The Edmonton Journal
Aw, the boat ride was too long, was it? And you say it was too hot?
There was no doctor on board, either? And the departure was
delayed. And the port was chaotic. And too little food and water had been laid in.
And some of you had to sleep on the floor!?
Oh, the indignity of it.
To listen to the whining and carping of many of the 261 Canadians rescued from Beirut on the first day of the evacuation from Lebanon, you would think they had just been returned to port from an ocean cruise that went terribly wrong, instead of being saved from a war zone.
Tuesday, the Crown Princess, a Princess Cruises ship, suddenly listed to port in heavy seas off the coast of Florida. The promenade deck almost submerged. Stairwells "became waterfalls." The casino and gift shop below decks were flooded. The main dining room had to be turned into a triage ward as more than 200 of the 3,100 passengers on board were injured by the sudden tilt; 94 had to be taken off for hospitals on shore.
By contrast, no passengers on the first Canadian rescue ship were injured. The worst that happened was a few threw up.
And, yet, the grousing and moaning on the Crown Princess did not equal that of the evacuees from Lebanon when they reached Cyprus early Thursday morning. Some even cursed at the Canadian diplomats who greeted them.
One woman from Montreal described the trip as "hell;" not the war, but rather her tax-paid voyage to freedom. After all, it had taken 15 hours instead of seven. Twice their ship, the Blue Dawn, had been stopped by the Israeli navy to ensure it was not hostile.
Imagine that. Stopping a ship in a war zone to see whether it is friend or foe. How rude! And the griping doesn't end with those Ottawa has already plucked
from the suddenly very hot zone in south Lebanon. Others still awaiting evacuation complain that our embassy in Beirut has not dealt with them fast enough. Their e-mails have gone unanswered, their phone calls meet with a busy signal. If they present themselves in person, there are long lines in the hot sun to meet a Foreign Affairs official face-to-face.
There aren't hotel rooms for them all. The waiting rooms are inadequate for the numbers wanting to leave. Embassy staff will not give precise departure times.
No kidding. We're not talking about the returns desk at Wal-Mart the day after Christmas. A staff of two dozen, who normally deal with a few thousand
inquiries a year are suddenly swamped with 2,000 or 3,000 people demanding to be saved - Now! In a city that no longer has a functioning airport. Where fighter-bombers frequently scream overhead. Air raids do tend to disrupt the flow of things.
It's a wonder our government managed, at all, to find seven underused cruise ships it could lease on such short notice.
On the first day that any country was able to get its citizens out by boat, we managed to rescue 261. The British got out just 170 of their people. The French, who have a fleet of warships patrolling the Mediterranean, could manage just 180.
Thursday, we rescued another 1,375. And thereafter, we should be able to extract 700 to 1,000 swearing, muttering ingrates each day, either to Cyprus or Turkey.
But just wait until they get to safe ports and find out they have several-day waits ahead of them until they can be airlifted - again at taxpayers' expense - to Canada.
When told she might have to sit put in Cyprus for a few days until a jet ride could be arranged, and that while she waited she would have to find and pay for her own hotel and meals, one of the first evacuees complained that the government had not already taken care of such things.
Whatever happened to personal responsibility? To simple gratefulness?
I don't expect the rescued Canadians to bow down and kiss the feet of our diplomats when they arrive on safe soil. But why is it too much to expect they might be thankful simply for being extracted from a danger zone, regardless of how uncomfortably?
They remind me of the Canadian and British antiwar activists extracted by commandos earlier this year from months of captivity in Iraq, who rather than saying thank you criticized the rescuers for using force to free them.
Wouldn't you be grateful to be rescued from Lebanon right now even if you and your family had to ride out in the fish hold of a trawler for a few days?
And yes it does matter that many of those complaining are Canadians of convenience. They hold Canadian passports, but have dual citizenship in Lebanon and have not been much interested in Canada for years until their real home country started getting dangerous.
There is a simple solution to this carping. The boats have to go back to Beirut for more evacuees. Anyone who profanes a Canadian worker or whines about conditions on the free boat gets put back on board and returned to Lebanon where they can find their own way out.