NYTimes April 28: "300 People, 14 Dead, Found Stranded on Isle in Bahamas"

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This is a sad story that will disappear from the media in 24 hours.

These are Haitians. They are very black. Very few cute six-year-olds.

It is their bad luck that there were no Cubans among them.

-- (retard@but.happy), April 28, 2000

Answers

http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/world/bahamas-boat.html

April 28, 2000

300 People, 14 Dead, Found Stranded on Isle in Bahamas

By DAVID GONZALEZ

ASSAU, the Bahamas, April 27 -- Fourteen Haitians died and 264 others were stranded on an uninhabited island for an unknown period of time after their overloaded 50-foot boat broke down at sea about 200 miles southeast of here, United States Coast Guard officials said today.

Bahamian and American vessels participated in the rescue effort, which began on Wednesday evening after passengers on three sailboats passing nearby spotted hundreds of dehydrated and weak people on Flamingo Cay. They radioed Bahamian authorities, who in turn requested the help of the United States Coast Guard, which maintains ships and helicopters in the region for drug interdiction and rescue operations.

Dozens of the weakest Haitians were rushed by helicopter to the nearest clinic, about 70 miles away at Georgetown, Exuma, while the others were evacuated from the barren island late today aboard the Royal Bahamas Defence Force vessel the Bahamas.

Michael Minns, who owns a market and a small marina in Georgetown, was among the first to be notified about the emergency on the island, and helped coordinate the rescue efforts at the request of the Bahamas Air Sea Rescue Association. He said that throughout Wednesday night, he fielded anxious mayday calls from the sailors who discovered the people on the island.

The calls quickly became urgent when a doctor who had been aboard a passing boat stepped ashore to tend to them, whom he described as being in desperate condition. When the first 11 of the most seriously ill reached the one-doctor clinic at Georgetown, he thought they were headed for the morgue.

"Some of them were comatose," he said. "I thought they were dead. They had on very little clothing, some were in their underwear and they were covered with dust and dirt. None of them could walk. Most had trouble even holding their heads up."

Mr. Minns said the 11 recovered after being given intravenous fluids, but communication was difficult, he said, because they only spoke Creole. He said 11 others arrived later that night. Authorities are unsure how they became stranded, but they assume they were being smuggled to the United States.

"'We don't know whether the vessel sank or it just dropped them off," said Petty Officer Gibran Soto, a Coast Guard spokesman in Miami. "There was no vessel nearby, and we don't know how long they were there."

Mr. Minns said he provided food and water from his store to be taken to the Haitians today. He said he had heard unconfirmed reports from some people involved in the rescue that the boat's engine had broken under the strain of its load, and that it might have drifted for as long as six days.

"The boat drifted to the shore and they were stuck," Mr. Minns said. "They were on a small, dry cay without much to protect them."

Because the Haitians were discovered in Bahamian territory, Bahamian authorities will have the responsibility of repatriating them to Haiti.

This is the largest such incident of intercepted or stranded immigrants, but it is hardly the first. Haitians have long come here to seek work in menial jobs in gardening, construction or housecleaning, fleeing the poverty and violence that has crippled their homeland for years. Others slip into the Bahamas looking for another smuggler to take them to the United States, paying a price that is dear, and sometimes deadly, for the privilege of packing themselves into rickety and creaky boats. In 1995, smugglers threw 100 Haitians overboard to lighten a boat headed for the Bahamas. All were believed to have drowned.

Political repression, violence and searing poverty have led Haitians to flee in great numbers. Last year the Coast Guard intercepted 480 Haitians trying to enter the United States, and 1,437 in 1998. The discovery of this latest group comes at a time when Haiti is confronting election-related violence as it prepares for next month's parliamentary elections, which have already been postponed several times.

Haitians are fearful that the violence, which has already claimed, among others, the life of a prominent radio commentator, will only increase as it heads towards presidential elections later this year. All the while, the nation has been at an economic and political standstill, with no legislature, almost no investment and even less foreign aid, and a devastated social and physical infrastructure.

Bahamian authorities told the Reuters news agency that several hundred Haitian immigrants were intercepted in Bahamian waters in recent weeks. Anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000 Haitians live illegally in the Bahamas, a nation of 700 islands that is home to 280,000 people.

"We are being engulfed," a Royal Bahamas Defence Force senior commander, Raymond Farqhuarson, told Reuters.

Mr. Minns said that he receives distress calls from Bahamian seamen who discover stranded Haitian vessels about every six weeks.

"It's constant," he said. "Some vessel with a broken engine, lost in the water. They put a whole lot of people on board and not enough food and water. They have no navigation aids, or even a compass."

-- (linker@help.ing), April 28, 2000.


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