Father of drowned Syrian boy: ‘My children slipped through my hands’
PHILIP Ruddock said the Syria refugee crisis had reached a tipping point, where any increase in intake won’t help, after Tony Abbott said he was thankful for stopping the boats.
WARNING: Graphic content.
AS the world reacts to the devastating photo of a drowned Syrian toddler and a grief-stricken father who has lost everything, increasing pressure is on Prime Minister Tony Abbott to help refugees caught in the humanitarian crisis engulfing Europe.
Today, Mr Abbott said he was thankful Australia had stopped the boats.
Speaking to ABC radio about the “very sad” images of the toddler Abbott said thankfully Australia stopped the boats coming to our shores.
“I would say, if you want to stop the drownings you’ve got to stop the boats,” Abbott said.
“We saw yesterday on our screens a very sad and poignant of children tragically, tragically dead at sea in illegal migration. And thankfully, we’ve stopped that in Australia because we’ve stopped the illegal boats, we’ve said to the people smugglers, ‘your trade is closed down’.
“As long as people think they can get here and the can stay here we’ll have the illegal trade. We’ll have the people smugglers in business, and we’ll have the tragedies at sea. So if you want to keep people safe you’ve got to stop illegal migration, and that’s what we’ve done.”
His comments come as the New York Times published an article attacking Australia for it’s refugee policies.
Meantime, Cabinet Minister Barnaby Joyce wants Australia to resettle more Syrian refugees.
Mr Joyce said he was touched by the personal story of a man whose plastic bag of water bottles and a packet of biscuits were his only possessions in the world.
“As an accountant myself, when you see an accountant walking across the border into Hungary from Syria when his life has been destroyed I feel a sense of empathy for him,” Mr Joyce told The West Australian.
But veteran Liberal Philip Ruddock says the crisis has reached such a tipping point any increase in intake will do little to help. Mr Ruddock earlier this year called for a Kosovo-type solution where Australia would accept masses of Syrian and Iraqi refugees who would return home once it was safe.
But now he says it’s up to international partners to do more to solve the problem, the scale of which he says hasn’t been seen since World War II.
“When you talk about 14 million people being displaced, let’s be realistic, whatever Australia does is not going to ultimately resolve this issue,” Mr Ruddock told AAP today.
“It’s of the size and dimension well beyond our capacity.”
The Anglican Church in Australia on Friday wrote to the prime minister and the immigration minister pleading for them to allow another 10,000 Syrian refugees before Christmas.
But Mr Abbott says the government has already raised Iraqi and Syrian refugees places by 4400 thanks to tighter border control policies.
“We’re doing exactly what Barnaby has suggested,” he said.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said Australia was considering a refugee increase and will work with other countries on possible solutions.
Opposition immigration spokesman Richard Marles accused the government of turning its back on international duties to refugees. He said the prime minister was only offering “ignorant” and “gratuitous” three-word slogans which Europe was treating as a joke.
A father’s grief
Abdullah, whose surname is given by Turkish media as Kurdi but sources in Syria say is actually called Shenu, lost his three-year-old son Aylan, four-year-old son Ghaleb and wife Rihana in the tragedy.
The story of his tragic journey to freedom come as harrowing photos emerged of a father throwing his family onto train tracks in Hungary in a desperate bid to avoid going to a refugee camp.
“I was holding my wife’s hand. But my children slipped through my hands. It was dark and everyone was screaming,” Abdullah Kurdi told Turkey’s Dogan news agency of the moment the dinghy began to sink. “We tried to cling to the small boat, but it was deflating.”
Abdullah cut an inconsolable figure sitting outside the morgue in Bodrum on Thursday, staring blankly into his mobile phone as he waited for the coffins of his family to be loaded onto a municipal van, an AFP photographer reported.
But not everyone has been moved by the shocking images with some prominent UK figures expressing their lack of concern.
Katie Hopkins, a British television personality and controversial columnist reacted to the death of hundreds of refugees who died when their boat capsized by advocating using gunships to stop people attempting to reach Europe’s shores.
“No, I don’t care,” she wrote in The Sun newspaper. “Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.”
Peter Bucklitsch, a UK independence party candidate has also come under fire for this tweet.
Twelve Syrian migrants drowned on Wednesday when two boats sank in Turkish waters as they were heading towards the Greek island of Kos, in the latest tragedy to hit migrants in the Aegean.
But attention has focused on three-year-old Aylan, whose tiny body was photographed washed up on a beach in the resort of Bodrum in an image that quickly became a viral symbol of the tragedy of refugees.
In a second image, a Turkish security officer cradles the boy in his arms. Abdullah had been trying to cross along with his family and up to three other Syrians from the flashpoint town of Kobane that last year was the subject of a months-long battle between Kurdish militias and jihadists, Turkish media said.
This is how we should be remembering Alan. But we'll be haunted by his death. pic.twitter.com/k4SJyAT4ei
— Ehmedê Xanî (@KurdSeT) September 3, 2015The Ottawa Citizen newspaper reported that the family had ultimately been trying to emigrate to Canada.
It said his sister Teema — a Vancouver hairdresser who emigrated to Canada 20 years ago — had sponsored a refugee application that Canada’s immigration authorities rejected in June.
“I was trying to sponsor them, and I have my friends and my neighbours who helped me with the bank deposits, but we couldn’t get them out, and that is why they went in the boat,” the newspaper quoted Teema Kurdi as saying.
Abdullah said the boat started to take in water shortly after it set off in the dead of the night, sending the migrants on board into a panic.
“The boat started to take in water 500 meters from the shore. Our feet were wet,” he said.
He tried to take hold of his children and his wife as he clung to the capsized boat, but they were quickly washed away.
“I tried to swim to the shore with the help of the lights but couldn’t find my wife and children once I was there. I thought they got scared and ran away,” he said.
“When I couldn’t find them in our meeting point in the city (Bodrum) where we normally meet, I went to the hospital. And got the bad news.” He confirmed the family had wanted to go to Canada but now only wants to return to Kobane to bury his family.
A hospital official in Bodrum told AFP that the bodies would be flown to Istanbul late Thursday and then to the Turkish border town of Suruc before reaching their final destination of Kobane.
Mustefa Ebdi, a journalist in Kobane on the Turkish border in northern Syria, said the family had been living in Damascus up to 2012 but been forced to flee the war’s instability multiple times.
After repeatedly moving back and forth, they decided to move to Europe through Turkey when in June jihadists re-entered the flashpoint town, holding hostages in a two-day stand-off that left more than 200 civilians dead.
Ebdi said they stayed in Bodrum for one month, saving money and borrowing from relatives for the journey.
Abdullah was quoted as saying by Dogan that the family had paid people-smugglers twice in the past to travel to Kos.
“At first attempt, the coastguard officials detained us and we were later released,” he said.
The next time “the traffickers (organisers) didn’t keep their promises and didn’t show up with the boat.” As a result of their previous experiences they had decided to embark on the final fatal journey independently.
As a result they, and the other Syrians from their hometown, “obtained a boat by our own means and tried to cross to the other side.”
Turkish authorities arrested four suspected people smugglers — Syrian nationals aged between 30 and 41 — over the twin accidents that killed Aylan and the 11 others.
They are accused of “causing the death of more than one person” and “trafficking migrants”, the Dogan news agency reported.
“The body of a three-year-old child who died on a boat in the Mediterranean Sea carrying refugees washed up on our shores,” said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“Will the whole of humanity not account for this three-year-old-child on our shores?” Erdogan asked.
Harrowing scenes in Hungary
Europe’s refugee crisis has taken another disturbing turn, with harrowing images showing a desperate father throwing his family on traintracks in Hungary to avoid being taken to a refugee camp.
Hungarian police on Thursday stopped a train bound for towns near the Austrian border, leaving the refugees on board fearful that they were being forced to go to a camp nearby.
The train had left Budapest’s Keleti (Eastern) station in the morning: the first to depart after the end of a two-day police blockade, leaving up to 3000 people stranded.
But the train was stopped by scores of riot police in Bicske, an hour from Budapest, where one of Hungary’s four main refugee camps is located.
TV footage shows dozens of passengers, who were ordered to disembark, banging on the windows shouting “No camp, no camp!” while others lay on the tracks in protest.
Shocking pictures show a man throwing his wife and child on the train tracks. They were wrestled off the ground by riot police.
British response: ‘Migrant intake under review’
British Prime Minister David Cameron who has been under fire for resisting calls to assist with the European migration crisis said the UK will fulfil its “moral responsibilities”.
Cameron had been coping criticism, even from some of his own backbenchers, for his response to the migrant crisis.
But speaking to the press Cameron said as a father he was moved by the image of the Syrian toddler washed up dead on a Turkish beach after drowning alongside most of his family trying to reach safety.
Britain had opted out of a quota system for relocating asylum seekers within the European Union and that was not to change at the moment.
“There isn’t a solution that’s simply about taking people, it’s got to be a comprehensive solution,” he said earlier.
Britain had accepted just 216 Syrian migrants in the past 12 months with a total of 5000 granted asylum in the past five years.
This is despite 230,000 refugees arriving in Greece alone just this year with hundreds of thousands more arriving elsewhere notably Turkey and Italy.
Earlier in the week Mr Cameron’s former coalition colleague Liberal Democrat Leader Tim Farrin warned Britain risked being viewed as disengaged, cold, irrelevant and a pariah state over the issue.
Several of Mr Cameron’s own MPs have since voiced concern about Britain’s position as has the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights Nils Muiznieks.
France and Germany will this weekend craft an “obligatory mechanism” that will see Europe’s 28 nations forced to take a share of the hundreds of thousands of migrants currently making their way to Europe.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel renewed her call for binding quotas to resettle the refugees, with her country taking the lead and agreeing to take 800,000 new arrivals this year alone.
That came as tens of thousands of ordinary citizens across Europe frustrated by their leaders’ apparent inaction to the humanitarian crisis offered up space in their homes, spare rooms, sheds and even sofas to the mostly displaced Syrian migrants.
In Hungary where tens of thousands of Syrian migrants are awaiting processing, the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said the mostly Muslim refugees threatened to undermine the continent’s Christian roots and Christianity was already under threat in Europe as he demanded Germany do more.
Germany has had to set up checkpoints and border controls with reports people smugglers were now dumping their human cargoes on freeways in the dead of night with signs on highways about Germany, Austria and Hungary borders warning motorists to slow down amid fears migrants were wandering on the roads.
Meanwhile, European’s law enforcement agency Europol said nearly 30,000 suspected people smugglers had been identified since the start of the year with gangs using social media to promise a new life abroad for a fee.
Czech police stop marking refugees
Czech police say they have stopped marking the hands of detained refugees with numbers after sparking an uproar among human rights groups, lawyers and media organisations.
Officers will from now on use “special wrist bands containing identification data,” Czech police said in a statement on their website on Thursday.
Police used markers on Tuesday to write numbers on the hands of 214 refugees, mostly Syrians, detained in the southeast of the country on trains arriving from Austria and Hungary.
Interior ministry spokeswoman Lucie Novakova told AFP the move was introduced “to prevent the children from getting lost” and keep families together.
But the measure raised eyebrows as it recalls Nazi Germany’s practice of marking the arms of death camp prisoners with numbers. Czech Interior Minister Milan Chovanec said on Thursday the police officers in the south-eastern town of Breclav had to “work fast and under stress” when asylum seekers arrived in the middle of the night.
The Czech Republic has become a transit country for migrants travelling to wealthier EU states like neighbouring Germany. The prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia will meet in Prague on Friday to deal with the refugee crisis.
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