By Tenzin Dharpo
DHARAMSHALA, Dec. 22: Turkish Coast Guard on Sunday, Dec. 20 rescued a sinking boat off the northwestern Çanakkale province coast carrying 51 refugees of which seven were Tibetans, according to a report by Daily Sabah Turkey.
The rescued came from Afghanistan, Burma and Tibet, said a Turkish Coast Guard official on condition of anonymity to DST. The incident took place off the coast of Ayvacık district in the Aegean Sea. The sunken boat was headed towards the Greek island of Lesbos which has seen as one of the entry points for the smugglers bringing people in overcrowded boats and rubber dinghies.
Just last week, Spanish volunteer lifeguards saved few boats off the coast of Lesbos, many among them toddlers drenched wet in the winter cold. NGO’s have employed life guards along the coast to bring in drowning and in many cases drowned people just minutes away from the shore.
Acosta, a Spanish lifeguard deployed on the Lesbos coast told USA Today, “This is my first week. The first arrival when you see people jump to shore and cry, when men 40 or 50 years old start to cry, that has a big impact. The first time we did a rescue at night it was so much scarier than during the day because you can’t see. You arrive at the people and you hear people screaming and you don’t know if people are fine or if there are injuries or deaths.”
A statistic from International Organization for Migration puts an astounding figure of 3,563 people who have died in the Mediterranean so far in 2015 in their quest to reach European shores, a large fraction of that figure around Turkey.
Any more information on the identity and conditions of the Tibetans rescued from the sinking boat is unavailable at this moment.
