In the morning of March 4, the Turkish coast guard found and rescued 87 people drifting in 4 life rafts outside Datça, Turkey. 26 of the people in the life rafts were small children.
I’m sorry to say this, and yes, it’s totally crazy, but people being left drifting in life rafts in the Aegean Sea by Greek authorities, has become so normal that nobody even bats an eyelid anymore. It’s just how it is. Something so outrageous has become normalized.
I don’t know what anyone finds “normal” about kidnapping groups of people, stealing all their belongings, beating parents up in front of their screaming children, kidnapping people and forcing them, many times at gunpoint, into life rafts and leaving them drifting at sea. If small children can’t climb down into the rafts they are thrown down by masked men. This isn’t normal behaviour, there is absolutely nothing normal about any of this: it’s totally and utterly disgusting. But nobody lifts a finger to even try to stop this madness. Have we gone totally off the reservation?
In the last four years, 24.000 people have been left drifting in 1.400 life rafts in the Aegean Sea by Greek authorities, amongst them almost 5.000 small children. The number of children alone is equivalent to over 450 football teams or 160 school classes. Does any of this affect us?
The problem is that nobody really sees these people for what they are. To many people, they are just statistics, numbers on a sheet, nothing anyone can relate to: no faces, no eyes, everything is blurred to protect their identity, their right to privacy. But the question is, by blurring their faces, are we protecting “them” or “us”? By not seeing, maybe we protect ourselves. What we can’t relate to is easy to just overlook. We don’t get involved because it’s not about us, it’s about “them”, and “them” isn’t real people, just statistics, a number on a sheet, nothing more.
Very few of us get emotional over statistics, but a picture can move the entire world. We saw clearly how a picture of a little lifeless body of Alan Kurdi, a child in a red t-shirt and blue shorts, touched our hearts a few years ago, made people stand up and get involved. Would that have happened if we had blurred it? Highly unlikely.
Why? because we saw that this could have been our child, our neighbours child, the child of our relatives or friends. So we got emotional, we reacted and we acted. Those two are usually firmly connected, cause and effect.
Most of the pictures posted in this post came from the case we reported in which 87 people, human beings, just like you and me, were left drifting in four life rafts in the middle of the sea a few days ago. None of these pictures have been pixelated, a decision we made to try to underline the fact that these are actually real people. They are not merely statistics on a sheet, they are in fact you and me, nothing more, nothing less.
I usually pixelate pictures before I publish them. It means I am sometimes the only one who sees the real people behind the blur: their faces, their eyes, sometimes eyes filled with life and hope, others just like a black hole. I see kids smiling, adults crying, despair, relief, anger, even happiness, though the latter not as often as I would like. By pixelating everyone I remove all of it, and it’s as if I’m removing their humanity, their being. Many times I find this very difficult. Necessary, but difficult.
This time I just couldn’t. I saw their faces, especially of the children, and I couldn’t cover them up. I have done it thousands of times before, but this time it just felt tremendously wrong, as if I erased them by doing so.
I’m sorry to dose who feel offended by this post. I feel you. My intention isn’t to offend anyone, but to try to give something back of the things I have “taken” from “you” and “them” over the years by removing what makes “them” human. “They” deserve so much more, “they” deserve to be seen as the human beings they are, and “we” deserve to be given the opportunity to react.
Real life, “theirs” and “ours”, isn’t pixelated, and we very much need to see the fruits of “our” creation, perhaps now more than ever.
Please take your time, look closely at these pictures, their faces, and ask yourself: would you have had the heart to throw them into life rafts in the middle of the sea? If not, ask yourself why? Because this is what’s being done on a daily basis in the Aegean Sea, it’s done in your name, on your watch. You are even paying for it.
By not reacting, and not acting, we are ALL complicit in crimes against humanity. They need to be stopped before it’s too late.