Crossing a beach in Bodrum
Brandon Griggs at CNN tells us about the photographer who took those photos of Aylan Kurdi.
Nilufer Demir was crossing a beach in Bodrum, Turkey, on Wednesday when she saw him: a small boy in a red T-shirt, blue pants and black shoes, lying face-down in the sand.
Waves lapped at his lifeless face.
She froze.
“There was nothing left to do for him. There was nothing left to bring him back to life,” she told CNN Turk, a CNN sister network based in Turkey.
So Demir, a correspondent and photographer with Turkey’s Dogan News Agency, did the only thing she could: She raised her camera and began shooting.
She thought it was the only way to express the silent scream of his body.
Demir, 29, has worked for Dogan News Agency, also known as DHA, since she was a teenager. Based in Bodrum, she responded to reports of activity at the beach and discovered that several bodies had washed up on shore.
She and her colleagues found Aylan’s brother Galip nearby, and then another boy. None of them had life jackets.
The boys’ father was the only Kurdi family member to survive the ill-fated boat trip.
“I don’t want anything else from this world,” Abdullah Kurdi told CNN on Thursday. “Everything I was dreaming of is gone. I want to bury my children and sit beside them until I die.”
Demir has been covering the refugee crisis for months and has photographed many dead migrants. But none has had the impact of her images of Aylan.
“I didn’t think it would bring this much attention when I was taking the photograph,” she told CNN Turk. “However, with the pain I felt when I saw Aylan, the only thing on my mind was to pass along this to the public. I didn’t think anything else. I just wanted to show their tragedy.”
That happens – one photo strikes a nerve. The little girl running down the road with napalm burns; the little boy in the huge cap in the Warsaw ghetto; the woman with the faraway stare in the dust bowl.
Nick Ut
I’m so grateful to her for what she did. The photograph was on the front page of the newspapers here on Thursday.
Utterly heartbreaking.
I hope that it will encourage more people to lobby their governments to do something constructive about the appalling waste of human life. We have massive ships carrying people on pointless cruises – why haven’t they been pressed into service to rescue those people so that they don’t have to rely on death trap boats? How many people could the UN mobilise to step in and protect the civilians if they had the political backing? Millions?
There is talk of a refugee ‘crisis’, but the actual crisis is in how inhumane our governments are being, despite the objections of the majority of decent folk.
Refugees aren’t problems, they are people with problems. We could so easily be the solution.
Tell me about it – I live a vertical mile or so above a pier where those cruise ships park and depart 3 times a week, two at a time. I can see them from here. They hold about 3000 people I think.
I heard a statement summarizing the anti-immigrant sentiment in some parts of the EU: “Soon Europeans will be a minority on our own continent”. Which is perhaps a bit less ironic than similar sentiments spoken by North Americans of white European heritage. So, whose planet is it anyway?
An excellent idea to use cruise ships. Perhaps some marketing genius could get the companies to set it up as a PR move. (On the other hand, handing this off to private companies seems rather like an admission of failure of the system – my (albeit kinda socialistic and idealistic) view is that one of the things that government is for is to find a way to do The Right Thing for society even if it’s not profitable and might be unpopular with some constituents.)
We watch them sailing into and out of Cork harbour; they dock at Cobh (formerly Queenstown, whence the Titanic sailed on her maiden and final voyage). Some of them are even bigger and 3000+ is only the passengers; it doesn’t include the crew.