Author:Saad Hasan | trtworld.com | 16 January 2019
The desperate people who have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea paid huge sums of money to reach Europe, while they could have afford air journeys to escape conflict and persecution — only if they were allowed to.
Before he died in 2017, Hans Rosling, the famous physician and statistician, often questioned why so many refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe were drowning.
In 2014, more than 3,000 of them died. Many more perished in the following years. As pictures of dead children like Aylan Kurdi surfaced, pressure mounted on governments in the Europe Union to do something.
The EU’s response was to call for more policing and to send out the coast guard to stop human traffickers. They coordinated with countries such as Libya, from where the refugees were coming, so they could be stopped even before embarking on the perilous boat ride.
Rosling was a man of numbers and facts. He researched and later wrote in his book Factfulness, that people weren’t dying only because of greedy traffickers — the tragedy was a result of stifling European regulations.
Refugees took sea journeys from Libya and Turkey on rickety inflatable boats because that mode of transportation was cheap. Read more>>>