9781422282847

C H A P T E R 1 The Present Replays the Past

T he first photo is beyond disturbing: a small boy, lifeless and face down on a beach in Turkey, his red T-shirt pulled up to the middle of his stomach. His hair looks as if it has just been neatly cut. Over the child’s body stands a Turkish police officer, his back to the camera. A second photo shows the same officer holding the dead child and carrying him away. By day’s end, the photos have made their way around the world. People soon learn the boy with the neatly cropped hair is three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, a passenger on one of two overcrowded boats that sailed from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos. Twenty-three people were aboard the boats, including Aylan’s older brother, father, andmother. All were refugees fromSyria trying to reach Europe. Aylan and his family had plans to travel to Canada, where an aunt was waiting. It was not to be. A wave struck the boat and the family fell overboard into the rough waters of the Aegean Sea. Aylan’s father survived, only to learn the rest of his family had perished. They were among the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war-torn Syria during the summer of 2015. The publication of the haunting photos jolted several countries into action. Within days, the governments of the United States, Germany, Great Britain, and France offered to take in thousands of Syrian refugees, all of whom were trying to escape a bloody civil war. Members of the European Union quickly met to discuss a unified asylum policy for the entire continent. “You see a dead child and can’t help but be catapulted into action,” Caryl M. Stern, president and chief executive of the United States Fund for UNICEF, told the New York Times . By the summer of 2015, six hundred refugees were arriving each night on the tiny island of Kos, making the 2.5-mile (4.1-km) passage across the Aegean Sea. Most came on small boats or rubber rafts owned by smugglers who charged $800 a person for the trip. Other Greek islands, such as Lesbos, were also in the path of this influx.

9

CHAPTER 1