Missing migrants at sea
The silence is deafening
Rumour has it that if a tree falls in a forest, no-one would hear it fall. What if that tree was a human body, gently coming to rest on the bed of the sea. Only the deep sea marine life might care.
This is what happens every day when migrants risk their lives to cross the treacherous Mediterranean waters to reach Europe in the hope of building a new future.
Mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, people like you and me with families and lives back home, go missing at sea, with barely a ripple being felt in the noisy media sphere. At least not what this misfortune deserves.
The sad reality is that except in rare cases where either news makes it to the public domain, or maritime government authorities receive distress calls from a sinking ship, no-one is looking for most of these missing persons, mostly presumed dead.
And I can assure you that no-one in the world will hear a sound when the lifeless bodies of these brothers and sisters in humanity, made of the same flesh and blood as us, softly touch the bottom of the ocean.
You know when you go to buy a new mattress and you spend your time falling back onto different beds as if you were training for the landing squad of the Olympic high jump team? Well it’s a little like that, only much, much softer. And, of course, you’re dead.
They are dead.
And I say this with full respect for them and their families.
Are you with me now?
Good.
What is worse in this case is that no-one knows where they went. Undercurrents of any sea, let alone a body of water the size of the Mediterranean, play with the contents of its intestines until all the cards are unevenly shuffled, until the entire set of Scrabble letters have been mixed up in the bag.
Wait a minute. This isn’t some kind of board game. These are people’s lives we are talking about here. These people are someone’s relative, someone’s friend.
Let that sink in for a moment.
And now this.
The luckiest who hit rock bottom are recovered on the spot, extracted and brought back from the depths as if they were given a second chance to live. Alas, they are still dead.
For everyone else it’s anyone’s guess from here on in. What’s certain is that a maritime grave is not like a grave in the ground. Suffice to say that search and recovery, not to mention identification, becomes a whole lot harder when you are not even dealing with a whole corpse, but (decomposed) body parts, sometimes settled, mostly swirling around in the undertow.
So even while you are dead at the bottom of the ocean you are praying that someone will come and find your body as soon as possible. The longer the wait, the less likely it will be possible to find anything but bones, even those disguised and buried amidst the sludge of the ocean floor.
The wait
I don’t understand. I’m here, you shout hoarsely from the bottom of the sea, the seaweed lodged in your nostrils threatening to silence you at any moment.
The silence responds…with more silence. And we wait… and they wait… Nothing.
Allow me to dip into your daily tribulations.
You think waiting for the results of a job application are hard?
Remember how the road rage bubbles up from within when your car gets stuck in a measly ten minutes of rush hour traffic?
Now multiply this by 52,560. That’s equal to one year of waiting.
Go ahead and tell me you would be able to put up with that. Then consider that some people have been waiting decades for their loved ones.
I can assure you that the depth of pain the family is feeling is unfathomable. So dark, so deep.
Can you imagine the pain of not knowing?
What if you lost your child, your parent, your sibling, a close relative or friend? How warm did it make you feel inside when you last celebrated their birthday, graduation or some other occasion? Or like when they took their first steps?
Go ahead and return to your traffic jam. What if instead of your job you were waiting for your missing relative? Would you even have the strength to go back to work?
Well then, how can you just sit there and accept that your fellow humans are suffering one of the worst kinds of suffering. Not knowing.
What if you watched your own relative drown in front of you?
Now don’t you think you should do something?
We hear news of children going missing in different countries, followed by the rapid mobilisation of a wide range of government agencies and civil society until the family’s suffering is put at ease. It is strange to say (some of) these families are lucky, given the circumstances, and of course it is unthinkable to compare different types of suffering.
But when you think of the bodies of migrants lost at sea…
Who will look for them? Their families at home don’t have the means to start a search effort or to hire a lawyer. Why is no-one rushing to rescue the bodies of these ill-fated souls from the ocean?
The simple answer is that no-one is interested. There is no interest at stake.
The lives of these humans are not valued in the same way other humans are.
In fact, there is something very sick here about the semantic link between ‘being interested’ and ‘interest’. Why do we associate intrinsic value with transient monetary worth? This makes me think back to the very recent history of slavery. The wholesale trade of human beings as objects. The dehumanisation of a whole section of society, at least that was the belief system the slave traders wanted everyone to buy into.
What is so different here?
Leap of faith
Migrants put their lives on the line, sell their future to illegal smugglers for a one-off chance to win a cheap lottery, only this time it’s like playing Russian roulette. One wrong slip and game over. You join the hundreds and thousands of lifeless souls swallowed by the choppy waters.
You reassure yourself that the horrible weather at the surface will be much better at the bottom of the ocean. You have sunk to those depths. You are already gone.
But you knew that the moment you chose to leave home. You knew. Everyone knew. But back home it must have been so hopeless otherwise why would you have decided to take this perilous, nay hopeless journey?
Remember Alan Kurdi?
I ask you earnestly, why would someone willingly decide to leave their country, their family and friends, their culture for the unknown?
For that?!
And do we really need more heartbreak like that to happen in order to be moved?
Have we lost all human feeling?
Little do you know that over there in the imaginary paradise that is the only dream keeping you physically and mentally afloat on this journey through hell, not everyone gets why you all keep coming to their country. They are dealing with their own relative struggles. Yes, you would say, but surely it can’t be as bad as mine. And that may be the case, but some would say one always sees the grass greener on the other side. And besides, life revolves in cycles. Some are on the up while others tumble down the hill. One never quite knows when the tide will turn.
Forgotten?
Of course not everyone is turning a blind eye to the plight of migrants. Many individuals, civil society organisations, international organisations, and government officials are doing their utmost to respond to this human tragedy.
But this is still not enough.
Most efforts are directed at helping those who are still alive. It is true that there are so many more survivors than dead persons. But since when was human life calculated in pure numbers? Since when did we start to rationalise loss of life in some kind of corporate cost-benefit ratio? Since when did we agree for dead people and their families to not count anymore?
So why recover the dead?
Hold on a moment. Are we really asking ourselves this question?
There are a number of concrete reasons why helping recover the dead is just as important as helping those who survived these dangerous journeys.
Think of the family left behind. They want closure. And international law says families have a right to know. They want to be able to bury their loved one, to have a place to mourn them and honour their life, just like anyone would.
As long as families don’t have answers about the fate of their missing relatives, they cannot move on with their lives. They may need legal papers to remarry, to receive their rightful inheritance, to receive compensation or to demand justice through legal recourse.
But what about dignity for the dead? Doesn’t every dead person deserve a dignified burial place?
Would you be happy if the body of your relative was floating around in the ocean somewhere?
I didn’t think so.
What if an organisation existed that had the hands-on experience to play a role in ensuring the best possible chances of identifying dead bodies when recovered from such turbulent places as the sea?
Search and recovery operations in such environments can be challenging enough, let alone when the chips are stacked against the first responders. To conduct successful complex recoveries that factor in the human element, experts need real-life experience. And no one recovery is the same as another.
Professional international search and recovery team
International Search and Recovery Team for Missing Persons (ISRT) is an NGO specialised in complex recoveries. The experienced team members operate with the highest ethical, forensic standards and protocols possible according to international laws. The team members of ISRT for Missing Persons have extensive experience in complex forensic terrestrial/underwater/survey and recovery operations, humanitarian operations regarding missing persons from past/current and armed conflicts, human rights abuses and/or organised violence.
ISRT for Missing Persons operates closely with and assists international governments and humanitarian / human rights organisations in Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) and Mass Fatality Management.
If you are interested in volunteering for ISRT for Missing Persons, please contact the NGO’s founder, Mr E. Kenn. Broekman, via the contact details on the website.
ISRT welcomes any sponsors to support their work to bring closure to those left behind.
Honour the dead. Their families still have to go on living.
The dead have gone, true. But they deserve a dignified end to their lives, and their families deserve to be able to move on.
Unfortunately the chances are you will not hear much about missing migrants. Please go and find out. Now is the time to act. It is a question of the future of our collective humanity.
