On Monday, nine Egyptian men accused of steering the overcrowded former migrant fishing boat that sank on June 14 off the Peloponnese, Greece, will appear in court in Kalamata, the Greek city where the shipwreck survivors were initially taken, one of the most serious in the recent history of the Mediterranean Sea. The nine men had been arrested in recent days and accused of being part of the criminal organization that allegedly organized the trip, and of having driven the boat for various stretches, but their involvement is not yet clear.
Meanwhile in Pakistan, one of the countries from which some of the people on the former fishing boat came from, ten people were arrested who are instead accused of being traffickers in human beings: they allegedly sent many young Pakistanis to Libya, the country from which departed the boat, in order to embark towards Europe. After learning that among those involved in the shipwreck were citizens of Pakistan – 12 among the survivors – the country’s prime minister Shehbaz Sharif called a day of national mourning for Monday and ordered an investigation into the traffickers. The arrests were made in the Kashmir region.
In Greece, as in Italy, it happens more often that in cases of irregular immigration those who have found themselves driving the boats used by migrants, the so-called “smugglers”, are prosecuted rather than the traffickers of human beings actually responsible for the journeys, who they are much harder to spot and rarely board vessels trying to get to Europe. In some cases, smugglers drive these boats in the initial stages of the journey, and then abandon them in the open sea.
Those who find themselves piloting the boats later can be a person who assumes the responsibility of doing so during an emergency, someone forced to do it by violence by the traffickers, perhaps because they have sea experience, or someone who has been paid by the traffickers and yet he is often a migrant himself.
According to Community Peacemaker Teams (CPT), an NGO that follows trials of this type, in Greek prisons prisoners convicted of piloting boats used by migrants are the second largest group of prisoners, after those convicted of drug-related offences. According to the organization’s complaints, most of the trials against these people are carried out with serious procedural shortcomings: for example, without the accused having access to interpreters who speak their languages.
For the crime of trafficking in human beings, the Greek penal code, just like the Italian one, does not provide for major distinctions between the various figures involved in the trafficking of human beings: for this reason, “smugglers” can be condemned with the same harshness reserved for those organizes the crossings of migrants in exchange for money.
The arrested Egyptians, aged between 20 and 40, have been assigned public defenders. The nine men were unable to apply for asylum like the other survivors of the shipwreck e according to Christina Karvouni of Community Peacemaker Teams they were spotted and arrested by the Greek Coast Guard without it being clear, exactly, why.
After last week’s shipwreck, 78 bodies were recovered, but the number of dead people is much higher: it is estimated that there were between 400 and 750 people on board the former fishing vessel, while 104 rescued survivors are from. especially from Syria, Afghanistan and Egypt, as well as from Pakistan. The ex-trawler had set sail from Tobruk in eastern Libya and was headed for Italy.
According to the UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, the shipwreck could be the second worst in the history of immigration to the Mediterranean after the one in April 2015 that occurred just outside Libyan national waters, in which you think about 1,100 people died.