I’m a trifle puzzled by the continued willingness to do those stories as reports on harrowing indifference.
The whole situation is much more coherent if you just look at it as the behavior of people who do not want to be stuck as the first country of asylum for legal purposes operating under just enough pressure from some combination of domestic human rights interests and EU members states without Mediterranean borders that they don’t think they can get away with actively tossing them to the sharks.
That also neatly explains, in a way that just ascribing the incident to either immediate apathy or apathy-induced resource limitations in the coast guard’s response does not, why there are resources to be had when Turkey needs a little sweetening to agree to play safe third nation or the Libyan coast guard needs some capacity building in order to reduce the number of boats that manage to enter someone else’s jurisdiction before running into trouble; as well as why there’s persistent hostility toward volunteers suspected of being a little too helpful or proactive when it comes to moving people from somewhere in the Mediterranean to Italy or Greece.
