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 |  Subject: Despicable Government Animals: Turkish coast guard seen beating back refugees during dangerous sea crossing  Sat Mar 12, 2016 9:13 pm | |
| The journey made by thousands of refugees and migrants daily from the Turkish coast to the nearby Greek islands is a notoriously dangerous one, with more than 440 people drowning en route this year alone.
While the dangers of the Aegean crossing are immense, they are compounded by the fact that no official life saving operation is underway in the international waters, and Turkish authorities have been trying to halt the daily departures.
Now new video from a volunteer group, reportedly taken on Friday, shows members of the Turkish Coast Guard attempting to violently stop one of the boats.
Footage posted to the Facebook page of Team Humanity, a volunteer group that has been working with refugees on the Greek islands, shows the incident.
At the start of the clip, two men, reportedly part of the Turkish Coast Guard, are seen pummeling the small rubber dinghy packed with refugees and migrants with two long oars.
Women and children can be heard screaming in the boat as they struggle to pull away from the vessel.
- Quote :
- 3 hours ago a refugee sended us this video, after we took them from the boat. This is what the Turkish coast guard did to the refugees‼️
Posted by Team Humanity on Saturday, March 12, 2016 The organization said one of the refugees aboard the boat shared the video with the volunteers after they helped them get to shore safely. Mashable has reached out to Team Humanity for more information.
SEE ALSO: This volunteer is upcycling refugee boats and life jackets into backpacks
According to data from the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR, 88% of the people crossing by sea from Turkey to Greece since the beginning of this year come from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq or other war torn countries and most quality for refugee status which offers them certain protections under international law.
NATO recently stepped up patrols in the eastern Aegean in hopes that it would slow the numbers of new arrivals. So far in 2016, nearly 150,000 people have made the crossing.
Earlier this week, the European Union and Turkey tentatively agreed to a controversial agreement aimed at combating the crisis through what's being billed as a "one-to-one" exchange.
Under the newly proposed plan, all migrants and refugees arriving on boats in Greece en route from Turkey would be turned back. In return, one Syrian in Turkey would be formally resettled in an EU country for every Syrian sent away.
Turkey in turn agreed that it would accept migrants who are picked up in the Aegean Sea, in the region that separates the country from the nearby Greek islands, as well as those who have arrived in Greece but have not yet applied for asylum there.
The two sides believe the measures could cut down on human smugglers and will more evenly distribute the burden of new arrivals, taking pressure off countries on the frontline of the crisis.
Human rights organizations have expressed concerns over the policy.
“Using Turkey as a ‘safe third country’ is absurd. Many refugees still live in terrible conditions, some have been deported back to Syria and security forces have even shot at Syrians trying to cross the border,” said Gauri van Gulik, Amnesty International’s deputy director for Europe and Central Asia.
“Europe has an absolute duty to protect refugees and must make the bold decision to fast-track significant, unconditional resettlement as a matter of urgency.”
“Refugees should not be used as bargaining chips,” said Bill Frelick, refugee rights director at Human Rights Watch, in a statement emailed to Mashable. “The integrity of the EU’s asylum system, indeed the integrity of European values, is at stake.”
Aid group Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which has been working with migrants and refugees in Europe for months voiced similar concerns in an emailed statement that called the proposal inhumane.
Turkey is already the largest host to refugees in the world, with three million refugees in the country. But people continue to flee to Europe as the conditions in the country regularly come into question.
http://mashable.com/2016/03/12/turkish-coast-guard-beat-migrants/ |
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