Editor:
For the first several years of my lengthy career criss-crossing the world’s oceans, I was employed on Liverpool-owned freighters trading between West Africa to Europe and North America.
It was an exciting time, coming from a hard-scabble UK childhood, where food was rationed for a decade after World War II, and entering a world where many West African countries were achieving independence from colonial powers in Europe. The air was filled with hope and expectations; many African women wearing colourful flowing cotton dresses printed all over with a political party logo and the face of its leader.
Everywhere was banking on a bright future, but sad reality set in after not too many years. Several of those countries that I had so enjoyed visiting back then became engulfed in military coups, civil strife, tribal wars, dictatorships and rampant corruption, causing many residents to take all kinds of risks in trying to get to Europe for a better life.
These thoughts crossed my mind when recently reading that between 35 and 40 migrants had drowned in a flimsy rubber dinghy that left the west coast of Morocco with about 60 people on board, bound for the Canary Islands about 100 kilometres away in the South Atlantic Ocean. Being part of Spain, the islands are a point of entry into Europe for asylum-seekers, but almost 600 drowned attempting the crossing last year alone.
A week before, a fishing boat with about 750 people crammed on board, like the proverbial sardines, had rolled over and sank off the coast of Greece. It was bound from Tobruk, Libya to Italy, and only about 80 asylum-seekers were rescued by the Greek Coast Guard; the others were tragically added to the many thousands who have perished making similar hazardous crossings of the Mediterranean Sea in the past few years.
While these asylum-seekers were drowning with minimal attention, the world’s media was focused on the search for an unclassified experimental submarine carrying billionaire adventurers to view the wreck of S.S. Titanic in international waters of the North Atlantic.
That story was leading every newscast for three or four days as the drama gripped world attention, similar to the 33 Peruvian miners trapped underground in 2010, and the Thai schoolboy soccer team trapped in the cave in 2018.
Everybody reading this will have heard about the sad outcome of the latest Titanic misadventure, but how many will have taken note of the asylum-seekers from Africa, Middle East and Asia who perished in these other recent disasters at sea.
Bernie Smith
