{"id":237887,"date":"2023-06-26T12:00:12","date_gmt":"2023-06-26T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=237887"},"modified":"2023-06-24T08:16:44","modified_gmt":"2023-06-24T07:16:44","slug":"a-titanic-disparity-in-how-the-world-responds-to-maritime-disasters-center-vs-periphery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/06\/a-titanic-disparity-in-how-the-world-responds-to-maritime-disasters-center-vs-periphery\/","title":{"rendered":"A Titanic Disparity in How the World Responds to Maritime Disasters: Center vs. Periphery"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Democracy NOW!<\/p><\/div>\n

22 Jun 2023 – <\/em>Titan and Adriana are two vessels recently lost at sea, four days and 4,000 miles apart. The five men who lost their lives on the Titan have been getting wall-to-wall coverage in the media worldwide. Meanwhile, the estimated 700 who died when the Adriana sank off the coast of Greece, mostly women and children, have been essentially forgotten. Passengers on the Titan were wealthy; two were billionaires. Each had paid $250,000 for an adventure of a lifetime, a deepsea dive to view the wreckage of the Titanic, the \u201cunsinkable\u201d passenger liner that sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg. Those crammed onto the ramshackle Adriana fishing boat were seeking not adventure but refuge from war, poverty, climate change or any of the many other life-threatening crises that force people to flee their homes with little more than the clothes on their back. They paid human traffickers to ferry them from Libya to Europe.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most notable difference between these two disasters was how the world responded to them. Governments immediately spent millions mounting a search and rescue operation to find the Titan, submerged somewhere in the north Atlantic, deep below an area twice the size of Connecticut. Media outlets provided continuous coverage, with one launching a countdown clock predicting when the submersible\u2019s oxygen would run out. The U.S. Coast Guard and Navy and the Canadian government sent planes and boats to the search area. France and Canada each deployed deep sea robots. People around the world watched and waited breathlessly.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in Greece, officials knew the exact location of the overcrowded, disabled Adriana. Shocking details are now emerging of its sinking on June 14th. First-hand accounts, reported in El Pais, suggest the Greek Coast Guard could have saved the doomed vessel\u2019s 400-750 passengers, but opted not to.<\/p>\n

El Pais reported:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Greek authorities had been aware of the ship\u2019s presence since 11 a.m. on June 13 and, in addition to keeping it under surveillance, ordered two ships in the area to deliver food and water to those onboard. They never activated a rescue operation, despite the conditions in which the ship was sailing, not even when the ship\u2019s engine broke down at 1:40 a.m. Between 2:04 a.m. and 2:19 a.m., the old metal fishing trawler jolted violently and then disappeared right before the eyes of the Greek coastguard. It is still not clear what happened, but the sea swallowed everything up.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(The Adriana\u2019s sinking at 2:19 am grimly paralleled that of the Titanic, which sank at 2:20 am. Both sank in water over 12,000 feet deep.)<\/p>\n

Most or all of Adriana\u2019s roughly 100 survivors were helped not by Greek authorities but by a private yacht that had responded to the distress call. Among the survivors were 47 Syrians, 43 Egyptians, 12 Pakistanis and two Palestinians. All were men, as they were traveling above deck on the Adriana. Hundreds of women and children were trapped below deck, and went down with the ship.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am struck by the alarming level of tolerance to serious human rights violations against refugees, asylum seekers and migrants that has developed across Europe\u201d Dunja Mijatovi\u0107, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, said on June 19th, one day before World Refugee Day. \u201cReports of human rights violations\u2026are now so frequent that they hardly register in the public consciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mijatovi\u0107 continued, \u201cLast week\u2019s shipwreck off the Greek coast is yet another reminder that, despite many warnings, the lives of people at sea remain at risk in the face of insufficient rescue capacity and coordination, a lack of safe and legal routes and solidarity, and the criminalisation of NGOs trying to provide life-saving assistance. Elsewhere in Europe, pushbacks at land and sea borders, violence against refugees and migrants, denial of access to asylum, deprivation of humanitarian assistance and the harassment of refugee rights defenders, are widely documented.\u201d<\/p>\n

The International Migration Organization\u2019s Missing Migrant Project puts the Mediterranean migrant death toll at over 27,000 since 2014. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates that close to 1,200 have perished so far this year in dangerous sea crossings to Spain, Italy and Greece. These deaths, about the same number as died on the Titanic, are surely an undercount. Just this week, 39 migrants are believed to have drowned attempting to cross from Morocco to Spain\u2019s Canary Islands.<\/p>\n

The Titan and the Adriana disasters were very different, but both were preventable. All travelers, whether migrants or millionaires, deserve rescue. The global response to the Titan\u2019s disappearance should be the model for how we respond to migrant vessels in distress. Knowing the names and the plights of those seeking refuge is what makes the world care.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/span><\/em>Democracy Now<\/span>!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/span><\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier<\/span>, released in paperback and now a <\/span><\/em>New York Times<\/span> best-seller.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/span><\/em>Democracy Now<\/span>! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a <\/i><\/span>Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/a>.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

22 Jun 2023 – Titan and Adriana are two vessels recently lost at sea. The five men who lost their lives on the Titan have been getting wall-to-wall coverage in the media worldwide. Meanwhile, the estimated 700 who died when the Adriana sank off the coast of Greece, mostly women and children, have been essentially forgotten.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":237888,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[197],"tags":[922,1268,753,487,950,741,378,234,883,86,112,821,413,70,2686,492,481],"class_list":["post-237887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-special-feature","tag-bias","tag-european-union","tag-greece","tag-human-rights","tag-invasion","tag-iraq","tag-journalism","tag-media","tag-migrants","tag-occupation","tag-pentagon","tag-refugees","tag-syria","tag-usa","tag-war-of-terror","tag-war-on-terror","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237887"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":237889,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237887\/revisions\/237889"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}