the boat sank, but many such vessels carrying migrants make the journey at night to avoid detection by authorities.

Migrants from Asia and Africa have long sought to reach Europe by passing through Turkey, and their desperate efforts have occasionally ended in disaster. Each year, thousands try to sail to Greek islands from Turkish soil in rickety boats.

Turkey is now hosting 80,000 Syrians who have fled the civil war in their country and are staying in camps just across the border, and some countries are concerned that larger numbers of Syrians could try to reach Europe illegally.

Greece said in July that it was quadrupling the number of guards at its border with Turkey and boosting other defences in part because of worries about a potential influx.

Some non-governmental groups believe migrants, deterred by tighter enforcement on the land border, are now turning back to more dangerous sea routes in their effort to start a life elsewhere.

[iammalcolmx]

My god. I know Turkey has plenty of African immigrants and I know they can't get work. When I first started visiting Istanbul I would never see Black people. Now I see them more often. I am wondering when I will start to be treated different because of my brown skin. It may not happen though because the English I speak makes me being American pretty obvious. I think.....

[passthewine]

The whole thing is crazy. I went on a Mediterranean cruise in 2006 and during the night when the ship was going from Greece to Turkey, they(we) came upon a boat that had collapsed in the water and the cruise staff saved the people in the water. When we got to Turkey it became a huge affair because the people aboard were all refugees so Turkey wouldn't let them off our ship because they didn't have papers and were found in Greek waters, Greece didn't want them because they were trying to sneak in and weren't Greek, and obviously Holland America didn't want them because they're just a cruise company that tried to do the right thing.
The whole thing was crazycakes and that extra day in Turkey was probably one of the best days of the trip.

[decemberwedding07]

Ugh. How heartbreaking. I cannot even imagine. And the guilt you'd likely feel as a survivor? Saving a drowning person is seriously hard. Swimming in full clothing is seriously hard. Doing both without a flotation device would be damn near impossible unless you were a serious athlete/trained lifeguard. Still, you'd probably never get over the what ifs. Especially WTR the 9 children.