I went to start a thread about refugees and asylum seekers last night but...

[j*oono]

I copied some photos last night and I wanted to post them here but I thought better of it because they are very distressing.

Is it time for Tony Abbott, Dutton and Chris Morrison to look into their hearts?

Turn back the boats to what?  Stop the boats for what reason?  I have no doubt that they have seen these photos of a young 3yr old boy washed up on the beach and his slightly older brother and his mother drowned too.

[icyfroth]

1. Pictures like the one above of the children holding signs make me think that ppl are using their children to emotianally blackmail countries, especially like Germany and Austria, with their history, to accept them. Why Germany and Austria? Because they know they're a wealthy countries with a great welfare system.

2. People aren't drowning on Australian beaches or in our waters anymore because Australian border security has stopped people smugglers from attempting to breach Australian borders.

3. Having said that, it's a tragedy that people are driven to such desperate extremes to leave their homes, risk their lives and their and try to settle in countries whose customs and traditions are so totally alien to them.

The US, Great Britain and the so-called Coalition of the Willing including Australia,  need to stop interfering in the Middle East, get out, stop the agression, the bombing, the hostilities, and let them get on with their own governments and their own customs and traditions.

It's Genocide, really.

[Anonymous]

about the little boy in your picture:

Three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, his five-year-old brother Galip and their mother, Rehan, died in desperate attempt to flee to relatives.

The family of a three-year-old Syrian boy whose body was washed up on a beach in Turkey were making a final, desperate attempt to flee to relatives in Canada even though their asylum application had been rejected, according to reports.

Syria was already at war when Aylan Kurdi was born. He died with his five-year-old brother, Galip, and mother, Rehan. Their father, Abdullah, survived.

Speaking to Canadian press on Wednesday night, the family said Abdullah had phoned them to tell them his wife and sons were dead, and he now only wanted to return to their Kurdish home town of Kobani to bury his family. The town was bombarded during heavy fighting this year between Islamic State and Kurdish fighters.

Pictures have emerged of the two boys, a laughing Aylan and Galip holding a teddy bear in a pink dress, and the pair standing together on a sofa, with Galip’s arm around his small brother.

Their aunt Teema Kurdi, a hairdresser in Vancouver, heard the news from her brother Mohammad’s wife, Ghuson. “She had got a call from Abdullah, and all he said was, my wife and two boys are dead,”she told the National Post.

“I was trying to sponsor them, and I have my friends and my neighbours who helped me with the bank deposits, but we couldn’t get them out, and that is why they went in the boat.

“I was even paying rent for them in Turkey, but it is horrible the way they treat Syrians there.”

Kurdi, who emigrated to Canada more than two decades ago, said she had privately sponsored a refugee application for the family to join her in Canada, but the application had been rejected.

Her account was confirmed by her local MP, Fin Donnelly, who told the paper that he had personally delivered Kurdi’s application to the immigration minister, Chris Alexander, in March, but it had been turned down.

Donnelly said he had spoken to Kurdi since the pictures were published and she was devastated. He told the Associated Press: “This tragic loss is just heartwrenching to go through. She was just completely upset and heartbroken.”

He said there were tentative suggestions about holding a memorial service for the family locally, but nothing had been decided. “She did say that she’s spoken to her brother and it’s very hard for him to even want to stay alive at this point, knowing what he’s going through.”

Canada allows refugees to settle if they have the sponsorship of at least five Canadian citizens, on the condition that those citizens provide financial and emotional support.

Only people who have been formally designated as refugees can apply, and many Syrian Kurds have reported difficulties getting their applications processed in UNHCR camps in Turkey. Turkey will not issue exit visas to refugees if they do not have official status.

The two young brothers and their mother were among at least 12 Syrians who died on a boat headed for Greece. The boat was part of a flotilla of small dinghies boarded by passengers at Akyarlar, the closest point to the Greek Aegean island of Kos.

It overturned in calm waters, overloaded by the 17 passengers. Bodies washed up on Ali Hoca Point beach in Bodrum. Another dinghy carrying a further 16 people also capsized.

The Turkish coastguard said five children and a woman died after the boats capsized and another three people were still missing. Helicopters helped rescue a further 15 people.

The country’s state-run news agency, Anadolu, said police have detained four suspected people smugglers, linking them with the tragedy.

Anadolu said the suspects, including at least one Syrian citizen, were detained on a beach on the Bodrum peninsula and would appear in court later on Thursday, suspected of acting as intermediaries for illegal crossings.

This week the coastguard said it had rescued more than 42,000 people in the Aegean Sea in the first five months of 2015, and 2,160 in the past week. More than 100 were pulled from the sea on Wednesday night alone, trying to reach Kos, the coastguard told AFP.

[moonflyte]

Click bait thread trying to denigrate our border protection policy to the millions moving into Europe.

Australia takes many more refugees than many other countries. Do you want an armada of boats and millions of migrants to arrive on our shores?  there's no stopping this human tide. What is this thread about?

The reason Europe cannot cope with this human tide is they took their borders down when the joined then EU and now it has been exposed for the failure it is,  abrogating your country to a foreign entity (Brussels EU).

Putting up the picture of that dead child to push your thinly disguised is inhuman imo.

[Anonymous]

Angela Merkel has raised the possibility of ending border-free travel in Europe in a sign that Britain may be winning the battle over the migrant crisis.

“If we do not succeed in fairly distributing refugees then of course the Schengen question will be on the agenda for many,” the German chancellor said in Berlin.

[moonflyte]

The UK has been struggling with ending their membership of the EU as millions of eastern European migrants flocked in to Britain and took many jobs, hundreds of Polish builders flooded in and worked day and night to finish jobs UK builders lost out on because of their wages and conditions system (nothing wrong with that).

The EU has been a massive failure  and only now are countries  waking up to it, only now they have realised it has spawned the human tide of deaths of children and families and now rioting.

Taking in millions of migrants will beggar most EU countries and they know it.

[opmania]

Sorry reply to op

[debra9275]

yes, heartbreaking picture that Joono. when it was first circulated on twitter I noticed someone say,

"I want to know details, where is it from, until I know I believe it to be photoshopped"

and i just thought, what have we become

[go-tazz]

The story behind the photo,(without the photos),

The pretty Turkish beach where two Syrian boys drowned this week as their family struggled to reach the West is a death trap for migrants.

By day, tourists lie on sunbeds and buy cocktails from a nearby restaurant, The Mermaid. At night, the place is transformed into a people-trafficking hub, where migrants are pushed out to sea on flimsy boats, not knowing if they will live or die.

Two weeks ago, at three in the morning, I stood on the beach and watched as nine Syrians jumped into a tiny inflatable dinghy, paddling off towards the twinkling lights of the Greek island of Kos, clearly visible 12 miles away.

Another trafficker, a 33-year-old Syrian based in Bodrum, said the stretch of coastline near Ali Hoca Point had become a favourite for the smuggling gangs. ‘There are 100 launching points along there, and – so far – the authorities have not caught up with us. We charge £1,200 for a place on a boat, but nothing for children under ten.’

As for the migrants, they are trapped. After paying the trafficking gangs up front for the journey to Kos, they then hope to travel on a ferry to mainland Greece, and up to cities in Britain, Germany, Holland or Scandinavia to begin a new life.

Predominantly Muslim, they are escaping a civil war being waged by the Syrian government against the murderous Islamic State. Not wanting to return to Syria or settle in Turkey, they can only go forward – even if it means the terrifying sea journey across the Aegean.

One migrant, 27-year-old design student Hassan Ahmadi, from Damascus in Syria, told me near the beach: ‘We were afraid at home with the war. Now we are afraid of the traffickers. They have guns, they are a mafia, so we go where they say. They do not look after our lives. We are only more money to them as they push another boat off into the sea.’

Yet he was still determined to go, even though he – like many of the migrants – cannot swim.

In the week I visited, five migrants, including a child, drowned when their boat overturned. Now, the death toll has risen again with reportedly as many as 13, including the two boys, drowned in the latest disaster.

The owner of The Mermaid restaurant, Veysi Aslan, said yesterday: ‘At 4am last week, I spotted some migrants in the sea. I jumped into the water, almost drowning as one of them clutched my neck so hard to stay above water.

‘I still managed to bring him to shore, but I was very upset. I see little boats with a capacity for a few people carrying 12 or 13. The traffickers here on this beach are Pakistani and Syrian, operating for maximum profit. They do not care about the migrants.’

The "solution" to these drowning seems simple because all they need to do is to stop the people smugglers.

But the "migrants" will still try it themselves

The smugglers and the migrants themselves are the ones that are responsible for these deaths,(it has nothing to do with Australia),

[j*oono]

It's a world wide problem.  I didn't start this thread for a giant bicker.  All world leaders should be working towards a solution.

I am including people like Bill Shorten who has been pretty spineless about the whole thing too.  For those that don't like the picture, I'm sorry to upset you but that wasn't the worst one although it is heartbreaking.

[Anonymous]

lets not forget about the infant who sufficated

in the truck.

Several arrests have been made in Hungary after the bodies of 71 refugees were found in a truck abandoned on a motorway in Austria.

Austrian police said three people had been arrested while their Hungarian counterparts said four were in detention. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy.

Police had  originally  put the death toll at between 20 and 50 after the truck was found on Thursday, but Austrian officials revised the figure upwards on Friday.

Speaking at a press conference in Eisenstadt, Austrian police official Hans Peter Doskozil said the dead comprised 59 men, 8 women and four children, including a young infant.

He said it was likely that those in the truck suffocated.

A Syrian travel document was found among the victims but more time is needed to determine whether people of other nationalities were on board, the police chief said.

Hungarian police said they had arrested four men, including three Bulgarians and an Afghan citizen, and had questioned roughly 20 people after conducting house searches.

"We expect that that this is the trace that will lead us to the perpetrators," Doskozil said, making clear that the people being held were not the ring leaders of the trafficking gang.

The truck, found on Thursday, had travelled to Austria from Hungary. The partly decomposed bodies were piled on top of each other in a cargo container in the vehicle, parked off the highway in Burgenland state.