Two Names on Texel: An Argument Over Who Owes the Dead

The foot was still in the shoe.

That is the sentence I cannot write around, and so I will not try. In October 2023, two months after a rubber dinghy carrying sixty-eight people lost its engine and tore apart north of Calais, a single foot in a shoe and a torso washed ashore on the Dutch island of Texel. It took until this summer for a detective named Fetze Venema, working with the Red Cross, to put names to what the North Sea returned: Samiullah, twenty years old, and Ahmad Jan, twenty-seven. Afghans. Brothers in nothing except the night of 12 August 2023 and the engine that failed.

A regional broadcaster and an investigative programme in the Netherlands have now traced the equipment, the route and the man who sold the crossing — Idriss Ghazi Kareem, sentenced in Paris last year to fifteen years, who kept running his business from the cell. The rubber boats, prosecutors say, come from China, are imported through Türkiye, stored in the Netherlands, driven to the French coast, and inflated for the Channel. A continental supply chain for what the national prosecutor for migration crime, Petra Hoekstra, called floating coffins. At least twenty-six people have died trying to cross the Channel this year, among them eight women and two children.

I owe my ledger a word before I go further. On 17 October I wrote a letter about a continent that keeps postponing itself; nothing in this week has made me want to take it back. And an open promise about the European Commission's Ukraine financing note is not yet due. I will come to today's forecast at the end.

What I want to do now is sit two voices across a small table and let them speak at full strength, because the question the desk sent me — who bears the moral weight — has at least two serious answers, and the serious reader deserves both.

The first voice belongs to a woman I will call the prosecutor, because her position is the one Hoekstra and her colleagues articulate in court. She would say this:

Do not look away from the man who sold the boat, the prosecutor would argue. Kareem earned hundreds of thousands of euros a year and knew the dinghies were not seaworthy, nor that the life vests were substandard. He kept running the network from prison. The policy debate one might want to have, she would continue, is a luxury Samiullah and Ahmad Jan did not have at two in the morning off Calais. States did not cut the throttle cable, nor did they choose a Chinese boat routed through a Turkish warehouse because it was cheaper than a safe one. A specific person did, for money, and eight others helped him, and a French court named them. If moral weight means anything, it means the weight falls first on the hand that took the cash. Everything else is sociology — and sociology, in the hour of the explosion, saves no one.

She would add, and I think she would be right to add, that the romance of structural blame can become its own anaesthetic. If every death at a border is only ever Europe's fault in the abstract, then no particular person is ever quite guilty, and the Kareems of the chain can keep working while columnists like me write letters to a continent. Fifteen years in a Paris prison is a sentence; a column is not.

Now the second voice. Call him the border sociologist, because the position is older than any one scholar and belongs to no one in particular. He would lean forward and say this:

Everything the prosecutor says is true, and almost nothing it explains, the sociologist would contend. A smuggling network is a market, and markets exist because there is demand that cannot be met legally. Samiullah and Ahmad Jan did not want a Chinese dinghy with a bad engine; they wanted a ferry ticket, or an asylum appointment, or a visa line at an embassy that would see them. None of those were available to a twenty-year-old Afghan in the summer of 2023. The policy did not pull the throttle, the sociologist would argue; the policy built the room in which the only door out was Kareem's door. You can jail him for fifteen years, and his lieutenants for less, and a new network will be standing at Calais by spring, because the arithmetic of the border has not changed. The moral weight of a market falls on whoever sets its terms. In this case: on us.

And he would gesture, because this is the week for it, at Istanbul. On Friday the Turkish foreign minister is hosting the R4 and E3 ministers — Germany, the UK, France, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia — in an unprecedented combined format. The agenda is Palestine, the Strait of Hormuz, Yemen, Ukraine. Migration, as always, is not on the printed sheet, though it sits in every chair. The same minister told a wire agency this week that the 2019 Türkiye–Libya maritime deal was «entirely legitimate», a sentence that will be fought over in Athens and Nicosia for another decade. In Athens itself, students and teachers filled fifty cities on Wednesday against the government's education and cost-of-living policies; local press in Istanbul reported figures from Greek state television of two and a half thousand in Thessaloniki, more than three thousand in Patras, and crowds in the tens of thousands in the capital, where one student told reporters that staying alive in the city had become very hard. Maritime boundaries, ministerial formats, housing allowances — the border sociologist would say these are all the same conversation, and the Channel is where its unpaid bills wash up.

So: who owes Samiullah's family the explanation? Kareem, who sold the seat? The Marechaussee, whose own statement concedes the Netherlands plays a key role in the import, transit and storage of the equipment? The French coast, where the boat left? The British shore, which was the destination because no legal route led there? The Turkish warehouse? The Chinese factory? The ministers who will sit in Istanbul on Friday and talk about Hormuz?

My reading, if you want it plainly, is that the prosecutor is right about this week and the sociologist is right about the decade. Kareem belongs in a cell. The market that will replace him belongs to the governments now flying into Istanbul and the ones that chose not to be invited. Both sentences are true. Neither cancels the other.

And yet I promised at the top that I would give the last word to the position I disagree with less comfortably, and in this column that is the prosecutor's. So let her finish.

You will write your structural piece, the prosecutor would say, and I will not begrudge you it. But remember what washed up on Texel: not a policy, not a market, but "a foot, in a shoe, that belonged to a twenty-year-old named Samiullah," whose mother gave DNA to a Dutch detective so that a name could be written on a grave. The man who put him in that boat is in prison. That is not everything. But do not tell the mother it is nothing. Do not tell her the real culprit is a system, as if systems can be sentenced, as if abstractions can be made to pay. Someone took the money. Start there. Then, if you have the stomach, go wherever your argument leads.

I have the stomach. I am less sure, this morning, that I have the answer.

One forecast before I close the file. The R4+E3 ministerial in Istanbul on Friday will issue a joint statement that names Palestine, Hormuz, Yemen and Ukraine, and does not name migration or the Channel at all. I would like to be wrong. I expect to be right.