Interview with Walt Staton from No More Deaths

Xochitl has a great interview up with Walt Staton, who was given a littering ticket on the Mexican border for leaving water bottles for immigrants who were dying of thirst. He now faces massive fines and possible jail time.

An excerpt:

(During a trip to Europe), we met this ship captain who was arrested in 2004. There is this gigantic cargo ship, and they spent years around Vietnam rescuing people in the ocean, these boat people fleeing Vietnam. And he rescued thousands of people over twenty years, and then as that crisis had died down the ship would take UN contracts to deliver humanitarian supplies to all kinds of places. They were crossing the Mediterranean in route to Jordan to deliver supplies that were supposed to go to Iraq in 2004 and they found a boat, a sinking raft of refugees, when they were in the Mediterranean. So they of course took the people on board.

Then they went to take them to Italy––it was the closest port––and Italy refused to let them land. They said we don’t want these refugees. They had nowhere else to go, so the guy eventually declared an emergency and forced his way into an Italian port in Sicily. The boat captain was arrested for smuggling, for basically rescuing these refugees from a sinking raft. So just understand the migration is global, the crack down against migration is global, but the crack downagainst humanitarian movements, the crack down against people who care, is also global.

PS: The link: http://www.splintergeneration.com/2009/08/03/an-interview-with-walt-staton/