It will be a year tomorrow since a cargo container was opened in Co Wexford to reveal a group of Turkish illegal immigrants, eight of them dead. One of the survivors who lost his wife and children talks to Nuala Haughey, Social and Racial Affairs Correspondent
Saniye Guler wanted to leave her native Turkey for a better life in Europe with her husband Karadede and their two young sons. When the couple discussed making the move, she would cite examples of other people, including their own family members, who had achieved some sort of financial security as immigrants in London.
London was where the Gulers thought they were bound when they crept aboard a freight container loaded with Italian-made office furniture in the Belgian port of Zeebrugge on December 4th last year.
Their smugglers in Belgium, the last in a long line of men who assisted them on their clandestine 2,000 kilometre journey, told them the sailing to England would take two hours.
But they were tragically mistaken. Instead, the Guler family - Saniye (28), Karadede (32), Imam (10) and Berkan (4) - along with nine other stowaways spent some 53 hours sailing to Waterford.
Wexford, not London, was the destination for the cargo in the P&O Ferrymasters' container. By the time it was opened four days (101 hours) after the 13 illegal immigrants had boarded it, eight people, including Karadede's family and two other children, were dead. All the deceased were from south-eastern Turkey.
It had been a gruelling sailing in a gale force storm, the container stowed in the lower hold of the Dutch Navigator cargo ship where cries for help could not be heard. The ship docked on December 6th in Belview Port near Waterford and the container was stored on shore for another two days before being transported by lorry to the IDA Enterprise Park on the outskirts of Wexford.
It will be a year tomorrow since Karadede and the four other survivors were carried out of that container, opened after the lorry driver noticed its anti-tampering seal had been broken. The eight deceased had died from lack of oxygen in the container, which had only small air vents.
To say that Karadede was one of the lucky ones, when his wife and children perished, does not do justice to his ongoing suffering. The widower, who now lives in Dublin, simply cannot talk about those awful last hours and one can only guess at the depths of panic the stowaways must have experienced as they gasped for air in the intense heat.
In a quiet Dublin bar-restaurant this week, he smoked one cigarette after another while his friend and interpreter, Ali, translated his pained story.
It starts near Elbistan in south-eastern Turkey, in a village abandoned by its youth, where one of the few remaining young families decided to follow the footsteps of other emigrants. The head of the family, Karadede worked as a welder. To make a living, he had been forced to spend long stints working away from home, even as far afield as Russia where he lived for three years.
Karadede says he had had the chance to go to England in the early 1990s, but said: "No, I'm happy here". Then work became increasingly difficult to find and he and Saniye saw no future for their boys. They decided to take the risk of being trafficked to London, where four of his siblings live with their families.
"I asked my brothers and sisters there to help but they said 'the life is not so good as you think here,'" said Karadede. "They tried to discourage me but I was thinking 'they don't want to help me, that's why they are saying this'. So I thought life must be better." Karadede's brothers and sisters did not know he and his family were on their way to join them when, after two false starts, they set out from the Turkish capital Istanbul.
They spent their life savings of €5,000 to pay the traffickers' fee of about €22,000, borrowing the remaining money on the promise of one day paying it back. They flew to Bosnia on November 22nd, 2001 and then travelled overland to Belgium, staying two nights in Brussels.
Karadede recalled the day they boarded the container with their food and belongings, squeezed in between the highly stacked furniture destined for an American data processing firm in the Wexford business park. They were shown a document to prove the cargo was destined for England. He thinks it may have been an invoice, which included a London address. However, it also included the Wexford destination, a reference which the traffickers, fatally, seemed not to have understood.
The stowaways were grouped together behind some bushes in the container park and were escorted in small groups to the container, the silicone seal of which was broken and then rejoined once they were onboard. Karadede said bitterly that he learned afterwards that two young men were initially afraid to climb on board, but were threatened by the smugglers, maybe even at gunpoint.
Karadede thought the container would be hitched to the back of a truck and said it was only when he felt a crane lift it into the ship's hold that he realised this was not the case.
His eyes were always on his watch because he was told the journey would take two hours. "After a while I tried to open the door to be in the ship," he said. "I was trying to open the doors and I must have fainted and when I woke up, I was in hospital in Wexford." Here, Karadede's words dry up. He bows his head as he struggles to remain composed, repeatedly dabbing his lit cigarette in the ashtray. Ali explains that he didn't smoke before this. "The thing is, he's been living it over for the past year because everywhere you go you have to explain it and then they ask questions," Ali says.
Karadede's doctor has recommended that he write down his feelings and he is working on his life story but can't get much beyond the date of his marriage, July 27th, 1991.
He is learning English and plans to stay in Ireland, where he, and three of the other young male survivors were given permission to remain on humanitarian grounds. The other survivor, a woman, has since moved to live with relatives in England.
Karadede's 72-year-old mother has stayed with him for the past six months, although the accommodation he shares with asylum-seekers in a large house in south Dublin offers little privacy.
Still, Karadede couldn't face living in England with his close relatives. "I see it as the reason for all that happened," he says. Nor does he want to be around his young nephews who only remind him of his boys.
He feels anger towards the traffickers who have not been punished for the misery they visited upon him. He says they were told that the truck driver would know they were in his container, but it turned out that they weren't even on a truck as they entered the cargo ship. The furniture inside that container was never brought to its destination; as a mark of respect to the dead, it was burned.