Jeanne Carstensen was in Greece as a reporter for The World when an overfilled boat chugging across a narrow part of the Aegean foundered and sank. The disaster brought the island of Lesbos together, in part because its residents remembered even older surges of migration, including the one caused by the Greco-Turkish War in 1922. Now she’s written a compelling and humane book about the disaster from as many points of view as possible — Greek, Syrian, Afghan, Iraqi, Turkish; her own — and it’s a stark reminder that people are still dying on the water. We talk about the nature of human smuggling on the edges of Europe and, finally, its effect on EU politics.
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Resources:
A Greek Tragedy, by Jeanne Carstensen
“A Lethal Farce in the Aegean Sea,” one of Jeanne’s first reports on the story
“The Libyan Coast Guard is Not What it Seems,” by Michael Scott Moore, a reported essay from the central Mediterranean
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