Greece boat disaster: Refugees who had endured treacherous journeys told me of overcrowding, failed motors and people falling overboard

A total of 26,000 asylum seekers have died in boats in the Mediterranean since 2014

When I met asylum seekers from the Middle East in a refugee camp in Serbia in 2016 and asked them about their journey, many of them said just one word: “boat”.

After that, they often did not want to discuss the issue further, so traumatic had been their journey. Many of them had also walked, for days, or weeks. Others had taken a boat and then walked, many of them encountering hostility, crime and abuse on the way.

Those who did speak about their boat journey told of terrifying conditions – overcrowding, failed motors, people falling overboard.

Survivors arrive to the port of Kalamata after a boat carrying hundreds of migrants sank in international waters in the Ionian Sea earlier this week.

I visited this camp just months after the death of Syrian two-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose body was washed up on a beach in Turkey, after he drowned, along with his mother and brother, after the boat he was travelling in capsized. The image shocked the world.

Yet, eight years on, we are still seeing people undertake treacherous journeys like these – many more people, in fact.

The trip from North Africa through the central Mediterranean to southern Europe is the deadliest migratory route in the world, according to the United Nations’ International Organisation of Migration (IOM). More than 20,000 people have lost their lives on the route since 2014 according to IOM – not counting last week’s tragedy – and more than 26,000 in total across the Mediterranean. The boat that sank off Greece was believed to have been going from Libya to Italy.

The migration crisis, which rocketed into public consciousness with Alan Kurdi’s tragic death, is not going away.