This picture taken on Friday shows Syrian refugees rescued off the coast of Cyprus waiting to leave the port in Limassol for a camp on the outskirts of the capital Nicosia.
AFP/Reuters/Geneva
More than 3,000 migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean so far this year, more than double the previous peak in 2011, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said yesterday.
Europe is by far the most dangerous destination for “irregular” migrants, the organisation found in a report, with 3,072, or 75%, of the 4,077 registered migrant deaths worldwide since January happening in the Mediterranean.
In the 216-page report titled Fatal Journeys: migrant fatalities across land and sea, IOM said more than 40,000 people had perished since 2000 while migrating – 22,000 of them while trying to reach Europe.
“It’s time to do more than count the number of victims,” IOM director-general William Lacy Swing said in a statement.
“It’s time to engage the world to stop this violence against desperate migrants,” added Swing, whose agency is not part of the United Nations but works closely with the world body.
The IOM report comes just weeks after one of the deadliest wrecks on record, when a ship carrying some 500 migrants, including Syrians, Palestinians and Egyptians and an estimated 100 children, sank.
The 11 known survivors have said the traffickers organising their dangerous crossing from North Africa deliberately sank the vessel off Malta.
That catastrophe came less than a year after two shipwrecks near the Italian island of Lampedusa left more than 400 migrants dead, catapulting the issue into international headlines.
The grim tally of Mediterranean deaths during the first nine months of 2014 is already more than double the previous peak of 1,500 during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings and nearly five times the prior peak of 630 in 2007, the Geneva-based organisation said.
The soaring number of deaths “likely reflects a dramatic increase in the number of migrants trying to reach Europe”, the report said.
More than 112,000 “irregular migrants” were detected by Italian authorities during the first eight months of this year – nearly three times as many as in all of 2013, it said.
“Many are fleeing conflict, persecution and poverty,” the report said, with people trying to escape Syria’s bloody civil war and Eritreans fleeing their repressive regime and forced, decades-long conscription accounting for the largest groups arriving in Italy this year.
The deteriorating security situation in Libya, a transit country for many migrants, is also pushing up the numbers of people trying to make it to Europe by any means possible, it said.
Elsewhere in the world, more than 6,000 migrants perished along the US-Mexican border between 1998 and 2013, meaning nearly 400 people died there annually over the 16-year-period.
Around 100 people have also died on average each year since 2000 in the seas bordering Australia, while thousands of others have succumbed in Africa’s Sahara Desert and in the Indian Ocean.
The IOM meanwhile warned that the actual numbers were likely far higher, pointing to the lack of detailed statistics and the fact that many migrants die in remote regions of the world and their deaths are never recorded.
Information is patchy and trends vary regionally, said Frank Laczko, head of IOM’s migration research division who led the study launched after 360 mainly Eritrean migrants drowned in a shipwreck last October near the Italian island of Lampedusa.
“What you do see in the last year or so, on the US-Mexico border there has been a decline in the number of deaths, in the border region near Australia there has been a decline, but in the Mediterranean we have seen a massive surge in the number of people dying,” Laczko told a news briefing. “Some experts now believe that for every dead body discovered there are at least two others that are never recovered.”
Swing pointed out that one in seven people around the world are currently considered migrants, lamenting the “harsh response to migration in the developed world”.
“Limited opportunities for safe and regular migration drive would-be migrants into the hands of smugglers, feeding an unscrupulous trade that threatens the lives of desperate people,” he said.
“We need to put an end to this cycle,” he said, insisting that “undocumented migrants are not criminals but human beings in need of protection and assistance, and deserving respect”.
The Geneva-based agency has kept records on Europe since 1988, Laczko said, adding: “I don’t think we’ve seen a year when we had so many deaths as this year. It’s still September.”
The going price for crossing the Mediterranean is between $2,000 and $4,000 a person, and smugglers are believed to have earned $500,000 on a single voyage, spokesman Joel Millman said.
“When Syria got even worse this year with ISIS taking over parts of the country, that’s when you started seeing a lot more Syrians on these boats,” Millman said.
“In the 51-day conflict in Gaza when the ceasefire finally came, that’s when you started seeing a lot of Palestinians coming, and the breakdown of authority in Libya created an opportunity,” he said, citing the chaotic North African state.
The IOM said survivors and relatives of the dead should be encouraged to speak out to help prevent further tragedies.
“That’s really our point today, to draw attention to the enormous inhumanity that’s taking place and we need to galvanise international opinion and try to amplify the voices of those who have lost loved ones so that others don’t take this foolhardy step and walk into the hands of smugglers who have nothing but cynicism in their hearts,” IOM spokesman Leonard Doyle said.
The IOM also called for more concerted investigation and prosecution of human smugglers.
In many cases migrants often disappear and die without a trace, and their families never know their fate, the IOM said.
“In the majority of cases we’re not even able to determine the gender of person who has died. We have very basic information about the numbers of deaths and missing persons,” Laczko said, noting that many returned bodies were decomposed.
