On the jetty of the port of Kalamata (Greece), in the dark, shortly before 11 p.m., a coastguard ship moors away from the prying eyes of onlookers, who have come to bring food and clothing for the hundred survivors of the sinking which occurred on Wednesday June 14 off the Peloponnese peninsula.
Red Cross volunteers watch the scene gravely. “They are bringing back the dead… Now there is no hope of finding any more survivors”, whispers one of them. A refrigerated truck is parked in front of the boat and the transport begins. The 79 bodies found must be taken to the morgue in Corinth or that of Athens, a hundred kilometers away to allow the bodies to be identified and the families to grieve.
“But this figure will obviously increase over the hours and we could have hundreds of deaths”, cowardly, exhausted, Dimitris Haliotis, Red Cross first aider. Since early morning, the forty-year-old has been providing first aid to around sixty rescued men, mostly Syrians, Egyptians and Pakistanis, temporarily housed in a disused hangar. Lying on mattresses and wrapped in gray blankets, their faces are scarred with trauma and fatigue. Behind a barricade, they are surrounded by police, coastguards and soldiers.
“They are psychologically and physically very weak. They had been traveling for six days in a boat where they were on top of each other… They didn’t even have a place to defecate, they were dehydrated and hadn’t eaten well for days”underlines Orestis Koulopoulos, an emergency doctor who affirms that, since the morning, about twenty have been admitted to the hospital for hypothermia, fever or hypoglycemia.
Increased risk taking
According to reports from refugees, there were 750 of them crammed together without life jackets on a decrepit blue trawler, the photo of which was shared by the Greek coast guard. It is the worst shipwreck off the coast of the country since June 2016.
According to several sources, the boat left from Tobruk, a port city in eastern Libya, less than 150 kilometers from the Egyptian border. For about a year, the number of departures from this north-eastern region known as Cyrenaica has increased considerably, while a majority of migrants have hitherto been trying to reach Europe from the coastal region of Tripoli. In June, half of the departures took place from the East, controlled by Marshal Khalifa Haftar and the Libyan National Army (ANL).
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