5 Deaths at Sea Gripped the World. Hundreds of Others Got a Shrug.

 

Many see harsh realities about class and ethnicity in the attention paid to the Titan submersible and the halfhearted attempts to aid a ship before it sank, killing hundreds of migrants. But there are other factors.

Five passengers on one ship perished during a pricey tour that was meant to bring them back to their previous life. On the other hand, just a few days prior, some 500 individuals may have perished while travelling in squalor and danger to seek refuge from poverty and violence.

Several nations and private organisations despatched ships, planes, and underwater drones to the Titanic after contact with the five people inside a submersible that was descending to the ship was lost in an effort to save them. That was a lot more work than what was done to save the hundreds of people aboard a fishing trawler that was damaged and dangerously overcrowded off the coast of Greece.

At ang nawawalang submersible, ang Titan, ang nakakuha ng napakalaking atensyon mula sa mga organisasyon ng balita sa buong mundo at sa kanilang mga manonood, higit pa kaysa sa bangkang lumubog sa Mediterranean at sa kabiguan ng Greek Coast Guard na tumulong bago ito tumaob.

Ang aksidenteng nalubog, sa lugar ng pagkawasak ng barko na nabighani sa publiko sa loob ng higit sa isang siglo, ay maakit ang mga tao anuman ang mangyari. Ngunit nangyari ito pagkatapos ng trahedya sa Mediterranean, at ang kaibahan sa pagitan ng dalawang sakuna, at kung paano sila hinarap, ay nagpasigla sa isang talakayan sa buong mundo kung saan nakikita ng ilan ang malupit na katotohanan tungkol sa uri at etnisidad.

Three successful businesspeople, including a white American, a white Briton, and a Pakistani-British magnate, as well as the billionaire's 19-year-old son and a white French deep-sea diver, were on board the Titan. Fewer than 100 of the estimated 750 people on board the fishing boat, who were mostly migrants from South Asia and the Middle East trying to get to Europe, survived.

"We saw how some lives are valued and some are not," said Judith Sunderland, acting deputy director for Europe at Human Rights Watch, in an interview. And when discussing how migrants are treated, she continued, "We cannot avoid talking about racism and xenophobia."

At a forum in Athens on Thursday, former President Barack Obama weighed in, saying of the submersible, “the fact that that’s gotten so much more attention than 700 people who sank, that’s an untenable situation.”

Status and race no doubt play a role in how the world responds to disasters, but there are other factors as well.

Other stories have been followed in minute detail by millions of people, even when those involved were neither wealthy nor white, like the boys trapped deep in a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018. Their plight, like that of the submersible passengers, was one-of-a-kind and brought days of suspense, while few people knew of the migrants until they had died.

And in study after study, people show more compassion for the individual victim who can be seen in vivid detail than for a seemingly faceless mass of people.

But the disparity in apparent concern shown for the migrants versus the submersible passengers prompted an unusually caustic backlash in online essays, social media posts and article comments.

Laleh Khalili, a professor who has taught about international politics and the Middle East at multiple British universities, wrote on Twitter that she felt sorry for the 19-year-old, but that “a libertarian billionaire ethos of ‘we are above all laws, including physics’ took the Titan down. And the unequal treatment of this and the migrant boat catastrophe is unspeakable.”

Many commenters said they could not muster concern — some even expressed a grim satisfaction — about the fates of people on the submersible who could afford to pay $250,000 apiece for a thrill. Before the U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday that the vessel had imploded and the five were dead, jokes and the phrase “eat the rich” proliferated online.

That schadenfreude partly reflects the rising anger in recent years at economic inequality, at the wealthy themselves and at the growing sense that the economy works only for those at the top, said Jessica Gall Myrick, a communications professor at Pennsylvania State University, whose specialty is the psychology of how people use media.

“One of the functions of humor is it helps us bond with people socially, so people who laugh at your joke are on your team and those who don’t aren’t on your team,” she said in an interview. Expressions of anger, she said, can serve the same purpose.

For human rights advocates, their anger is directed not at the rich but at European governments whose attitudes toward migrants have hardened, not only doing little to help those in trouble at sea but actively turning them away, and even treating as criminals private citizens who try to rescue migrants.

“I understand why the submersible captured attention: It’s exciting, unprecedented, obviously connected to the most famous shipwreck in history,” said Ms. Sunderland, of Human Rights Watch. “I don’t think it was wrong to make every effort to save them. What I would like is to see no effort spared to save the Black and brown people drowning in the Mediterranean. 

Instead, European states are doing everything they can to avoid rescue.”The disparity between the two catastrophes was particularly evident in Pakistan, the country of Shahzada Dawood, the Titan's billionaire, and many of the victims of the fishing trawler. It emphasised Pakistan's stark disparity between the ultra-wealthy and the millions of people living in poverty, as well as the failure of numerous governments over a long period of time to address unemployment, inflation, and other economic problems.

Undated picture of Suleman Dawood and Shahzada Dawood. Both passed away within the submersible Titan.Dawood Hercules Corporation is to be credited, via Agence France-Presse.

“How can we complain about the Greek government? Our own government in Pakistan did not stop the agents from playing with the lives of our youth by luring them to travel on such dangerous routes,” said Muhammad Ayub, a farmer in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, whose younger brother was on the fishing vessel that capsized and is believed to have died.

One factor that made the two maritime disasters very different is the degree of familiarity — though that in no way explains the lack of effort to aid the migrants before their boat sank. It is not just that some people are indifferent to the suffering of migrants — it is also that migrant drownings in the Mediterranean have become tragically frequent.

The rescues of a few people in Turkey who had survived more than a week under the rubble of a powerful earthquake in February — unusual victories amid an unusual disaster — drew the kind of global attention rarely given to the millions of refugees from Syria’s civil war who, for a decade, have lived not far away.

In 2013, the deaths of more than 300 migrants in another boat disaster off the Italian island of Lampedusa produced an outpouring of concern and increased rescue patrols. When Syrian asylum seekers began trying to reach Europe in enormous numbers in 2015, some governments and people portrayed them as alien, undesirable, even dangerous, but there was also considerable interest and empathy. The wrenching image of a drowned 3-year-old washed up on a beach had an especially profound effect.

Years and countless fatalities from migrant boats later, the tragedies are still horrifying but receive far less attention. Aid workers refer to it as "compassion fatigue." Along with it has faded the political desire to assist, which was always sporadic and unstable.

According to Arshad Khan, a political science student at the University of Karachi, "no one cared about the several hundred people" who perished in the Mediterranean. The millionaire businessman who spent billions of rupees to see the Titanic debris in the water is being sought after by the United States, the United Kingdom, and all other major world powers, he said.