On June 14, 2023, the news broke of the shipwreck of a ship in the Ionian Sea (Greece), in which there were a couple of dozen deaths. As the hours passed, the death toll continued to rise and two days later there was already talk of 81 fatalities. And what was even more chilling: there were “hundreds” missing in the waters of the Mediterranean. As it is unknown exactly how many people were on the ship, there is talk of half a thousand human beings who surely drowned.
Four days later, that is to say on June 18, the news of the migrants in the Mediterranean went to the background because five millionaires aboard a submersible called Titan had disappeared on their way to the depths of the ocean, where they hoped to see the remains of the Titanic. . And so the media focused its gaze on the wealthy who paid $250,000 to see a sunken ship and forgot about the 500 missing migrants.
In this way, the initial indignation over the Mediterranean tragedy lost strength, and the reactions of religious leaders, the UN Secretary-General and thousands of demonstrators who, in Greece, protested against the EU’s migration policies, vanished. Despite this, little by little some testimonies have emerged accusing the Greek Coast Guard of having tried to tow the fishing boat where between 500 and 750 people were crowded, many of them children and women.
The Greek authorities have denied that something like this happened, although later the interim government spokesman, Ilias Siakandaris, told ERT public television that the coast guard did use a rope “to hold on and to get closer (to the ship), to see if they wanted to help”, but never to tow the boat. A debate that sounds frivolous if one thinks that only 104 people were rescued alive (all men) and the fate of between 330 and 580 human beings is unknown, who will surely join the list of dead in a sea that is called by some means “the largest underwater mass grave on the planet”.
And while countries like Pakistan take DNA samples to identify the bodies of their compatriots killed in the Mediterranean tragedy, small boats and weak vessels continue to reach European shores On June 21, a child died and 30 people disappeared near the coast of the Canary Islands, in Spain, and NGOs continue to criticize Europe’s inaction in the face of repeated tragedies in the Mediterranean. Hopes of recovering the bodies of the missing persons? Very few.
