14 migrants killed by train while walking on tracks in Rep. of Macedonia

Source: http://www.theguardian.com

Fourteen migrants believed to be from Afghanistan and Somalia have been hit by a train and killed while walking along railway tracks in Macedonia, police said on Friday.

The migrants, who were part of a group of between 30 and 40 people, were struck by a passenger train north of Veles, in central Macedonia, at around 8.30pm on Thursday. The express service had been travelling from Thessaloniki, in northern Greece, to the Serbian capital, Belgrade.

STOP WAR ON MIGRANTS!

MEDITERRANEAN HAS BECOME A MASSIVE GRAVE FOR MIGRANTS

More than 1,200 dead immigrants in one week, 1,750 people in search for a better life already drowned just in 2015. Human life is constantly devaluated and dead immigrants are treated as mere statistics. Fortress Europe murders daily.

Demonstration: Tuesday April 28, Thessaloniki

STOP WAR ON MIGRANTS!

No Lager assembly of Thessaloniki

IOM: The total number of deaths this year “could well top 30,000”

The International Organization for Migration said the 2015 rate of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean is much higher than last year, when a total of 3,279 migrants died. That, in turn, was much higher than in 2013, when around 700 died, IOM said.

So far this year, 1,776 have died, according to the U.N. refugee agency, which also estimates that 219,000 people made the crossing last year. The deaths in 2015 so far are 30 times higher than the same period last year.

IOM spokesman Joel Millman told reporters in Geneva: “The 2015 death toll now is more than 30 times last year’s total at this date… when just 56 deaths of migrants had been reported on the Mediterranean.

The total number of deaths this year “could well top 30,000,” said Joel Millman. “We just want to make sure people understand how much more … rapid these deaths have been coming this year than last year.”

UNHCR: number of fatalities in Saturday’s boat tragedy over 800

UNHCR has now interviewed most of the survivors of Saturday’s boat tragedy in the Mediterranean. According to the survivors, their boat departed from Tripoli in Libya on Saturday morning with some 850 people on board, including many children. Among those on board were some 350 Eritreans, as well as people from  Syria, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Senegal, Gambia, Ivory Coast and Ethiopia.

Only 28 people are known to have survived the shipwreck, including a young man from Bangladesh who was transported by helicopter to a hospital in Catania, Sicily, on Sunday, and 27 people who were disembarked later by the Italian Coast Guard in Catania. From available information and the various accounts we’ve had, UNHCR now believes the number of fatalities to have been over 800, making this the deadliest incident in the Mediterranean we have ever recorded.

10 points of institutional racism

Here are the 10 points put forward by the European Commission and backed by EU foreign and interior ministers at a meeting in Luxembourg:

1. The EU will reinforce the EU’s maritime patrolling operations in the Mediterranean, called Triton and Poseidon, by giving them more money and equipment. The EU will also extend their scope to patrol a wider area of sea.
2. The bloc will make a systematic effort to capture and destroy vessels used by the people smugglers, using the EU’s counter-piracy “Atalanta” operation off Somalia as a model. EU officials said it would be a combined civilian and military operation but gave no more details.
3. The EU’s law enforcement, border control, asylum and prosecutors’ agencies will meet regularly and work closely to gather information on how the smugglers operate, to trace their funds and help investigate them.
4. The European Union’s asylum support office will to deploy teams in Italy and Greece for joint processing of asylum applications.
5. EU governments will fingerprint all migrants.
6. The EU will consider options for an “emergency relocation mechanism” for migrants.
7. The European Commission will launch a voluntary pilot project on resettling refugees across the EU
8. The EU will establish a new return programme for rapid return of “irregular” migrants co-ordinated by EU agency Frontex from the EU’s Mediterranean countries
9. The EU will engage with countries surrounding Libya through a joint effort between the Commission and the EU’s diplomatic service
10. The EU will deploy immigration liaison officers abroad to gather intelligence on migratory flows and strengthen the role of the EU delegations

700 deaths for freedom in the Sicilian channel

A political position from Migrant Coordination (Italy) on the massacre in the Mediterranean sea: [passa alla versione in italiano]

Seeing the massacre in the Sicily Canal, we migrants, on the front lines of the daily struggle against the government of mobility and movement, declare that in the war of borders we side with the women and men who seek freedom. Whatever the reason: escaping war, dictatorial regimes, persecution or simply the desire to change life.

We fight every day to guarantee our rights against institutional racism, which seeks to silence us and make us no more than labor force to be silently exploited. Through assemblies, demonstrations and strikes we organize to demand freedom for all, against exploitation, precarity and racist laws like the Bossi-Fini legislation. We are here and here we fight. But we know that our condition comes from having crossed a border, a border that continues to follow us in the residency papers in our pockets and the daily racism we face. For this reason we struggle so that all the women and men who like us must move to conquer a future for themselves can do it without being blackmailed or forced to seek help from criminals to reach their objective.

Seeing the massacre in the Sicily Canal we say clearly that the “organizations without principles” are many: human traffickers, The European Union, the Italian State, the governments that use migrants as an exchange commodity. European policies, which continue deny freedom to thousands of women and men, are the main reason it is today impossible to reach the Italian coast safely. Those who want to go on vacation can take a ferry, those who wish to find a better life must seek out human traffickers.

If the Mare Nostrum operation had for a time limited the number off deaths, the effects of its end and the beginning of patrolling operations of the Schengen area’s southern borders coordinated by Frontex are evident. Those who now express sadness on camera that speak of migrants as a European problem are the same that said that Triton would be a step forward: merchants of death and killers of freedom. If the rumors of a naval blockade of the Mediterranean were to be confirmed, the result would be that we migrants would end up as the expendable pawns of a game of cops and robbers, between the “forces of good” of the democratic EU and the “evil agent” human traffickers. Two different sides, but both without moral principles.

Faced with the political crimes committed by governments on both sides of the Mediterranean we demand the right to move across borders by any means, without dying.

Coordinamento Migranti – movimento dei/delle migranti contro razzismo e sfruttamento

Rome: New migrant shipwreck reported to the IOM

The International Organization for Migration has received information about a new migrant shipwreck with at least 20 deaths, a spokesman for the organization says.

An unidentified person called the IOM’s Rome office saying that they were on a sinking boat with 300 people on board, including 20 who had already died, the official said.

The same caller said there was a total of three boats in distress.

New shipwreck off the coast of Rhodes

A sailing boat, carrying 150 Syrian refugees capsized off the coasts of Rhodes.

Some media talk about 3 dead refugees, others about 15 (among them a 6 years-old child).

Alarm Phone Press Release: The EU kills Refugees, Ferries not Frontex!

Press Release, 19.4.2015

Last night at least 650 people drowned about 73 nautical miles north of the Libyan coast when seeking to reach Italy. They were on board of a 30 meter long boat that capsized when the container vessel King Jacob approached them for assistance. There were only 28 survivors.

This is the biggest refugee boat catastrophe in the recent history of the Mediterranean Sea. With its decision from the 27th of August 2014 to scale down rescue operations at sea, the EU is responsible for this mass dying. The EU has the means and possibilities to rescue refugees in the Mediterranean Sea. But instead, they let people drown.

Over the last weeks, we, as the Watch The Med Alarm Phone, became direct witnesses of struggles over life and death on these boats and of the relatives’ worries. We also witnessed how the coastguards of Italy and Malta as well as the crews of commercial vessels made great efforts but could often not prevent the dying as they were not sufficiently equipped to conduct rescue operations. And this is due to political decisions made on the level of the European Union.

Fortress Europe has caused ten thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean Sea in the last 25 years.

Those responsible are:
Politicians and police forces that have created, through the Schengen Regime, the general visa-duty and the organised manhunt of refugees and migrants without visas;
The politicians, police and military forces that have established Frontex in the past 10 years and have turned the Mediterranean Sea between Libya and Italy since the Arab Spring into a maritime high security zone;
The EU politicians who decided on the 27th of August 2014 in Brussels to scale down the Italian rescue operation Mare Nostrum in the Mediterranean Sea and enforced a politics of deterrence through Frontex’s Triton operation along the Italian coast!
They carry responsibility for the thousands of deaths that have occurred in the last months in the maritime zone between Libya and Italy.

The dying needs to end:
We demand an immediately created direct ferry line for refugees from Tripoli and other places in Northern Africa to Europe.
We demand safe and legal corridors for refugees to reach a place of refuge without the need to risk their lives.
We call out, beyond all confessions and political sides, to take immediate direct action against these murderous EU policies and politics.

Watch the Med Alarm Phone
http://www.watchthemed.net/
This PM online: http://watchthemed.net/reports/view/110
info@watchthemed.net

700 feared dead as migrant boat capsizes off Libya

A rescue operation is under way after a boat carrying an estimated 700 migrants capsized in Libyan waters, 120 miles south off Lampedusa.

Twenty-eight people have been reported rescued, while a number of bodies have been washed ashore in Libya.

The migrants reportedly fell overboard when they ran to draw the attention of a passing vessel. The boat is said to have capsized at midnight.

The disaster could become one of the worst over the decades of the migrant situation in the southern Mediterranean, which has seen the death toll rise over 1,500 since the beginning of 2015, Reuters reported.

“At the moment, we fear that this is a tragedy of really vast proportions,” Carlotta Sami, a spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, told SkyTG24 television.

“The first details came from one of the survivors who spoke English and who said that at least 700 people, if not more, were on board,” Sami added.