When the water is safer than the land, the choice is easy: water. Hundreds of war refugees get on board each and every day. By wind, by rough sea. Boats ready to fall apart, smugglers who abandon the boats within the Turkish territorial waters. The new boat captain can be anyone able to drive a … motorcycle. The journey outcome is predicted: either the boat falls apart and men, women and children land in the water or the overloaded boats approach Greece’s shores. Volunteers and locals jump into the cold water and rush to help.
WARNING! Some picture can be very tough for sensitive people.
It’s almost biblical…
Jesus Christ Superstar – the picture went viral on the internet: A member of the Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms rescue a refugee baby from the cold waters of the Aegean Sea.
Little refugee angels – Syrian children wrapped in emergency blankets against hypothermia somewhere in Lesvos.
Some angels didn’t make it. From September 2nd to October 26th at least 69 infants and children lost their life in the Aegean Sea.
During the last two days, the bodies of 31 infants and children were recovered from the sea. They were drowned in 7 boat incidents off the Greek islands of Lesvos, Samos, Agathonisi, Kalymnos and Rhodes.
For some the long journey ends in the water, at the shore.
What is left behind are the traces on the sand, a ring…
…and the shame on Europe.
It’s a SHAME for “Christian” Europe that closes its eyes to the problem, when…
at the same time, a simple guy, an elderly fisherman from Lesvos dives in the cold water to help save refugees from drowning.
These pictures need to go all over the world, not only in Greece. If you watch foreign TV stations, you will see that the Greek situation has been put on the back line. Central & Northern Europe & American attention to this severe problem is unforgivable.
And since their Governments are doing very little, other than having meetings how to manage this situation, with no results. why do the people of each country not become sensitized & offer their help, either as what items are needed, money or offer their voluntary assistance. I cannot believe this human crisis is being ignored by the whole world and leaving it to Greece! There are so many good people out there, they must act on a personal basis, cause if you wait for the institutions, you’ll be waiting!!!
God help these people!!
I’m afraid the European Union is disintegrating into a confederate shamble of small minded states through lack of leadership.
Angela Merkel tried to take a lead on the issue but faced immense pressure from within her government and other EU states that she had to pull back. She should have been supported but opposition politicians see an oportunity to exploit inherant fears that many people have of foreigners, for a politcal springboard.
It is shameful and disgraceful when human lives are at stake.
Unless the EU wakes up to fact that it should be a Union pulling together rather than pulling itself apart for the sake of transient popularity, Greece Italy and some other countries will muddle on.
Sadly, the EU is more concerned with how to process the paperwork or allocate numbers than the human lives the paperwork and numbers represent. If human suffering was on the EU agenda, they would have noted the humanitarian crisis the bailout imposed on Greece. And the member states are no better. Frau Merkel “invites” hundreds of thousands to come to her country without a thought of how they might get there nor the burden she placed on the people of the nations being traversed, no less a plan to provide for the people on arrival.
However, the “crisis” does get the professional politicians a lot of press coverage as they act concerned and point fingers.
I doubt that Europe’s politicians will be moved by such pictures. They got into their positions of power by ignoring other people’s needs and problems, and focusing on their own careers and money-grubbing. Expect nothing from them, and you will not be disappointed.The least competent among them is the idiot president of France — Hollande. He is competing with Papandreou for the title of “World Idiot”.