The last thing they wanted when they embarked in Lebanon was to be landed in even more desperate Syria. For some of them, a return. For the majority -at least seventy-five- an end of the journey, having already been rescued by the coastguards of the port of Tartus.
The shipwreck of his boat, which released moorings between Monday and Tuesday in northern Lebanon, has focused on the multiplication of clandestine emigration from the coast of this country, generally bound for Italy.
The death toll provided by the Syrian Minister of Transport has been increasing -up to 87, according to his count on Saturday- but not the number of those rescued alive, which remains at twenty-one. The final death toll could be even higher, since he has estimated that between 120 and 150 people were traveling. The ship, "small and wooden", had sailed from the Lebanese port of Miniyeh, north of Tripoli (Lebanon) and fifteen kilometers from the border.
The governor of the province of Tartus has specified that the shipwreck should have occurred two days ago, although the first bodies were not detected until yesterday afternoon. The hopes of finding someone still alive are practically nil, although the search continues, made difficult "by the intense waves."
The twenty-one survivors, including eleven Syrians, six Lebanese and four Palestinians, have been taken by ambulance to Al Basel hospital in Tartus. The port of that city is also home to a Russian naval base, so Russian helicopters would be collaborating with the Syrians.
A hospitalized Lebanese has not been able to attend the funeral of his two daughters, aged five and nine, who died in the shipwreck, in which his wife and son have also been reported missing.
Lebanon is the country that receives the most refugees per capita in the world and the economic crisis of the last three years has increased hostility towards them and the urgency to emigrate again. However, the Lebanese themselves make up a growing percentage of these passengers of despair, alongside Syrians and Palestinians.
In one of the poorest neighborhoods of Tripoli, condolences arrived this Friday for Mustafá's relatives, a taxi driver who sold the taxi because he could no longer pay for fuel or his daughters' school fees. He collected, yes, the trafficker's fee - between three thousand and five thousand dollars - to embark on the ship that has ended up sinking his family. Both he and his three daughters have drowned and only his wife has survived.
Lebanese police now say they have arrested three of the traffickers involved in the town of Bebnin. However, the big bosses also traffic in weapons, drugs or fuel and rarely go to jail. The half million euros that are pocketed per trip achieved goes a long way in a country on the verge of exhaustion.
It even gives to multiply the bet. Bigger ships and greater risk, to sail to Italy, two thousand kilometers away, instead of Cyprus, two hundred. This has to do with the hardening of the Cypriot authorities, which since 2019 have an automatic repatriation treaty with Lebanon.
All this has contributed to Cyprus no longer being the favorite destination for Lebanese traffickers, who now head, in 80% of cases, to the Italian coast. The journey, much longer -several days- multiplies the risks and the price, but the hopelessness has also been increasing in parallel.
According to Lebanese military sources, 22% of these desperate perish on the high seas, due to shipwreck, thirst or starvation. Often because an inexperienced pilot - often someone the smuggler exempts from paying passage in exchange for taking the helm - gets lost or is unable to steer the overloaded ship during a storm.
The shipwreck that concerns us is already the worst of its kind in the history of Lebanon, where last April at least a dozen people drowned during the pursuit of a precarious boat filled to the flag, by a patrol boat, the height of Tripoli.
The number of clandestine immigrants from the Lebanese coast doubled between 2020 and 2021. And it more than doubled again in the first nine months of 2023, compared to the same period last year. According to L'Orient-Le Jour, the vast majority of attempts are intercepted -mostly on land- or fail.
In any case, the drama has not yet taken on biblical proportions, as at other times and on other shores of the Mediterranean. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that "2,670 people have left or attempted to leave Lebanon" since January 1.
North of Tripoli, the attempts are daily. In another incident, on Wednesday, the Lebanese navy said it had towed 155 people located aboard a damaged ship in its waters to the mainland. On the same Thursday, other ships from Lebanon were seized near Malta - by the Italian navy - and by the Turkish navy, which took them to Izmir, after the Greek coastguard rejected them near Crete.
Finally, between Monday and Tuesday, the Cyprus navy received two SOS in its waters, coming from two ships carrying 300 and 177 migrants. All of them were brought safe and sound to this EU member country, although not from the Schengen area.
The financial situation in Lebanon has become so dire that this week banks have been closed between Monday and Wednesday for security reasons. Last Friday there were half a dozen kidnappings by clients who, at gunpoint, demanded to recover their own savings, deposited in their day in dollars and now subjected to the corralito. The starting shot had been given the day after the robbery of a young interior designer, already a "heroine", who said she needed her money to save her sick sister.
