Before the Adriana, an overcrowded fishing trawler, left Libya on 9 June, Sajjad Yousef spoke to his father. His family had begged him not to make the treacherous journey from Pakistan to Europe. But Yousef wouldn’t listen. He wanted to leave the desolation of life in Pakistan far, far behind. It was hard, the journey would be rough, he knew that. His family had taken out loans in the millions of rupees to buy him space on that teeming trawler, and Yousef was ready to take his chance.
Most of the 750 people on board the trawler were Pakistani. They were migrants, fleeing poverty and lack of opportunity but also the ravages of the climate emergency, which is felt acutely in Pakistan. The men and women who risked their lives on the Mediterranean were escaping floods, droughts, glacial melt, crop damage and locust plagues, all of which Pakistan has suffered in recent years. It is a cruel fate to endure disaster after disaster; they were once described as “biblical” but have since become mundane, everyday occurrences.
