FROM OUR REPORTER
KALAMATA – Kalamata Out of duty. Or for organizational needs. “This is the list.” The employee stops in the doorway of the coast guard offices in Kalamata, four blue walls and a flag. She holds a dozen sheets in her hand. She spells out in slow English: Â «I tell you again. Here are 104 names. These are the survivors.For anyone who isn’t on this list, there’s no more hopeTO”. It means over 600 Syrians, Egyptians and Pakistanis who were on the trawler that sank on the night between Tuesday and Wednesday, 45 nautical miles off the Peloponnese coast: missing who pass to deaths.
Champions of Dna
About twenty relatives of these victims listen to the employee: «There is only one hope, and that is that in the chaos and with the language problems, the name was spelled wrong». Minimal possibility, close to nothing. On the third day, the authorities stop patrolling the sea. Last clarification: “Families can send DNA samples through embassies. They will be confronted with the 78 corpses. If there is a match, the families will be notified. There are 40 days of time». Every humanitarian disaster opens up a bureaucratic odyssey.
Ahmed is also in front of the Coast Guard office, an Egyptian who speaks with a Milanese accent. He is 23 years old and lives in Corsico, on the edge of the Lombard capital. On the sunken boat was his cousin, 19 years old, departed from El Gharbia. Ahmed’s story contains the human drama and a reconstruction that could prove decisive for understanding what caused the second most serious massacre in the history of migration in the Mediterranean: «My cousin left with three friends from Tobruk. The route involves a line up to an oil rig, then veers west. No one explains how the boat ended up near Greece. Thursday evening here among the survivors I spoke with the three friends who were traveling with my cousin, they told me that they had joked for a long time, don’t worry. Then there was the engine failure. They said that the Coast Guard threw a rope, which was tied to the fishing boat, then they set off, but it is as if the lookout gave too strong a pull: the fishing boat started to dance and capsized. They were all close, but once they fell into the sea they no longer understood anything, perhaps my cousin was unable to stay afloat».
Three hours of observation
Il the key theme is that of the rope. The testimony gathered byCourier coincides with three other survivors’ stories circulated by Greek parliamentarians and a Red Cross employee. The Coast Guard first denied the presence of any ropesthen revealed to the newspaper Kathimerini that “just before 11 pm the crew has turned the lights on the fishing boat and informed the passengers on loudspeakers that they were in danger. The coastguards also used a rope to hook the vessel and check the conditions inside it.’ A version later repeated by the government spokesman, Ilias Siakantaris, with the clarification that “the episode would have occurred at 11 pm”, while the boat sank around 2 am. From on board they would have said “we want to go to Italy”. However: “There was no towing attempt.”
There are no other confirmations on the towing manoeuvre, but what happens before is also relevant. According to the few official documents, the Coast Guard reconstruction claims that a patrol boat from Crete hooked up to the vessel at 10.40pm on Tuesday, and followed him at a distance until 1.40, “not encountering any problems in navigation”. He means three hours of observation. Which translated, according to multiple sources consulted by Courierand net of the reports on the boat in trouble since the morning, it means only one thing: “They were escorting the vessel hoping it would be able to enter Italian waters».
Not new situation. And that also occurs because migrants and the Coast Guard up to a certain point have convergent interests: Greece wants to avoid a humanitarian emergency, migrants fear being trapped in a country from which reaching Northern Europe becomes almost impossible.
Key point: understand when a vessel is in danger. An assessment which, influenced by political indications, can determine the life or death of hundreds of people. Certainly, always considering the Greek reconstruction, there was no adequate intervention deployment when the trawler sank. For such a scenario, Greece was condemned by the European Court of Human Rights on 7 July 2022. The facts date back to January 2014, a boat with 27 Afghan migrants sinks near the island of Farmakonisi, facing Turkey. Eleven victims. That day, only one coast guard lookout was to the rescue (as in the shipwreck three days ago) and the migrant boat capsized in an attempt to tow it with a rope (as reported by the survivors of Tuesday night).