This Is The Way: Throw 'Em Back

The BBC reports: "Greek coastguard threw migrants overboard to their deaths, witnesses say". The article relates:

    The Greek coastguard has caused the deaths of dozens of migrants in the Mediterranean over a three-year period, witnesses say, including nine who were deliberately thrown into the water.

    The nine are among more than 40 people alleged to have died as a result of being forced out of Greek territorial waters, or taken back out to sea after reaching Greek islands, BBC analysis has found.

    The Greek coastguard told our investigation it strongly rejects all accusations of illegal activities.

    So who were these people being "thrown overboard"? The article recounts: "We showed footage of 12 people being loaded into a Greek coastguard boat, and then abandoned on a dinghy, to a former senior Greek coastguard officer." That's not being thrown overboard. 

     Anything else? "In five of the incidents, migrants said they were thrown directly into the sea by the Greek authorities. In four of those cases they explained how they had landed on Greek islands but were hunted down. In several other incidents, migrants said they had been put onto inflatable rafts without motors which then deflated, or appeared to have been punctured." Well, they weren't thrown to their deaths because they are still alive. As for the rafts, they were probably the rafts used by the migrants themselves which are well known to be of crappy Chinese manufacture and prone to sinking. Again, not being thrown overboard to their deaths.

    What else? 

    One of the most chilling accounts was given by a Cameroonian man, who says he was hunted by Greek authorities after landing on the island of Samos in September 2021.

    Like all the people we interviewed, he said he was planning to register on Greek soil as an asylum seeker.

    "We had barely docked, and the police came from behind," he told us. "There were two policemen dressed in black, and three others in civilian clothes. They were masked, you could only see their eyes."

If they were masked and dressed in black, how does he know they were policemen? 

    He and two others - another from Cameroon and a man from Ivory Coast - were transferred to a Greek coastguard boat, he said, where events took a terrifying turn.

How does he know it was a Coastguard boat? 

    “They started with the [other] Cameroonian. They threw him in the water. The Ivorian man said: ‘Save me, I don’t want to die'… and then eventually only his hand was above water, and his body was below.

    "Slowly his hand slipped under, and the water engulfed him."

Just like something out of a movie instead of what an actual drowning victim acts like. (See, e.g., this article from the Journal of Search & Rescue; this article from State Farm Insurance; and this article from the Red Cross). 

    Our interviewee says his abductors beat him.

    "Punches were raining down [a common saying in Cameroon (sarc.)] on my head. It was like they were punching an animal." [Oops--let his native culture show through] And then he says they pushed him, too, into the water - without a life jacket. He was able to swim to shore, but the bodies of the other two - Sidy Keita and Didier Martial Kouamou Nana - were recovered on the Turkish coastline.

Given his culture's propensity for lying, why should we believe him? He had, after all, broken laws and lied in order to get to Greece in the first place and has a strong incentive to lie in order to get additional sympathy to support an asylum application.

    And another incident:

    Another man, from Somalia, told the BBC how in March 2021 he had been caught by the Greek army on arrival on the island of Chios, who then handed him to the Greek coastguard.

    He said the coastguard had tied his hands behind his back, before dropping him into the water.

    "They threw me zip-tied in the middle of the sea. They wanted me to die," he said.

    He said he managed to survive by floating on his back, before one of his hands broke free from the ligature. But the sea was choppy, and three in his group died. Our interviewee made it to land where he was eventually spotted by the Turkish coastguard.

 Again, why should he be believed? 

    And another incident:

    Of the incidents we analysed, the one with the highest loss of life was in September 2022. A boat carrying 85 migrants ran into trouble near the Greek island of Rhodes when its motor cut out.

    Mohamed, from Syria, told us they rang the Greek coastguard for help - who loaded them onto a boat, returned them to Turkish waters and put them in life rafts. Mohamed says the raft he and his family were given had not had its valve properly closed.

    "We immediately began to sink, they saw that… They heard us all screaming, and yet they still left us," he told the BBC.

    "The first child who died was my cousin's son… After that it was one by one. Another child, another child, then my cousin himself disappeared. By the morning seven or eight children had died.

    "My kids didn't die until the morning… right before the Turkish coastguard arrived."

Once more, there is no corroborating evidence offered in the article that this incident occurred, let alone that it happened in the way described. Instead, we are supposed to take the word of an admitted criminal, a member of a religion that authorizes lying if it benefits the liar, and who, if his story is to be believed, let his children drown while he survived.

    What's ignored in the article is that this is a type of war. Turkey, the sworn enemy of Greece, is allowing illegals from countries throughout the Middle-East and Africa to traverse its country and encouraging them to swim or boat out to Greek islands near the Turkish shoreline for the purpose of undermining and weakening its enemy. It is, literally, an invasion by a hostile power. In war, soldiers are killed and weapons destroyed. Why should it be different in this case? And why is the BBC glossing over Turkey's criminal conduct--including violating international treaties and agreements to keep asylum seekers in its borders?