Hundreds of migrants feared dead

Time has an article about the on-going losses of illegals in the Med:

Survivor accounts have pushed to more than seven hundred the number of migrants feared dead in shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea over three days in the past week, even as European ships saved thousands of others in daring rescue operations.
The shipwrecks account for the largest loss of life reported in the Mediterranean since April of 2015, when a single ship sank with an estimated eight hundred people trapped inside. Humanitarian organizations say that many migrant boats sink without a trace, with the dead never found, and their fates only recounted by family members who report their failure to arrive in Europe.
“It really looks like that in the last period the situation is really worsening in the last week, if the news is confirmed,” said Giovanna Di Benedetto, a Save the Children spokeswoman in Italy.
Warmer waters and calmer weather of late have only increased the migrants’ attempts to reach Europe. The largest number of missing and presumed dead was aboard a wooden fishing boat being towed by another smugglers’ boat from the Libyan port of Sabratha that sank on Thursday. Estimates by police and humanitarian organizations range from around four to six hundred missing in that sinking alone.
One survivor from Eritrea, 21-year-old Filmon Selomon, told The Associated Press that water started seeping into the second boat after three hours of navigation, and that the migrants tried vainly to get the water out of the sinking boat. “It was very hard because the water was coming from everywhere. We tried for six hours, after which we said it was not possible anymore,” he said through an interpreter. He jumped into the water and swam to the other boat before the tow line on the navigable boat was cut to prevent it from sinking when the other went down.
A seventeen-year-old Eritrean, Mohammed Ali Imam, who arrived five days ago in another rescue, said one of the survivors told him that the second boat started taking on water when the first boat ran out of fuel. Police said the line, which was ordered cut by the commander when it was at full tension, whipped back, fatally slashing the neck of a female migrant.
According to Italian police, three hundred people in the hold went down with the second boat when it sank, while around two hundred on the upper deck jumped into the sea. Just ninety of those were saved, along with about five hundred in the first boat.
Italian police said survivors identified the commander of the boat with the working engine as a 28-year-old Sudanese man, who has been arrested and faces possible charges for the deaths. Three other smugglers involved in other crossings also were arrested, police announced.
Carlotta Sami, spokeswoman in Italy for UNHCR, put the number of migrants and refugees missing in that incident at over five hundred based on a higher tally of nearly seven hundred people on board. She said fifteen bodies were recovered, while seventy survivors were plucked from the sea and two dozen swam to the other boat.
Most of the people on board were Eritrean, according to Save the Children, including many women and children. One of the survivors included a four-year-old girl whose mother had been killed in a traffic accident in Libya just days before embarking, Di Benedetto said.
The UNHCR’s Sami also said that estimated that a hundred people are missing from a smugglers’ boat that capsized on Wednesday off the coast of Libya, captured in dramatic footage by Italian rescuers.
In a third shipwreck on Friday, Sami said over a hundred people were rescued, fifty bodies were recovered, and an unknown numbers of migrants were still missing.
Because the bodies went missing in the open sea, it is impossible to verify the numbers who died. Humanitarian organizations and investigating authorities typically rely on survivors’ accounts to piece together what happened, relying on overlapping accounts to establish a level of veracity.
Survivors of Thursday’s sinking were taken to the Italian ports of Taranto on the mainland and Pozzallo in Sicily. Sami says the UN agency is trying to gather information with sensitivity, considering that most of the new arrivals are either shipwreck survivors or traumatized by what they saw.
Italy’s southern islands are the main destinations for countless numbers of smuggling boats launched from the shores of lawless Libya each week, packed with people seeking jobs and safety in Europe. Hundreds drown each year attempting the crossing.

Rico says somebody's gotta start passing the word to these countries that there are no jobs or money, just death by drowning, waiting for them...

The BBC has an article by Kelly Grovier about commemorating them:

The death at sea of a loved one is a fate that haunts survivors with particular horror. This week photos circulated in social media of a temporary memorial off the coast of Turkey, created to eulogize the estimated four thousand Syrian refugees who have died in the desperate journey to find safety in Europe. Comprised of two hundred styrofoam headstones, fashioned convincingly to resemble polished marble slabs, the Sea Cemetery is a flotilla of unsinkable sadness. Anchored by weights that keep the seemingly gravity-defying stones in fluid rows (eerily echoing the order of a veterans’ cemetery), the carved names and cut-short years drift undrownably on the observer’s conscience.
The buoyancy of the headstones is intended, no doubt, to symbolize the resilience of memory, however painful. But the images possess another power too, one capable of casting unexpected light on the solemn tradition of art honoring those who have perished making arduous crossings. The sea has ceaselessly set a cruel stage for the imaginations of artists and writers: whether it’s John Milton’s poem Lycidas, composed in 1637 to in memory of a drowned classmate, or J M W Turner’s sombre painting, Peace – Burial at Sea, which commemorates fellow artist David Wilkie, who perished off the coast of Gibraltar in 1841; William Wordsworth’s Elegiac Stanzas, written in honor of the poet’s brother, John, who died in 1805 commanding a doomed ship in the Irish Sea, or French painter Théodore Géricault’s canvas, The Raft of the Medusa, which controversially called attention to the agonizing demise over thirteen days in 1816 of over a hundred people following the wreck of a naval frigate bound for Senegal.

Seen in the context of the Sea Cemetery, an icescape such as The Wreck of Hope (above), painted in 1823-24 by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich, is suddenly invigorated with contemporary intensity. In Friedrich’s dramatic work, a ship can be seen overturned amid a tumult of arctic ice sheets whose sharp upward thrust has erected a frozen catacomb resembling an ancient burial tomb or prehistoric portal. Though inspired, in part, by the explorer William Parry’s voyage in 1819 to discover the Northwest Passage, Friedrich’s vision of the sea’s frigid surface transformed into an icy mausoleum was mainly macabre fantasy. Placed alongside this week’s photos of the Sea Cemetery, however, The Wreck of Hope reimagines itself as a kind of archetypal holding pattern for titanic loss.

Rico says that styrofoam in not something you want loose in the ocean...