Who, and What, Is Behind 200 More Deaths in the Mediterranean?
August 10, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Migrants from Syria and Afghanistan arrive on a dinghy from Turkey to Greece, July 27, 2015. Refugees risk their lives crossing the sea from Turkey in dangerous, overcrowded boats. Photo credit: AP
Between 600 and 700 refugees were on board a fishing boat that capsized 15 nautical miles off the Libyan coast on Wednesday, August 5. More than 200 are feared drowned. “It was a horrific sight,” said Juan Matias, of Doctors Without Borders who was among those rushing to the aid of the victims. “People desperately clutching life belts, boats and anything, fighting for their lives among the drowning and those who were already dead.”
Last year, 3,200 migrants from Afghanistan, Syria, and Northern Africa died making the horrific crossing to Europe, entering through Italy and Greece and hoping to get to more prosperous Northern Europe. This year, many more are dying—in large part because the European governments have taken the position that rescuing too many of them would, in the words of a British minister at the Foreign Office, be “an unintended pull factor” encouraging more people to risk the deadly crossing.
They are being driven to a cold death in the waters of the Mediterranean or, if "lucky," being detained in European concentration camps. They are fleeing violence, terror, and social meltdown in Afghanistan, Syria, and other places where U.S. invasions, bombing campaigns, and bloody civil wars have been set in motion by the U.S. empire to overthrow regimes they saw or see as not sufficiently compliant or too aligned with rivals.
These victims are our sisters and brothers, our blood.
What is happening to them is yet another reason humanity needs and why we are building the movement for: REVOLUTION – NOTHING LESS!
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