The New Yorker:

The tragedy of the Adriana comes amid renewed anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe.

By Nicolas Niarchos 

The migrants were mostly Pakistanis, Syrians, Palestinians, and Egyptians. They left the port of Tobruk, Libya, on what their families thought was a “a V.I.P. boat,” headed for Italy, and what they hoped would be a better life in Europe. Five days later, the Adriana—which was actually a fishing trawler, and dangerously overcrowded—became stranded in deep waters to the southwest of Greece’s Peloponnese peninsula. On June 14th, in the middle of the night, it capsized, then sank, while a Greek Coast Guard vessel was stationed just a short distance away. As many as seven hundred and fifty men, women, and children are believed to have been on board. Only a hundred and four have been found alive. It is one of the worst shipwrecks in the Mediterranean’s history.

It was election season in Greece, and the tragedy quickly became political. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a former financier with undergraduate and business degrees from Harvard, and the leader of the conservative New Democracy Party, was seeking a second term as Prime Minister: he won a first-round election last month and the second round, on Sunday, by a large margin. On a recent campaign stop, he denounced the smugglers who had lured the migrants on to the Adriana, then castigated political opponents who criticized rescue services, saying, “We are also very disappointed with those who, with this tragedy, found an opportunity to denounce their own country and the Coast Guard, which made a commendable effort to save hundreds of people in extremely difficult conditions.”

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