On June 14, 2023, a fishing boat carrying refugees and migrants sank in the Mediterranean. One of many such incidents in recent times. It is becoming a rather regular occurrence. How many people died this time? Of course, no one knows. No one knows how many men, women, and children were loaded on that boat. Yes, ‘loaded’ like cattle as could be seen from an aerial photograph of the boat released by Greek authorities before it capsized and sank. Seventy-eight dead bodies were found and 104 people were rescued. However, as reported by CNN, the Chairman of Pakistan’s Senate, Muhammad Sadiq Sanjrani, said that more than 300 Pakistanis have been killed in the incident. Then, there were also Afghans, Egyptians, Palestinians, and Syrians on the vessel. The International Organization for Migration (IOM), a UN Agency, estimates that there were about 750 people on the packed boat which means around 650 people have perished in the sea. We will never know the exact numbers of how many people were there and how many died. Only the families of the dead will find out one day that their beloved ones will never return.
Who owned that boat and who were the organizers of that trip from Tripoli to the coasts of Italy are officially unknown. The huge network of international human traffickers and their criminal associates in travel agents, hotels, homestays, transport owners, border security, immigration, etc., are operating undauntedly in full view of the entire world. They are well-known in their respective territories. Often, they are powerful individuals or are backed by people in power.
Shahid Mehmood, a retired Pakistani civil servant knows the travel agent who charged 2.2 million Pakistani rupees for his 25-year-old son Sultan’s safe passage to Europe with assurance of a better life and earning. Mehmood’s story, published by Reuters on June 17, 2023, recounts Sultan’s ‘two to three days’ journey to Europe promised by the travel agent. Sultan was flown to Dubai, even though he had no travel documents, ID, or passport. He stayed in Dubai for 2 days. Then he was transported to Egypt, where he stayed for another 6 days. From there he was sent to Libya in a plane that was so crammed it had people sitting on the floor. He was kept in Tripoli for four months in filthy conditions before being loaded onto the aforementioned fishing boat for a 5–6 day journey to Italy. Sultan is one of the hundreds of migrants on board who are missing after the boat sank.
IOM launched a Missing Migrants Project (MMP) in 2014. It aims to document cases in which migrants, including refugees and asylum-seekers, have lost their lives while crossing state borders or during the process of migrating to an international destination.
According to the MMP database, a total of 54,125 deaths and disappearances happened along migration routes from January 2014 to December 2022. Out of these, 25,324 deaths and missing cases occurred in the Mediterranean Sea. Missing or disappearances essentially refer to deaths where dead bodies could not be found or recovered. Of course, these figures are official and must be lower than the actual number of deaths and missing individuals, since the true number of people taking part in each journey is never known.
People have been migrating since the earliest days of our existence. An article by Byerin Blakemore published on March 1, 2019, in National Geographic, asserts that humans originated in Africa and then moved out to different parts of the world around 60,000 years ago. Today we leave our home country in search of a better life, to escape various types of persecution or war, and to flee from the effects of climate change that made our ancestral homeland uninhabitable. While technology has made transportation easier and faster modern civilization has also imposed harsh restrictions on cross-border movements of people.
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This article was published in the Daily Sun on July 5, 2023. Please read the full article here or here.