Each garment tattered in the sand exemplifies a life lost at sea this past year. Until 2,600. The emblematic beach of Sant Sebastiàin the Barcelonahas become for a few hours visual scenario of the immigration drama that does not cease in Mediterranean. Two canoes brought from the Greek island of Lesbos They add, if possible, more drama.
It is the action with which onege rescue at sea Open Arms wanted to revive consciences that they have left something sleepy and accustomed to drama of images that seem to hit less because of their repetition. But the situation of emergency in it Mare Nostrum remains more alive than ever: more than 2,600 lives of immigrants trying to reach Europe lost at sea during 2023.
The organization of this scenario, which has had the help of a hundreds of volunteers, has not been easy and has lasted all night. Several organizations have done their bit with the contribution of the clothes that has been carefully scattered on the beach.
“Structural holocaust”
“What is happening is a consensual structural holocaust, we know,” shoot Oscar Camps, director of the NGO Open Arms to add: “We have decided to bring to the shore of Europe what we see every day so that people can measure with their own eyes the magnitude of the loss of so many lives.”
The staging, co-organized by the Fura dels Baushas been made to coincide with the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the writing of the letter of Human rightsat which time there are more than 58 armed conflicts in the world. In the eight years of the NGO’s activity, close to 30,000 people drowned in Mediterranean waters. “An outrage,” says the activist.
The UN has not turned out very well, once again, in the words of the director of Open Arms – ““a dying organization”-. Neither do the European institutions – “Europe should stand out for the protection of fundamental rights and not be so close to complicity and death” -.
“This staging is the consequence of the lack of policies, of this lack of safe and legal ways for people to access a right such as asylum,” he said. Camps. “The UN considers more than 1,000 deaths a year as an armed conflict because every year we have three silenced at sea, which only we see but which today we want to share,” she clarified.
Loss of donations
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Camps has warned that after the pandemic the drop in donations due to the economic recession and the multiple emergencies that plague the world. “We are once again in a major economic recession,” he says, adding: “We have had to reduce missions in the Mediterranean because we cannot sustain them financially, it is the first time that has happened to us in eight years,” he acknowledged. But the next day the 22nd they go out to sea again.
Open Arms has chosen the Barceloneta beach to convey to citizens that inaction and indifference are not options and that silence encourages complicity. Behind every piece of clothing in the sand, Camps recalls, there are “individual stories and broken families.”