An international news agency on Tuesday reported that seven Bangladeshi migrants have died while attempting to cross the perilous Mediterranean Sea from Libya in a boat carrying 280 people in cold weather. Quoting the mayor of Italy’s Lampedusa island, the news report said three Bangladeshi people died during the crossing, another four suffering severe hypothermia died after they were intercepted by the coast guard. Meanwhile, the Mediterranean Hope migration project twitted that 280 migrants hailed originally from Bangladesh, Egypt, Mali and Sudan. We’ve no such words to express our sorrow for the untimely death of our youths. If we want to elaborate the reason behind their death – it was severe cold. The desperate migrants were trying to cross the Mediterranean defying freezing temperature. It’s clear that the migrants had not enough warm cloths and foods. So far as we know, hundreds of our nationals make the deadly journey every year to reach their desired destinations being lured by the brokers. What’s most significant is that – this is not the first time where Bangladeshi nationals died while crossing the Mediterranean. We get such tragic news of our national’s death in a regular interval. Even, it was not stopped during worldwide Covid-19 restrictions in 2020 and 2021.
Which shocks us very much is that there continues to be a deafening silence from the government and other human rights organisations, even in the face of deaths. It becomes a continuous phenomenon. Nobody even raises a question why these youths risk their lives to go to foreign land when their motherland is a developing country! Why they pay on an average Tk 8 lakh to 10 lakh to the brokers to get a chance to go to Europe? According to statistics available, the unemployment rate in Bangladesh was approximately 5.3 per cent in 2020. The situation worsened in 2021 to January 2022 due to pandemic. On the other hand, about 30 per cent of the country’s total population is young who are aged 15-30 years while the number of young unemployed people is about one third. In the last two years thousands of people have lost their jobs and many others also had faced salary cut. Besides, several thousands were compelled to shutdown their businesses due to huge loss. The number of new poor has shot the number of unemployed to such an extent that it becomes almost impossible to arrange any job for them in the country. This is the reality whether the government admits it or not.
Mega projects have made Bangladesh one of the most corrupt countries. A poor country cannot be most corrupt and developed at the same time. Human trade is our main stay of the economy. Government spends huge to hit foreign lobbyists to lie about development. They forget that the foreign embassies are the sources of information about a country’s fragile conditions.
