news Sara on 28 Mar 2007 09:27 pm
Thrown to the sharks
There are an estimated 20.8 million uprooted persons worldwide. Among the many reasons one would flee their home, risking abuse, injury and often death, is to escape the dire situation they face were they to stay. Given the choice between watching your family raped, beaten tortured and killed at the hands of a known enemy vs gambling on humankind to intervene in your hour of need - what would you do?
Domestic and international conflict has led to a cottage industry of the movement of peoples across borders - a commodities service where the goods being shipped are babies, children, the sick and infirm, regular people driven from their homes and jobs, families and friends. They are rarely treated better than if they were chattel. Many die of dehydration and other easily avoidable situations.
Is is unfathomable the situation these people face. And when one comes across a story in the daily news cycle describing the latest in abuses - Somalis fleeing war being thrown to sharks off the coast of Yemen by smugglers - it is heartbreaking to think how so-called humankind is acting, once again, inhuman and unkind.
from CNN:
The victims are people “who are desperate to escape persecution, violence and poverty in the Horn of Africa,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said in a statement.
Passengers who resisted the smugglers were stabbed or beaten with wooden and steel clubs, then thrown overboard where some were attacked by sharks, the agency said it learned from survivors.
“Several recovered bodies showed signs of severe mutilation,” UNHCR said. “Survivors also reported that several Ethiopian women and at least one Somali were raped and abused by the smugglers during the voyage from Bosaso in Somalia’s Puntland region. Survivors also alleged that some Yemeni security forces confiscated their money once they reached shore.”
