It's been more than a week since choppy seas have prevented traffickers from sending their clients, indigent migrants and asylum seekers, off to find their own way to Europe. They are expecting the next wave of migrants to be a huge surge of people who have been backed up on the shores of Libya, waiting to embark. The traffickers are cruel. One of the migrants they picked up said that one day the traffickers had them line up on shore, as if they were about to begin the final leg of their journey to Europe. "Stay there" they said, and the hundreds stood on the shoreline. WHere was the boat? The boat was not ready. They were sitting ducks. The police came and arrested them for the crime of leaving the country, or trying to. The migrants figured the traffickers had called the police, so they would be arrested, abused, finally get free and have to pay the traffickers' fees all over again. People pay upwards of $2,000 U.S., more than the average annual income in Burkina Faso, for passage to Sicily in rickety boats and rubber rafts with no food, water, instruction, or direction and insufficient gas. The traffickers and the migrants must rely on rescue ships from Italy and the rest of Europe, including volunteer ships, to save them close to Libyan shores.
This according to a volunteer crew member writing in the Aquarius's ship log. Click on the caption to read the entire entry in French.
This according to a volunteer crew member writing in the Aquarius's ship log. Click on the caption to read the entire entry in French.