Cynical bastards would let 'em drown

Alan Cowell and Elisabetta Povoledo have an article in The New York Times about Libyan 'migrants':

The United Nations refugee agency has urged the crews of ships in the Mediterranean to keep watch for unseaworthy vessels carrying migrants from war-torn Libya after a report that a ship with six hundred people on board broke up just off the port of Tripoli. Witnesses in Tripoli said the ship was only a hundred yards from shore when it broke up, according to Sybella Wilkes, a spokeswoman for the Geneva-based organization. “It’s not clear how many people died or drowned,” she said, but sixteen bodies— including those of two babies— had been recovered.
Refugees who left on another vessel said they saw bodies and pieces of a ship in the water, said Laura Boldrini, a spokeswoman in Italy for the agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Ms. Wilkes said there had been a “dramatic increase in the number of boats making this terrible journey,” as migrants, many of them from sub-Saharan Africa, tried to flee Libya’s turmoil, heading for sanctuary on the Italian island of Lampedusa. “The majority of the boats are unseaworthy and in terrible condition and overloaded,” Ms. Wilkes said in an interview.
Witnesses to the accident, including a high-ranking Somali diplomat, said many of those on the ship were Somalis.
With many ships in the Mediterranean, both on routine commercial journeys and on military missions related to NATO operations in Libya, Ms. Wilkes said the refugee agency was urging crews to be especially alert.
Before rebellions began to sweep through North Africa in January and February, several North African countries, including Libya and Tunisia, routinely patrolled their coastlines to prevent migrants from trying to reach southern European countries that did not welcome them. But those controls dissolved as the uprisings broke out, leaving many migrants from sub-Saharan Africa stranded, particularly in Libya.
The Italian interior minister, Roberto Maroni, said that at least 10,000 people had made the crossing to Italy from Libya since the turmoil began. He said that, should the war continue, Italy should prepare for an even greater swell; the influx has strained Italy’s ability to absorb the migrants and challenged laws permitting free travel among European nations.
Some officials said the ships arriving from North Africa have been larger and more overcrowded than in the past. “They’re unfit boats sailed by unskilled crew, and they’re overcrowded; the risk has grown exponentially,” Ms. Boldrini said. At least three ships sailing from Libya are believed to have sunk since March, she said.
The latest report from the United Nations refugee agency followed an account in the British newspaper The Guardian that dozens of African migrants on a foundering boat had been left to die in late March when a number of European and NATO military units apparently ignored their cries for help. The boat, carrying 72 people, drifted in open water for sixteen days, The Guardian reported; only eleven people survived. The newspaper quoted survivors as saying the Italian Coast Guard and an unidentified military helicopter ignored their calls for help, despite international rules obliging crews to respond to distress calls.
The Reverend Mussie Zerai Yosief, an Eritrean priest who runs a refugee rights association in Rome, said that, on 26 March, a day after the ship left Libya, migrants on board contacted him and told him that they had run out of fuel. He in turn informed the Italian Coast Guard, he said. The Italian Coast Guard told the Maltese authorities that the ship was heading their way, a spokesman said.
According to The Guardian, survivors said that the boat eventually drifted close enough to a NATO aircraft carrier to be seen and that two jets from the carrier passed over the boat. In a statement, Carmen Romero, a NATO spokeswoman, denied that the alliance was involved in the episode.
Other migrants have been more fortunate. On Sunday, 528 people were saved when their ship crashed into rocks just off the coast of Lampedusa in the middle of the night.

Rico says he must count himself among those cynical bastards, of course...