The Columbus Dispatch

A migrant father’s plight in Greece

Son’s death on journey results in criminal charge

- Elena Becatoros

VATHY, Greece – On a pine-covered hill above the sparkling Aegean Sea lies a boy’s grave. His first boat ride was his last – the sea claimed him before his sixth birthday.

“He drowned in a shipwreck,” his gravestone reads. “It wasn’t the sea, it wasn’t the wind, it is the policies and fear.”

Those migration policies are being called into question in the case of the Afghan boy’s 25-year-old father, who is charged with child endangerme­nt for taking his son on the journey from Turkey to Greece and faces up to 10 years’ imprisonme­nt.

This is believed to be the first time in the European Union that a parent faces prosecutio­n for their child’s shipwreck death in the pursuit of a better life in Europe.

The father, divorced and raising his son alone, said he decided to leave Turkey after his asylum applicatio­n there was rejected twice, fearing deportatio­n to Afghanista­n.

“I didn’t come here for fun. I was compelled,” he said. “I decided to go for the future of my son, for my future, so we can go somewhere to live, and my son can study.”

Now, he says, he often thinks of killing himself. He agreed to speak to The Associated Press on condition he only be identified by his initials, N.A., and that his son wouldn’t be named.

“Without him I don’t know how to live,” he cried. “He is the only one I had in my life. All my hopes were him.”

It isn’t entirely clear why Greek authoritie­s took the extreme step of charging this man when so many others have been in his place.

Migration Minister Notis Mitarachi said the case doesn’t herald any change in Greece’s migration policy.

“If there is the loss of human life, it must be investigat­ed whether some people, through negligence or deliberate­ly, acted outside the limits of the

law,” Mitarachi said, adding this was on a case-by-case basis.

He noted that asylum seekers’ lives aren’t in danger in Turkey.

“The people who choose to get into boats, which are unseaworth­y and are driven by people who have no experience of the sea, obviously put human lives at risk,” he said.

On the EU’S border, Greece has been on the front line of Europe’s migration crisis. From 2014 to 2020, more than 1.2 million people used the eastern Mediterran­ean route to Europe, according to UNHCR figures. More than 2,000 died or went missing.

Last March, as Greek-turkish relations soured, Turkey announced its borders to the EU were open, sending thousands of migrants to the Greek border. Greece accused Turkey of weaponizin­g migrants’ desperatio­n. Aid groups and asylum seekers have also reported pushbacks by Greece, illegal deportatio­ns without allowing asylum applicatio­ns. Greece vehemently denies the claims.

The AP pieced together what happened with this father and son from legal documents and interviews with people

involved in the case.

Their journey began in the Turkish town of Izmir. The 24 Afghan passengers included 29-year-old Ebrahim Haidari, who remembers the boy as an intelligen­t child who chatted with other passengers and joked with the smugglers in Turkish. He was struck by the father and son’s close relationsh­ip.

On the night of Nov. 7, the group was driven to the Turkish coast. The sea wasn’t calm, but the smugglers insisted the weather would improve.

Unlike the adults, the boy wasn’t scared. He was excited about his first boat ride.

The smugglers forced the passengers into the inflatable dinghy and made one of them drive. As the hours passed, the sea grew rougher and the boat took on water. Terrified of dying, they turned toward the first land they could see. But rocks near the shore tore the dinghy, throwing them overboard.

As they tumbled into the inky sea, the child slipped out of his father’s embrace. There was chaos. The father couldn’t see or hear his son.

A boat eventually appeared with a searchligh­t. The survivors waved and shouted, but it didn’t stop. A second vessel appeared, but the same thing happened.

The father is certain the crew saw them, but didn’t help.

Legal documents show the Samos coast guard arrested the father for “exposing his minor son to danger during the attempted illegal entry into the country by sea.”

Greece’s Shipping and Island Policy Ministry, under whose jurisdicti­on the coast guard falls, didn’t grant an interview request with Samos coast guard officials. However, an official outlined authoritie­s’ account of events, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The official said the coast guard was alerted to the possible arrival of migrants at the tip of an uninhabite­d peninsula and immediatel­y dispatched two vessels. But they saw nobody when they arrived. Hours later, one of the vessels spotted a woman behind a rock and discovered the boy’s body nearby while rescuing her. The father was found several hours’ walk away, with nine other people.

“If you have a dead child, you try to figure out who he was with,” the official said. “It’s different when you have relatives there helping, and different when you find them alone.”

The indictment accuses the father of “leaving your ... child helpless” and putting him in an unseaworth­y boat in bad weather.

Nick van der Steenhoven of refugee rights charity Choose Love notes asylum seekers have little choice in timing.

“These people have to rely on smugglers, and these smugglers decide when and where people take these journeys,” he said. The father and son “became victim of the failure of the European Union to provide safe and legal routes.”

The father’s defense lawyer Dimitris Choulis is filing an official applicatio­n requesting an investigat­ion into the coast guard’s actions. The father, he said, is convinced his son could have been saved.

Choulis considers the charges “the product of panic and not the product of some broader policy . ... But automatica­lly we are creating one more obstacle to these people to claim asylum.”

 ?? THANASSIS STAVRAKIS/AP ?? An Afghan father at the port of Vathy on the eastern Aegean island of Samos, Greece – still devastated from losing his only child at sea while taking him from Turkey to Greece – has now found himself charged with a felony count of child endangerme­nt.
THANASSIS STAVRAKIS/AP An Afghan father at the port of Vathy on the eastern Aegean island of Samos, Greece – still devastated from losing his only child at sea while taking him from Turkey to Greece – has now found himself charged with a felony count of child endangerme­nt.

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