Agean Tragedy Stirs Amnesty Reaction
The incident involves a covert Greek "return" of 40 illegal immigrants to Turkish territorial waters after their being captured in Greece. They were then forced off a boat to survive on their own in the Aegean Sea. Some of the immigrants were reportedly still hands-tied when thrown overboard.
Six of the refugees have been found dead and 3 bodies are still reported missing.
The incident happened on Monday, September 25 and has been separately investigated and independently confirmed by Amnesty executives in Turkey. The AI International Secretariat in London and AI Greece are also looking into the incident.
Officials of the Turkish Karaburun Gendarme Command said a Turkish sea rescue operation launched after the Greek expulsion recovered the dead bodies of five Tunisian refugees and an Iraqi but a search for three missing Tunisians was still underway.
The 31 survivors of the incident were identified as 19 Tunisians, 5 Palestinians, 5 Iraqis and 2 Lebanese. Two of the survivors are women.
Investigating the incident on site, AI Turkey Branch deputy chairman lawyer Taner Kilic and lawyer Sibel Yilmaz interviewed the survivors and confirmed their account.
Accordingly, the refugees, all illegal migrants, had traveled to Greece over the Aegean Sea and were captured after reaching the Greek shore. They were then forced to board a speed boat by Greek authorities and carried by sea to Turkish territorial waters just off Karaburun. Once there, the immigrants, some of them still with their hands tied , were told to get off the boat and jump into the sea. Those who did not jump themselves were pushed overboard.
AI Turkey has appealed to Ankara to work the mechanisms of international conventions and for the Greek authorities responsible for this tragedy to be identified and charged. AI Turkey is concerned not only over the incident but the well-being of the survivors of the tragedy whose futures are at stake.
Dangerous Practices
Kilic had last week criticized both Greece and Turkey for secretly deporting illegal immigrants into each other's territorial waters saying this was in violation both of refugee and human rights laws.
Kilic's remarks came in the wake of a September 21 statement made by Metin Corabatir, spokesman for the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), where he said it was wide-spread practice both in Turkey and Greece to capture illegal immigrants in their territory and then by land or sea, return them back to the other country.
This "common practice" was first revealed in a September 20 news report in the mass circulation daily Hurriyet, based on aerial footage taken by a Turkish Coast Guard helicopter showing Greek Coast Guard boats entering Turkish waters on two separate occasions and leaving illegal immigrants caught in their own waters off the shores of Kusadasi and Ayvalik.
The Hurriyet report said the two specific incidents had taken place in July 2004 and May 2006 but implied this was part of a secret policy on which Ankara had contacted Athens and sent all the recorded material for inspection.
"If a person has arrived in the territorial waters of a country, that person is inside that country, it means the person has passed through the border gate" Kilic told bianet in an exclusive interview on the issue.
While protective mechanisms for human rights and refugee demands do exist on paper, people caught in the territorial waters of one country and then released into the territorial waters of another do not benefit from any of these procedures, Kilic argued.
"In reality, no coast guard authority has a right to release people caught in one's country to the territorial waters of another. But we have known this attitude and these practices for a long time".
Amnesty International had in October 2005 released a report on the discrimination of Greece against asylum seekers, immigrants and refugees and according to Kilic, that country has a long record in this field.
"Asylum procedures are not properly carried out in Greece" he explained. "According to the official figures in that country, the number of asylum requests accepted is 1 percent. There is no such ratio in the world. This shows that discrimination is an official policy". (EZO/II/YE)