Mediterranean tragedies

On the day anti-immigrant vitriol was revived across Europe after the Westminster terrorist attack, we were given another stark reminder of the dismal lives of the hundreds of thousands of people forced to cross the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Around 200 people looking to take the deadly route from Libya to the European shores had to be rescued once again when their ship capsized. At least 500 refugees have died in the waters of the Mediterranean since the turn of the year. Around 1,000 had to be rescued just this past Sunday.        This is a story that has often been told – but to little or no effect. A human tragedy has been unfolding in the Mediterranean over the last half a decade but since no country claims to own the sea when migrants or refugees are drowning, no one has taken responsibility for the dead. It is those willing to put their lives at risk for an existence without daily conflict and hunger who are left to take the blame.          Instead of making more of an effort to protect these precious lives, the European Union’s borders chief insisted that it was NGOs conducting rescues off the coast of Libya that were ‘encouraging traffickers’.

It is in fact a miracle that thousands more have not died on these shores. And it is the efforts of a number of humanitarian NGOs and some European navies that have saved lives. But sympathy for those who are dying after fleeing deadly conflicts in their home countries has been low. A humanitarian emergency should have been announced on these migrant routes – but that would mean admitting that the emergency was created after the EU made it near impossible to use the safer route to Greece that refugees prefer. Ours is a world crumbling under the weight of being unable to accept its moral responsibility to the rest of our kind. Far-Right groups preying on the fears of their fellow citizens have peddled the dangerous lie of the big, bad asylum seeker who wants to destroy Western civilisation. And it is a lie that works well for governments unable to solve the myriad of conflicts that in many cases they themselves have helped create.