Twelve migrants including four children have drowned off the coast of the Greek island of Lefkada after the small boat carrying them capsized. Another fifteen people were rescued by the Greek coast-guard who launched a rescue operation after some of the migrants managed to contact the authorities via mobile phone saying that they were in trouble. Eight of the survivors are being treated in the local hospital, all of whom are from Syria.
This is only the latest incident in which migrants, many of them refugees from war-torn Syria have lost their lives off European coasts.
Such small-scale tragedies often go unreported in Europe, with only major losses of life – such as was the case in the Lampedusa tragedy – seemingly capable of causing Europe to take notice of the people dying on its doorstep.
Three hundred and sixty dead bodies floating in the Mediterranean made headlines all over Europe in October. The twelve young men that miraculously survived for nine hours in the Aegean Sea in September after their boat sank between Turkey and the Greek island of Lesvos, did not.
Successful policing of Europe’s external land borders is causing migrants to take increasingly dangerous routes to reach Europe.
“It was 11:30 at night when we passed the sea border to Greece, just half an hour after we had left Dikeli in Turkey. We hit a rock and our dinghy started taking in water. We desperately tried to empty it but suddenly it broke and started sinking. We fell into the sea. Some of us could not swim. Everybody was screaming and crying. I was holding on to a piece of wood. We stayed nine hours in the sea. I got so tired that i fell asleep in the sea on my back. Maybe I was unconscious. Then I heard someone screaming.” This account, by one of the 12 young migrants that survived the shipwreck on the night of the 14th of September was recorded by local activists in Lesvos.
Greece visible from Turkey
Lesvos is one of the Greek islands situated so close to the Turkish coast that it is visible on clear days. Its nearest point is only ten kilometers away, but conditions at sea can be treacherous.
However this dangerous journey is rapidly becoming a preferred gateway to Europe from the east by human traffickers who provide migrants with transportation. This is often in overcrowded, inflateable rubber boats and always for a small fortune.
The rise in sea-crossings is a trend also visible in Italy according to Frontex, the EU border police agency. In the first six months of 2013, they recorded 24,805 illegal border crossings into the EU. Most of these occured over the three-month period between April and June when there was a whopping 155 percent increase compared to the first three months of the year; this was the sharpest increase between two consecutive quarters ever recorded by the agency since 2008.
This rise is due partly to better weather conditions in the Mediterranean, but also to a ”sharp increase” in detections at the land border between Serbia and Hungary, according to Frontex.
Sea routes are only option
There used to be a slightly less dangerous route than the sea. But in the autumn of 2012, Frontex and Greek authorities succeeded in sealing off what since 2010 had been the major gateway for illegal migrants into Europe: The Greek-Turkish northern land border, marked by the Evros river. In 2011, police registered 57,000 crossings.
Now, thousands of migrants waiting for a chance to continue to Europe from Turkey have been left with the option of risking their lives on the sea to reach their destination – Europe and the passport-free Schengen area. 2,834 undocumented migrants were arrested in Lesvos during the first eight months of this year, compared to 253 over the same period in 2012, according to Greek police. The BBC has reported that 4,409 migrants have attempted to enter the island from mainland Turkey so far, and that 2,600 of them were arrested in Lesvos – the remainder were detected in Turkish waters and sent back.
Couldn’t swim
The ten Syrians and two others that saved each other from drowning in the Aegean over nine hours that September night, were rescued in the morning by the Yalker, a Russian cargo boat, and a fishing boat near the bay of Gera/Mytilini of Lesvos.”The people on board the Yalker gave us their clothes, coffee, something to eat. I heard others crying and I cried a lot too because I thought my friend had died. Later I saw he had survived too. Two other Syrians saved him holding his body for all the time over the water. We all survived,” said the young Syrian.
Cat and mouse
Europe’s extensive and expensive efforts to seal off its external borders are a cat-and-mouse game: Once one crossing point is closed, human traffickers find another. For the migrants that are forced to rely on these smugglers, the risk involved becomes increasingly higher.
”Mass migration is like water. You can block one course. But it will always find another”, said a police officer in the northern Greek border town of Orestiada as the massive Frontex and Greek police operation blocked the 203 kilometer land border between Turkey and Greece. In 2012 a fence was erected and new detention policies implemented.
Reception behind barbed wire
Since late September, the police in Lesvos have opened a new reception center for migrants. There, they are registered and interviewed about their travel routes before being released with a document that requires them to leave Greece within 30 days. If they are Syrians, the requirement is six months.
The reception procedures are not meant to offer protection for migrants, but are rather strategies for further control, surveillance and deterrence, claim local activists in the civic group Welcome 2 Lesvos. They see the EU’s policies as indifferent towards the dangers that migrants are exposed to – and regard the reception center as a detention facility; it is a closed camp surrounded by fences and barbed wire.
”In the last days more than 80 migrants succeeded in reaching the island of Lesvos despite the numerous illegal push-backs that take place in the Aegean Sea. These women, children and men fleeing war-torn countries, dictatorial regimes or unsustainable socio-economic conditions are subjected to violence and the indifference of the Greek and European authorities. In absence of any clear regulation, police and coast-guard authorities keep the migrants who survive the dangerous sea crossing in a legal limbo, without any form of protection, care or information,” according to the local activists.
Lost wife and toddlers in Samos
For the migrants and refugees, the stakes are high. Read the painful story of Wasim Abu Nahi, 36, a Syrian refugee of Palestinian descent. He made it across the strait from Turkey to a cliff on the Greek island of Samos with his wife and two small children – only to see them die in a forest fire.
Rescued, but feeling trapped
Greece, and the other Mediterranean countries that guard Schengen’s exterior border in the south, are often not the destinations of the migrants’ dreams. Many seek to go to countries where they have friends or relatives and might integrate easier. In the Italian city of Milan, a group of Syrians that recently survived a shipwreck outside Italy in late October explained how they felt trapped and kept in the dark about the fate of the people they were with when the boat capsized between Libya and Lampedusa:
”We are Syrians and we arrived in Italy after a shipwreck. Now we are blocked in
Milan with a lot of other Syrians because when we try to go to other
countries the police block us at the border of Italy or of Austria. We
don’t want to stay in Italy but we want to move to Germany or to Sweden where we have our friends and families. After the shipwreck some of us have been taken to Sicily, some others to Malta, others to Lampedusa; we don’t even know where the people who were in our boat are now. Our boat sunk because the Libyan police shot us just after we left Zuara. We need to know if the people we know are alive or died; and if they are alive we want to know where they are. When we arrived in Sicily, the Italian police forced us to give the fingerprint but we didn’t know that by giving fingerprints in Italy now we are not allowed to claim asylum in other countries. We ask the European Union and Italy to give us information about our relatives and comrades, and to let us move to the countries where our families are or where we wish to go.”