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Tuesday, June 25, 2013

NATO members involved in Libya's "liberation" sued by migrant survivors

Terrible story of how NATO naval ships and helicopters (with the exception of one who dropped water and biscuits) let 63 migrants suffer and die only a few nautical miles from their warships.  Guess NATO was too busy liberating the light-skin Libyans from dictator Gadhafi and didn't want to be distracted by dark-skin African migrant workers who were trying to get away from war-torn Libya.  What a wonderful world!

.....Last year, an investigation by the Council of Europe,   the continent's human rights watchdog, found that a catalogue of institutional and legal failures led to the avoidable deaths of the migrants. It called on Nato and its member states to launch separate inquiries into why so many military units – including a Spanish frigate under Nato command that was sailing in the immediate vicinity of the boat – failed to respond to the migrants' desperate pleas for help.....

....Father Mussie Zerai, an Eritrean priest in Rome, one of the last people to communicate with the migrant boat before its satellite phone battery ran out, warned against the omertà, or code of silence, among Nato states....

...Launching the legal case, Abu Kurke , a survivor, described what happened after the dinghy left Libya on 27 March 2011 before washing up in Libya two weeks later with only 11 people alive, two of whom died shortly after.....

........Abu Kurke said: "We waited for help and it never came. People began to die after three days. The sea was rough, some fell overboard and couldn't climb back in. After a week with nothing to eat or drink, some drank sea water and fell ill.

"I noticed the people who drank sea water died faster than those who didn't, so I abstained from drinking it. I kept the bottle given by the helicopter, once that water was finished, some of us kept our urine in the bottles. Each time our mouths got too dry we sipped our own urine. I also had toothpaste, which I ate.

"For the first eight days, we kept the dead bodies in the boat, no one wanted to throw a body overboard. But more people were dying because of the smell. Many times we saw boats and picked up bodies to show them. Finally a week after the deaths, it was very smelly, people began throwing the bodies out. Sometimes water came over the side and swept the corpses away.".....

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