Islamabad — In the tiny, remote village of Bandli, high in the mountains of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, local officials distributed a somber list on Friday. On it are the names of eleven missing men. They are believed to be among hundreds of people crammed into an old fishing boat that sank thousands of miles from their homes off the coast of Greece by human traffickers last week as they tried to cross onto European soil.
It was one of the deadliest maritime disasters in Europe in decades.
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The Bandli men were among an estimated 400 to 750 people from Pakistan, Egypt, Syria and other countries who were being carried on the fishing boat when it sank about 50 miles from the southern Greek city of Pylos on June 14.
An undated handout photo by the Hellenic Coast Guard shows migrants aboard a boat during a rescue operation before their boat capsized in the open sea off Greece, June 14, 2023. HELLENIC COAST GUARD/ Portal
Pakistan has been grappling with a total economic meltdown for months, prompting more and more people to risk their lives to reach Europe in search of a better future.
CBS News’ affiliate network, the BBC, sent a team from its Urdu channel World Service to Bundli, where they met Raja Anwar standing on the roof of his home, staring absently at the gate to his property.
His 38-year-old son, Abdul, sent word to Anwar that he would board the boat in Libya just before it departed on June 14.
“We had to take out a huge loan of 22 lakhs ($8,000) from our extended family to pay for his trip,” Anwar told the BBC.
He said his village had lost a young generation of men, including his son and four nephews, the youngest of whom, Owais Tariq, was just 19. All but one of the men are married with young children, he said.
The boat the would-be migrants were on had much less human capacity and when it became clear that it was capsizing, the captain reportedly abandoned the ship and abandoned them to their fate. Of the hundreds on the boat – which one group said may have included many children – only 104 were rescued. So far, the Greek authorities have recovered 82 bodies.
Most of the nationals of Pakistan were apparently on board the doomed ship. The country’s interior minister, Rana Sanaullah, told parliament on Friday that there were at least 350 Pakistanis on the boat, adding that a total of 281 families had contacted the government for help and information.
People offer their support to Raja Yousaf (right), whose son Raja Sajid is missing after a shipwreck off the Greek coast, in Bindian village in Kotli, a district of Pakistan’s Kashmir prefecture, Sunday, June 18, 2023. Nasir Mehmood / AP
Another 193 Pakistani families have already had DNA tested to match the remains of victims found or to keep the file as so many people are still officially missing after the shipwreck.
Pakistan has arrested several suspected human traffickers and their agents, who have told authorities their ringleader is based in Libya, from where the boat set sail for the North African coast.
These people smugglers reportedly charged around $8,000 each to illegally ferry the Pakistani nationals from Libya across the Mediterranean to Europe — a dangerous sea crossing that has become increasingly busy as European nations have worked to seal off their land borders. The migrants were flown legally to Dubai, Egypt and directly to Libya, the authorities said.
An official investigation is underway to identify and arrest everyone else involved in people smuggling, Sanaullah said, adding that the Pakistani government is also working to recommend legislative changes to increase the likelihood of convictions in such cases.
The interior minister said not a single trafficker had been convicted in Pakistan for more than five years, adding that this was mainly because victims’ families agreed to a pardon in exchange for money.
Given Pakistan’s deep economic woes, it’s unclear what impact efforts to tackle irregular migration might have on the country.
Pakistanis are grappling with inflation at an almost unimaginable 38%. A rapidly depreciating currency and a current account deficit prompted the government to take drastic measures last year to avoid a sovereign default.
But these measures dealt a severe blow to domestic growth and jobs. The industrial sector, Pakistan’s economic engine, has shrunk by almost 3% in the current fiscal year according to preliminary data. This is an enormous burden for a country of over 230 million people and a generally young population that is pushing 2 million new people into the labor market every year.
Official unemployment figures have not been released for two years. But Hafeez Pasha, a former finance minister and economist known for his work on Pakistan’s labor issues, put the unemployment rate at a record “11-12%, conservative”.
After Egypt and Bangladesh, Pakistan currently has the highest number of nationals registered as arriving asylum seekers in Italy, European border protection agency Frontex told Portal.
This year through May, a record 4,971 Pakistanis attempted to cross the central Mediterranean in a single year, according to Frontex data since 2009.
Opportunities for legal migration are limited and this high number represents those who actually made it to Italy.
Many, like the hundreds of people who have now died on the boat off southern Greece, see no other choice but to try and negotiate deals through agents, who often present illegal routes as a faster, cheaper or even the only way to go to reach Europe, according to the Migrant Resource Centre, an EU-funded organization that provides information and advice to migrants.
Eleven desperate families in Bandli village on Friday clung to the hope that they would yet learn their loved ones were among the lucky ones rescued.
That hope was quickly fading, and pain was already showing on the faces of mothers, fathers and other relatives, who wondered if their loved ones were among the 12 Pakistani nationals Greek officials say were pulled out of the water alive became.