Tuesday 30 / April / 2024
Istanbul/Polikastro: Nine people, including two babies, were found drowned off the coast of western Turkey on Tuesday after a boat carrying people to Greece partly capsized, the coast guard said.
The fibreglass vessel partially capsized befroe dawn off the coast of Seferihisar in Izmir province, close to the Greek Island of Samos. Two people were rescued swimming to the shore, the Turkish coast guard said.
A crackdown on illegal crossing and the dangerous winter conditions have failed to deter tens of thousands from boarding flimsy boats and attempting to cross the Mediterranean in the first few weeks of the year.
More than 360 people died in the Mediterranean in January including more than 100 over the final weekend, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Tuesday.
In January, 60 children died trying to get to Greece in this way, bringing the total number of minors drowning on this route to 330 over the past five months.
IOM said more than 67,000 had arrived in Greece and Italy, the vast majority in the former, compared with 5,000 in the same month in 2015.
Meanwhile, at least 80 buses packed with migrants, many of them women and children, were backed up short of the Greek border with Macedonia on Tuesday, stranded by protests on either side of the frontier.
Taxi-drivers on the Macedonian side have blocked the railway line between the two countries, protesting over the fact that police give priority first to trains and buses to take the migrants north to Serbia en route to western Europe.
On the Greek side, farmers had parked dozens of tractors on the roadside leading to the border crossing at Idomeni, part of a protest over a planned pension reform by the Greek government to satisfy international creditors.
At least 80 buses stood on the Greek side. A camp at the frontier was at full capacity with some 700 people.
"We've been here for a few days now," said a Macedonian taxi-driver, who gave his name as Goran. "The railway is blocked, the aim is to get the authorities to talk to us about an agreement that will allow us to transport refugees to Tabanovce," on Macedonia's northern border with Serbia.
More than 1 million people fleeing poverty, war and repression in the Middle East, Asia and Africa reached Europe's shores last year, most heading for Germany.
Temperatures in the Balkans, having dropped below freezing in January, were back up into the teens, easing the journey for a growing proportion of women and children.
"From one in 10 who were children, now we are looking at a significant proportion of women and children, up to 60 per cent," Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the UN children's fund UNICEF, told a news briefing in Geneva.
Aid agencies and authorities erected tents along the route to the border, but many male migrants slept outside on the ground, lighting camp fires against the morning chill.
"It's not possible to get all these people into tents," said a refugee who gave his name as Sardar and said he was from Iraq.
"There aren't enough facilities so we spent the night on the ground."
A police official in Macedonia, who declined to be named, told Reuters: "We're working on the problem. We hope it will be resolved soon."
