The death toll in the last 48 hours has added to more than 50 who have drowned in just three days as seasonal changes in the Aegean turn the wind-whipped sea between Turkey and Greece into a deadly passage for thousands.
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At least three more people – a woman, a child and a baby – died when another migrant boat sank off the nearby Greek island of Rhodes, and three more are missing.
Spyros Galinos, the mayor of Lesvos, which has seen the biggest influx of all the Aegean islands, called on European officials to reach an agreement with Turkey for refugees to be processed on the neighboring country’s soil.
The latest deaths followed the drowning of 17 people, 11 of them children, Wednesday off the islands of Lesbos and Samos also in the Aegean.
“When are these people going to be saved?” asks Aphrodite.
Survivors of Thursday’s and Friday’s latest tragedies told Greek local media that they had been forced to get on the old wooden boats at gunpoint by Turkish traffickers. Two hundred people crossed the Aegean Sea from Turkey one day, 300 another day, 2,000 another. Eight more people drowned at two other locations, bringing the day’s total dead to 16. Often they are too cold to sleep at night without proper shelter or warm clothes, and temperatures are expected to drop as low as -4 degrees as winter conditions set in.
Many of those killed in the incident are children, the coastguard said on Friday.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras slammed European leaders on Friday for their “ineptness” in handling the flood of refugees reaching the continent.
The bodies of four young children were also recovered.
They then stay in makeshift, dirty camps while they wait for permits from the Greek authorities which allow them to board ferries to Athens, from where they will travel through the Balkans towards Western Europe. “We don’t know. And even if they stay here there are no jobs”. They have urged for more efforts to achieve a political resolution of the Syrian war and in the meantime strengthened cooperation with Turkey to deal with smuggling networks on Turkish shores. The weather conditions were bad, but the coast guard was quickly informed of the tragedy and the wreckage was located close to the port.
“We fear it’s getting worse”, says Ron Redmond, regional spokesperson for the UNHCR.
Judith Sunderland of Human Rights Watch said there is an urgent need to boost Greece’s search-and-rescue capacity with more vessels from Frontex, the EU’s border protection agency.
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Refugee arrivals on the island of Lesbos alone surged during October to approximately 125,000 – double the arrivals in August. While that may be an over-statement, the crisis has pitted countries like 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.
