EU Agency: Greece Ignored Offer to Monitor Migrant Ship

Facts

• According to the European Union's border and coast guard agency, Frontex, Athens offered no response to an offer to send a plane to monitor the migrant boat that later sank. Authorities rescued 104 people, and 82 bodies have been salvaged from the wreck; UN agencies fear this is a fraction of up to 750 people who may have been on board.¹
• The fishing boat left Libya in the early hours of June 13, with approximately 750 migrants on board. A plane operated by Frontex offered to monitor the situation, but never got an answer from Greek authorities who later said the ship had requested uninterrupted passage to Italy.²
• The official accounts are contradicted by a BBC analysis of the movement of other ships on the day of the disaster. The investigation suggested that the ship with stationary for about seven hours before capsizing.²
• A representative for Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party criticized Greece's illegal and life-threatening policy on the Mediterranean earlier this week and called for an international commission to investigate Greek policies.³
• The UN has also called for an investigation. Earlier this month, a UN spokesperson said, "This is yet another example of the need of member states to come together and create orderly, safe pathways for people forced to flee."⁴
• The interior minister of Pakistan, Rana Sanaullah, addressed the National Assembly on Friday, saying that of the 104 survivors of the ship, 12 have been identified as Pakistani citizens and at least half of the passengers on board were Pakistani.⁵

Sources: ¹POLITICO, ²BBC News, ³Daily Sabah, ⁴VOA, and ⁵Aaj English TV.

Narratives

• Narrative A, as provided by Human Rights Watch. Not only has Greece abandoned asylum-seekers fleeing from impoverished, war-stricken homelands, but it has also prosecuted activists attempting to alert authorities to the whereabouts of those headed toward its borders. The government is violating international law, and Athens should allocate its resources toward defending the vulnerable instead of imprisoning them and those trying to help them.
• Narrative B, as provided by Breitbart. While politically liberal European countries are the loudest proponents of open borders, under the current system of first-to-receive-first-to-deal-with, they don't bear nearly the same responsibility dealing with migration as Greece, Italy, and Malta. Hopefully, a new system of offering money per migrant rather than settling them will be passed — if not, the entire continent will soon be overwhelmed by migration on a scale it cannot cope with.
• Establishment-critical narrative, as provided by Democracy Now. The global community's biased focus on maritime disasters shows how much work there is to be done. There was round-the-clock media coverage of the Titanic submersible wreckage, but scant coverage of this horrific catastrophe in real-time. The global media and community of nations must work together to refocus attention on the regular and tragic maritime disasters whose victims are migrants from the Global South.