2025-05-31
49 分钟The Economist During the migrant crisis that gripped Europe back in 2015,
the numbers strained the imagination.
More than a million migrants made their way in, many fleeing Syria's civil war.
As governments tried to manage the flood, one picture really galvanized people that year.
A two-year-old Syrian boy drowned, washed up on a beach.
For a pained moment,
those incomprehensible numbers representing people became just people,
part of broken families, people with names like Alan Curdie.
A decade later, migrant deaths still happen, are happening, quite probably right now,
somewhere in the Mediterranean. 20 dead, or 40, or 100.
Their numbers, because that's more spiritually manageable,
but also because we will just never know who many of them are.
That same year that Alan Curdie drowned,
a heaving fishing boat sank off the coast of Libya, with perhaps a thousand on board.
No one is sure exactly.
But they, they had names too, and there's an international project to find them all out.
I'm Jason Palmer and this is the Weekend Intelligence.
This week my colleague Barkley Bram learns in visceral detail just how hard it is to identify the casualties of migration and just how determined a handful of people are to do it anyway,
to put names, to numbers and dignify the dead.
The boat looms large over Diabatte.