EU divisions on full display as more migrants wash ashore
LESBOS, Greece — Drowned babies and toddlers washed onto Greece’s famed Aegean Sea beaches, and a grimfaced diver pulled a drowned mother and child from a half-sunk boat that was decrepit long before it sailed.
On shore, bereaved women wailed and stunned-looking fathers cradled their children.
At least 27 people, more than half of them children, died in waters off Greece on Friday trying to fulfill their dream of a better life in Europe. The tragedy came two days after a boat crammed with 300 people sank off Lesbos, leaving 29 dead in one of the worst accidents of its kind. It won’t be the last. As autumn storms threaten to make the crossing from Turkey even riskier and conditions in Middle Eastern refugee camps deteriorate, ever more refugees — mostly Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis — are joining the rush to reach Europe.
More than 60 people, half of them children, have died in the past three days alone.
Highlighting political friction in the 28-nation European Union, Greece’s left-wing prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, cited the horror of the new drownings to accuse the bloc of ineptitude and hypocrisy in handling the crisis.
Hungary’s right-wing foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, used the same word — hypocrisy — about critics of his country’s fencing off of its southern border to keep migrants out.
Szijjarto described the influx as the biggest challenge the EU has ever faced. The crisis has pitted countries such as Greece, with well over 500,000 arrivals so far, against eastern Europeans who are unwilling to take in refugees — or, like Hungary, insist that anyone leaving a relatively safe country, such as Turkey or Greece, for a wealthy one like Germany is by definition an economic migrant.
Speaking in Athens, Tsipras accused Europe of an “inability to defend its (humanitarian) values” by providing a safe alternative to the sea journeys.
“The waves of the Aegean are not just washing up dead refugees, dead children, but (also) the very civilization of Europe,” he said, dismissing Western shock at the children’s deaths as “crocodile tears.”
Tsipras’ government has appealed for more assistance from its EU partners. It argues that those trying to reach Europe should be registered in camps in Turkey, then flown directly to host countries under the EU’s relocation program to spare them the sea voyage. But it has resisted calls to demolish its own border fence with Turkey.
Greece’s Merchant Marine Ministry said 19 people died and 138 were rescued near the eastern island of Kalymnos early on Friday when a battered wooden pleasure boat capsized.
At least three more people — a woman, a child and a baby — died when another boat sank off the nearby island of Rhodes, while an adult drowned off Lesbos.
Nearly 600 people were rescued by the Greek coast guard in the past 24 hours.