By Martin Hellicar
SEVENTY of the 107 boat people holed up in a Limassol hotel have gone on hunger strike in a desperate bid to avoid deportation.
The boat people have been living under police guard in the Pefkos hotel ever since they were rescued, starving and thirsty, off a Syrian-flagged fishing boat found drifting off Cyprus on June 29.
The government stated last week that only three of the Arab and African passengers, all of whom have been seeking asylum in Cyprus claiming they face persecution in their home countries,
would be granted asylum. Interior Minister Dinos Michaelides added that Cyprus did not grant asylum to anyone and that the three – from Bangladesh, Sudan and Sierra Leone – would be sent away as soon as a third country was found to receive them.
The rest of the survivors – who hail from Sudan, Sierra Leone, Congo, Rwanda, Bangladesh, Libya, Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon – are to be sent away once travel documents have been arranged for them.
The news of pending deportation prompted all seventy men among the boat people to begin a hunger strike on Sunday. They were continuing their hunger strike yesterday, though Limassol police said their resolve was waning.
“Twenty-eight of them had breakfast and 33 had lunch, their stomachs were obviously getting empty,” a police source said.
The survivors have been staging a protest at the hotel, wearing hastily- prepared placards decrying their fate.
“Save my life, Cyprus” and “Please help us”, the banners read.
A spokesman for the Aliens Support Movement, Doros Polycarpou, said the boat people were desperate. He said the Iraqis among them were particularly fearful, as they believed they faced imprisonment or even execution if sent home.
The passengers, including eight children and two pregnant women, were in a bad state when a Ukrainian cargo vessel found them crammed aboard the deck of the tiny Rida Allah. They had been drifting for 10 days after the vessel developed engine trouble two days after leaving the Lebanese port of Tripoli on June 18.
Police said two passengers died of thirst on the fishing boat and had been thrown overboard before the vessel was found and towed to Limassol.
The Syrian captain of the trawler, 31-year-old Mohammed Mustafa, has been charged with causing death by negligence and carrying paying passengers on an unsuitable vessel. The survivors claim they parted with hundreds of dollars each for passage to Greece or Italy on Mustafa’s boat.
