Routes and Camps After Turkey had opened its borders, thousands of refugees made their way to the border with Greece. Greece refused to accept them, and security forces there deployed water cannons and tear gas to prevent them from crossing the border, with at times considerable force. Those who had been forced back had to spend the winter near the Greek border without any food or sanitary facilities. Such illegal interventions (so-called pushbacks) which force back refugees before they have the chance to apply for asylum contravene international law which guarantees the right to apply for asylum. The course of war can also have a significant impact on refugee routes as those seeking safety naturally try to avoid areas of active combat. Natural obstacles such as mountains or bodies of water can pose additional risks. Crossing the sea in order to escape has always been particularly dangerous. The 2015 photograph of Alan Kurdi, the young boy lying dead on a beach on the Turkish coast, came to symbolise the plight of refugees on their route across the Mediterranean. Alan’s family had sought to escape the Syrian civil war by making their way from Turkey to Greece in an overcrowded rubber dinghy. The photograph put a face and a name to an individual, appearing as it did among the vast number of the drowned. It served as a wake-up call for the international community. More often than not, the boats available to refugees are barely seaworthy, and one of the greatest dangers is the sheer difficulty of navigating on the open sea, for which refugees are often not sufficiently equipped. Between 2016 and 2018 the MS Aquarius of the aid organisation SOS Méditerranée carried out rescue operations for vessels in distress. In the summer of 2016, it took aboard several passengers from a wooden boat drifting about 25 miles off the Libyan coast. The analogue compass the refugees had taken with them was retained by the Aquarius’ captain, Alexander Moroz. It is a simple, mass-produced compass of Chinese manufacture with a power socket for back lighting, but it cannot be used to determine a course. To navigate, one would need to know the boat’s actual position at sea and consult a map for orientation – an item rarely available aboard a refugee vessel. This is why these boats fail to be on, or stick to, any course and often drift for days on the open sea. Rescue by an aid organisation is therefore practically the refugees’ only chance of survival. ANALOGUE COMPASS China, c. 2015
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTMyNjA1