Last week the European parliament failed to come to an agreement over the migrant quota system Germany and Italy are pressing for whereby all 28 European member states would take their fair share (dependent on each country’s size and relative wealth) of the hundreds of desperate people who are washed up daily on the shores of Italy and, more recently, Greece.
The migrants are from a variety of backgrounds and origins. Some are young African men in their 20s who are seeking the opportunities they are denied at home in Europe. The majority, however, are young families — and a growing number of unaccompanied children — fleeing war and oppression.
I was just seventeen years-old when I fled Gaza, alone, during the six-day war with Israel and became a refugee first in Jordan, then Egypt and, eventually, Britain where I finally became a citizen of somewhere in my late 20s. I understand the fear, the apprehension, the sense of being cast adrift and that small inextinguishable flame of hope that drives the migrant’s search for a new home.
The traffickers — typically gangs or jihadists — are interested only in money, and cram unseaworthy boats with people according to how much they can afford to pay. Syrians, being generally better off, obtain places on the upper decks. The poorer refugees tend to find themselves below deck, enclosed, and with no chance of escape from drowning if the boat capsizes or sinks. Not wishing to face arrest, the traffickers no longer pilot the boats themselves, but push them out to sea, thrusting a GPS navigation device set for Italy into the hand of the nearest migrant.
Last year 3,500 migrants drowned en route from Libya to Italy. In a bid to deter them, Italy cut its ‘search and rescue’ services but this only resulted in more deaths — in the first three months of 2015 2,000 had already perished.
People who put themselves at such risk are not sneaky opportunists... they are desperate.
In 2014, Germany took one third — over 200,000 — of the total claims for asylum in Europe, while Sweden took the most per capita with 80,000 — 50,000 of whom were middle-class Syrians who arrived by plane. Italy had little choice but to absorb 64,000. Most other European countries have steadfastly looked the other way.
British prime minister, David Cameron, reluctantly agreed to accept 500 of the ‘most traumatised’ of Syria’s 4 million refugees in 2014. By contrast, Turkey has accommodated well over a million, as have Jordan and Lebanon.
Xenophobia and racism
In Europe, where the far right is resurgent on a tide of xenophobia and racism, migration has become a key political issue. In the UK, where general elections will take place on 7 May, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) has provoked a general shift to the right which is largely being expressed in policy on Mediterranean migration.
I was deeply shocked to read a recent piece in the Sun newspaper — which champions David Cameron’s bid for a second term — by star columnist, Katie Hopkins.
“Make no mistake,” Hopkins warns the Sun’s two million readers, “These migrants are like cockroaches.”
She recommends bombing the refugees’ boats and “drilling a few holes in the bottom of anything resembling a boat” just to make sure.
Mistaking inhumanity for ideology (a mistake Adolf Hitler also made) she boasts, “Show me bodies floating in the water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.”
The Labour Party, which used to be associated with left-wing, fair-minded, humane politics, has made its own special contribution to the debate by offering for sale a mug which trumpets ‘Controls on Immigration... Vote Labour’.
Commentators from both the right and left suggest that, rather than fleeing their own countries in search of a better life in the West, migrants should stay at home and struggle to improve life there. The problem is that, in many cases, the outside world will not allow that. Many of the most corrupt and authoritarian governments in the Middle East and Africa are supported and armed to the teeth with the instruments of repression by external powers.
The Arab Spring experience showed us that when a popular uprising looks set to organically produce a regime (especially Islamist or Socialist) that is at odds with their own economic, political and strategic agendas, regional and global powers do not hesitate to intervene either overtly or covertly.
In addition, many migrants are fleeing wars and violence that have directly resulted from external intervention. The West needs to accept some responsibility here: civil conflicts and proxy wars are raging in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen — all countries that the West has invaded or bombed. The most numerous among the Mediterranean migrants are Syrian and Afghan.
And the state of total chaos in Libya, which allows the unregulated coastal industry of maritime people-trafficking to thrive, is a direct result of the Nato intervention to depose Muammar Gadaffi.
It is time that Europe stopped fear-mongering and recognised the true scale of the crisis and its own moral, and humanitarian, obligation to help.
A Mori poll found that people in the UK and Spain believe there are twice as many immigrants in their countries as there actually are; the Italians, Belgians and French think there are three times more and the people of Poland are terrified by the notion that there are 30 times more. The media can do much to remedy these misapprehensions.
The truth is that the numbers who actually have the guts and organisational abilities to get to Libya are relatively small — a total of 626,000 in 2014. Those who make it to the southern shores of the Mediterranean have sacrificed everything to pay for this one chance to cross it. Risking death on the high seas is not for the faint-hearted and if families and young people are so desperate that they do so, surely the 28 members of the EU and its half a billion people can recognise their bravery and determination by offering them a home.
Credit: Abdel Bari Atwan is the editor-in-chief of digital newspaper Rai alYoum: http://www.raialyoum.com. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@abdelbariatwan.
