Images of lifeless 3-year-old refugee reflect migrants' plight
Among the 12 Syrians who have drowned off Turkey after their boat capsized on Wednesday, one of them was a little boy whose photos have sparked an international outcry over the refugee crisis.
In what could be an attempt to reach Greece, the asylum seekers’ boats sank on their way, costing at least 12 lives. What shook the entire nation was a young boy’s images lying face down on the beach without life.
The images, which were first published by Turkish media agency shortly after the bodies washed up on shore, have been all over the social networking sites. Angry protesters have tweeted about the photo saying they were highly disturbing.
A Turkish coast guard confirmed that only nine refugees out of 23 could survive with the help of life jackets. They said the boat had set off from Turkey's Bodrum peninsula in order to reach the Greek island of Kos. Unfortunately, both the boats sank.
Some of the survivors said they were from the Syrian town of Kobane and had fled to Turkey to evade the conflict in Syria caused by the Islamic State group. With Turkish media reporting and publishing images of the tragedy, relatives were seen to have broken down completely as they identified the bodies.
Sadly, the three-year-old little boy named Aylan was not alone; his brother and his mother also lost their lives. Their father named Abdullah Kurdi survived. "I came to the sea and I was scared. My heart is broken," a fisherman who saw the bodies on shore said.
While the BBC has chosen to release only one photo, other newspapers such as The Independent UK published all the graphic images, saying that the world shouldn’t turn a blind eye to the plight of the millions of refugees. Human Rights Watch deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa Nadim Houry tweeted saying that the pictures were "haunting." “Biggest indictment of collective failure,” he added.
As the image immediately drew online international condemnation, most of the politicians from Europe preferred to keep mum. However, Yvette Cooper, a leadership candidate for the UK's Labour Party, said the photograph was indicative of refugee crisis so that “we cannot keep turning our backs" on the issue.
According to International Organisation for Migration, as many as 350,000 refugees have travelled to Europe since January without fearing consequences and risking lives. The report that IOM released showed that at least 2,600 refugees have died drowning in a bid to cross the Mediterranean in the same period.
As Hungary refugee crisis reaches its second night, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has made plans to meet with other members of the European Union on Thursday to figure out ways to cope with the emergency. Similarly in Germany, the Interior minister would be addressing the parliament after a planned asylum center was left burning.
Federica Mogherini, the European Union foreign policy chief, suggested nations to take a united stand at this hour. Meanwhile, Czech authorities also said that refugees travelling without proper identity documents would be rightaway removed from trains.
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