GENEVA: A total of 8,565 migrants died on land and sea routes worldwide last year, the UN migration agency said Wednesday, a record high since it began counting deaths a decade ago.
The International Organization for Migration said the biggest increase in deaths last year was on the treacherous Mediterranean Sea crossing, to 3,129 from 2,411 in 2022. However, that was well below the record 5,136 deaths recorded on the Mediterranean in 2016 as huge numbers of Syrians, Afghans and others fled conflicts toward Europe.
IOM said the total number of deaths among migrants in 2023 was nearly 20 percent more than the previous year.
It said most of the deaths last year, about 3,700, came from drowning.
The count also includes migrants who vanished — often while trying to cross by sea — and are presumed dead even if their bodies were not found.
The Geneva-based migration agency cautioned that the figures likely underestimate the real toll, and factors such as improved data collection methods play a part in its calculations.
“Every single one of them is a terrible human tragedy that reverberates through families and communities for years to come,” IOM Deputy Director General Ugochi Daniels said in a statement.
Overall, the biggest jump in deaths in recent years was in Asia, where 2,138 migrants died last year, 68 more than in 2022. That was primarily because of increased deaths among Afghans fleeing to places like neighboring Iran and among Rohingya refugees on maritime routes, IOM spokesperson Jorge Galindo said in an email.
IOM said a record number of deaths also occurred in Africa last year — 1,866 — mostly in the Sahara Desert and along the sea route to the Canary Islands.
The agency cited difficulties in data collection in remote areas, such as in the dangerous Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama, where many migrants pass from South America on their way north.
IOM’s Missing Migrants project, which tallies the figures, was set up in 2014 after a surge in deaths in the Mediterranean and an influx of migrants on the Italian island of Lampedusa off Tunisia.
Over 8,500 migrants died worldwide last year, a record since the UN started counting in 2014
https://arab.news/jucrx
Over 8,500 migrants died worldwide last year, a record since the UN started counting in 2014
- IOM said the total number of deaths among migrants in 2023 was nearly 20 percent more than the previous year
Poland slow to counter Russia’s ‘existential threat’: general
- The general highlighted a low “pace of technical modernization,” compared to increases in the army’s size
- Kukula said the Polish army should reach 500,000 soldiers by 2039
WARSAW: Russia poses an “existential threat” to Poland and its military is lagging, the country’s armed forces chief warned senior officials on Wednesday.
Poland, the largest country on NATO’s eastern flank and a neighbor of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, is the western alliance’s largest spender in relative terms.
This year, the country is allocating 4.8 percent of its GDP to defense, just shy of the alliance’s five percent target to be met by 2035.
However, that record defense spending was not enough to “make up for nearly three decades of chronic underfunding of the armed forces,” General Wieslaw Kukula, chief of the general staff, argued at the meeting, which included top officers, the defense minister and Poland’s president.
The general highlighted a low “pace of technical modernization,” compared to increases in the army’s size.
Kukula said the Polish army should reach 500,000 soldiers by 2039, compared with around 210,000 at present.
As a result of a lack of updates, some new Polish units “are not achieving combat readiness,” due to insufficient equipment, rather than a personnel shortage, the general argued.
Meanwhile, he added, “the Russian Federation remains an existential threat to Poland.”
Russia “is constantly reorganizing its forces, drawing on the lessons from its aggression in Ukraine, and building up the capacity for a conventional conflict with NATO countries,” he stressed.
Poland is to receive 43.7 billion euros ($51,5 billion) in loans under the European Union’s Security Action For Europe (SAFE) scheme, designed to strengthen Europe’s defensive capabilities.
Warsaw plans to use these funds to boost domestic arms production.
The Polish government claims that Poland will be able to access SAFE finance even if President Karol Nawrocki — backed by Poland’s conservative-nationalist opposition — vetos a law setting out domestic arrangements for its implementation.
Law and Justice (PiS) — the main opposition party — argues that SAFE could become a new tool for Brussels to place undue pressure on Poland, thanks to a planned mechanism for monitoring the funds, which they claim risks undermining Polish sovereignty.
