Since March, at least 1,072 asylum seekers have been dropped at sea by Greek officials in at least 31 separate expulsions, according to an analysis of evidence by The New York Times from three independent watchdogs, two academic researchers and the Turkish Coast Guard. The Times interviewed survivors from five of those episodes and reviewed photographic or video evidence from all 31.
“It was very inhumane,” said Najma al-Khatib, a 50-year-old Syrian teacher, who says masked Greek officials took her and 22 others, including two babies, under cover of darkness from a detention center on the island of Rhodes on July 26 and abandoned them in a rudderless, motorless life raft before they were rescued by the Turkish Coast Guard.
“I left Syria for fear of bombing — but when this happened, I wished I’d died under a bomb,” she told The Times.
This is disgusting - by the way, Australia has been doing literally this exact thing for seven years and counting, just dragging boats back to sea and calling it a day. We’ve been the world’s proving ground for treating refugees like shite for decades now.
It is fairly rare to even get a glimpse at this nowadays, because Europe does everything it can to keep this thing dark, like trying to prosecute civilian rescue efforts or grounding civilian airplanes trying to spot from the skies.
Another thing Europe now loves to do is to just outsource it to the other side of the Mediterranean like the failed state of Libya, great partners of the EU in keeping those pesky migrants out of Europe. That they are held like slaves in Libya, if they don't die at sea or in the desert, doesn't concern us very much.
Yeh, our government has been pulling the same shit. Funny how they claim to be doing the right thing, yet are clearly self aware enough to know that if the public found out was truly happening there’d be an outcry.