I had already forgotten his name, but not his photo: Alan (Aylan in Turkish) Kurdi, the 2-year-old toddler who washed up dead on the Turkish coast in 2015. The photo went all over the world and made a devastating impression. For the Irish writer Paul Lynch it was the source of inspiration when writing his novel Prophet Song which I wrote about on Wednesday.
When the photographer found him, Alan, wearing blue pants and a red sweater, was lying motionless on the beach as the seawater washed around him. He was wearing blue sneakers that stand out a little more in another photo where a police officer carries him away. When I saw those shoes, I now thought of the ten thousand children’s shoes on Dam Square – all symbols of the war violence that children suffered.
Who exactly was Alan Kurdi and what happened to the perpetrators responsible for this god-awful scandal? I had to look it up, because I had forgotten that too, perhaps like many readers. Anne Barnard wrote in it The New York Times a reconstruction on December 27, 2015.
Alan came from a family of Kurdish origin that emigrated to Turkey during the civil war in Syria. The situation had become extremely dangerous for the Kurdish minority in Syria. In Turkey, Abdullah, Alan’s father and a hairdresser by profession in Damascus, could not survive financially. On the advice of his sister Fatima, who had previously emigrated to Canada, he decided to flee Turkey by boat to Greece with a group of fourteen people. (As an aside, a female relative in Canada also plays a similar role in Lynch’s novel.)
“We are going to paradise,” Abdullah had said. That paradise was of course Europe. The father steered the boat himself, or at least, according to a witness, he took the helm from a human smuggler who had jumped overboard in the growing panic. The boat capsized soon after departure, the passengers ended up in the water, including Alan, his older brother Ghalib and their mother. Abdullah shouted to his wife: “Keep his head above water!” But Alan, Ghalib and their mother disappeared into the waves, as did two other passengers. Abdullah himself was among the survivors. His sister Fatima, indignant, traveled to Europe and successfully launched a major publicity offensive.
Five perpetrators were tried in Turkey. In 2016, two Syrian men were jailed for four years for human smuggling. Only in 2020, three Turkish men were sentenced to 125 years in prison for manslaughter for their part in the drama. It is not exactly clear why their sentences were so much harsher than those of the two Syrians.
We, in our ‘paradise’, cannot imagine the depth of despair of refugees who take such risks.
This sad story by Alan Kurdi provides yet another bitter example of this. A few weeks after the publication of the photo, Alan’s aunt, as if nothing had happened, also boarded a boat with her family for a flight from Turkey. They will make it.
I read this statement from Abdullah, Alan’s father, a few weeks after the disaster: “I have become a shadow.”