Gwynne Dyer: Refugees drown amid fear of foreigners in Europe

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      The first thing to do, if you want to cut the number of refugees from Africa and the Middle East dying while trying to cross the Mediterranean, is to drop leaflets all along the Libyan coast teaching them about ship stability. Don’t all rush to one side when you spot a ship that might save you, the pamphlets will say, because your boat will capsize and you will drown.

      That’s what happened last weekend off the Libyan coast, where a boat filled with at least 700 refugees overturned when the people aboard spotted a Portuguese freighter and tried to attract its attention. (One survivor says there were 950 people aboard, including those locked below decks.) At least 650 people died—half a Titanic’s worth of casualties—although the boat in question was only 20 metres (70 feet) long. Only 28 people were saved.

      Exactly the same thing happened with another boat crammed with refugees the previous week, and another 400 people drowned. Counting another 300+ people who drowned in another disaster in February, the death toll right now, before the peak summer season for refugee crossings, is around 1,500. That’s a full Titanic. It’s not getting quite as many headlines, though.

      So the second thing to do is to lock the European Union’s foreign ministers into a room and refuse to let them have caviar and Champagne until they agree to do something about the silent massacre in the Mediterranean. Something quite effective was being done until late last year, but they deliberately stopped it.

      Until late last year the Italian navy (praise be upon it) was running an operation called Mare Nostrum that went all the way to the edge of Libya’s territorial waters to pluck refugees from the sea. The operation cost 9.5 million euros a month ($10.3 million), but it rescued 100,000 people from leaking boats or the open sea. More than half of the 170,000 refugees who landed in Italy had cause to thank the Italian navy, and only one in a hundred died.

      The number of refugees arriving in Italy each month is around the same this year, maybe a little higher—but 10 times as many people are dying on the way. That is because the European Union’s governments, rather than sharing the cost of the Mare Nostrum project, asked Italy to shut it down and substituted their own “Triton” operation.

      Except that “Triton” is in no way an adequate substitute. It only gets a third of funding Mare Nostrum had, and it is only supposed to operate in Italy’s coastal waters, not farther out where most of the refugee boats capsize or founder. Even this year, with the Italian navy theoretically excused from duty, it has saved twice as many people as the pathetic “Triton” operation. Which, by the way, was intended to be pathetic.

      The argument the European governments made was that if you didn’t give the refugees the hope that they would be saved by the Italian navy, fewer of them would come. Right, so if you’re fleeing the civil war in Syria or the ghastly dictatorship in Eritrea, and you learn that the danger of dying on a Mediterranean crossing has gone up from one percent to 10 percent, you’re going to decide to stay in war-torn Libya instead?

      Were the European governments lying to themselves, or just to everybody else? The latter, almost certainly. They were under pressure at home to stop the flow of migrants, they didn’t want to share the burden of saving them with the admirable Italians, but they couldn’t just say “Let them drown.” So they came up with that preposterous argument about deterring the migrants by making the crossing more dangerous, and shut Mare Nostrum down.

      “In many countries in Europe at the moment,” said Laurens Jolles, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) representative in Italy, “the [political] dialogue and the rhetoric is quite extreme and very irresponsible....It’s a fear of foreigners...but it is being exploited for populist or political reasons, especially in election periods.”

      Too true. Take, for example, Katie Hopkins, columnist for the Sun, a down-market right-wing British red-top (tabloid newspaper) owned by the estimable Rupert Murdoch. Last Friday, in an article headlined “Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants”, she wrote: “NO, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.”

      “Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit 'Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984', but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors....It’s time to get Australian. Bring on the gunships, force migrants back to their shores and burn the boats.”

      Saying that sort of thing is how she earns her living, but it also expresses the true sentiments of a politically significant minority not only in Britain but in most countries throughout the European Union. When the UNHCR appealed to the EU to resettle 130,000 Syrian refugees, Germany said it would take 30,000, Sweden (with a tenth of Germany’s population) took 2,700—and the other 26 EU states only took 5,438 between them.

      So the drownings will continue.

      Comments

      13 Comments

      doconnor

      Apr 20, 2015 at 11:52am

      "you learn that the danger of dying on a Mediterranean crossing has gone up from one percent to 10 percent, you’re going to decide to stay in war-torn Libya instead?"

      The danger if dying in Libya is a lot less the 1% (3200 killed since 2014 with a population of 6 million). Even staying in Syria the risk is only about 1.5% (No doubt it is lower if you don't choose to fight).

      Why do they risk the crossing? Poor judgement of risk (a common human failing) or hoping for a better life for their children and grandchildren?

      McRetso

      Apr 20, 2015 at 1:17pm

      I'm not so sure about the migrants coming from Syria, but those coming from Libya are usually migrants from other places who are using Libya as a final baseplate for their attempt to get into Europe.

      This has two implications:
      1) That they've already travelled quite a ways and spent most of their life savings, so they're already committed to the journey.
      2) They aren't from Libya, so their risk of death would not be the same as that of a Libyan native. Migrants are much more vulnerable to death and all sorts of exploitation than inhabitants. Migrants don't have relatives they can stay with or contacts in the security forces who can protect them, etc. So the risk to a migrant who stops in Libya is probably a lot higher than the risk to someone who already lived there, maybe even higher than the 10% chance of drowning on the Mediteranian.

      Heathstrom

      Apr 20, 2015 at 2:16pm

      This is absolute madness.

      Europeans must plan a strategy to deal with this problem. The EU that forces this illegal immigration to Europe must be stopped by any means necessary. It’s time to change the power that the EU has over European countries with regards to immigration. Support political parties and legislators that will change the laws regarding the EU. And it must also be recognized that vigilante action is now necessary, because this is an invasion!

      It’s exasperating. But it will eventually hit a crisis point and snap back like a spring under pressure.

      sam2

      Apr 20, 2015 at 3:01pm

      Australia has the "Pacific solution" or "Operation Sovereign Borders", which seems like the same thing. They intercept asylum seekers and send them to detention centers on other pacific islands. If they are deemed legitimate refugees, they are allowed to stay on that pacific island - they are not ever allowed to go to Australia. Australia pays these pacific islands large sums of money to take the refugees. The islanders apparently resent the refugees.

      It seems cruel, but boats have stopped attempting to reach Australia and deaths at sea have dropped.

      If my family was in a place with no future, no jobs, and violence; I'd do what ever I had to in order to get somewhere else.

      Moriarty

      Apr 20, 2015 at 6:47pm

      Part of the blame can and should be placed on EU officials. By not sending the "migrants" or "refugees" back home, or by not preventing them landing on European shores, they are encouraging this. If you encourage bad behavior, or unsafe behavior, you get more of it. It really is that simple.

      Let's See

      Apr 21, 2015 at 8:13am

      Europeans (and North Americans who are really little different than Europeans) have brutalized Africa to the point where anarchy reigns and a great many people's lives are shattered. Why would such people care at all about the fate of a few black/brown people on the Mediterranean.

      Rodney

      Apr 21, 2015 at 10:01am

      Given that my ancestors and those of my wife were United Empire Loyalists and, therefore, fled from one nation to another perhaps to avoid the persecution that might have come and that all of us in North America, other than the aboriginal population, have descended from immigrants or were immigrants who came to find a better life, the bottom line is to give assistance to refugees from persecution and various horrors no matter who they are or where they come from.

      George Costanza

      Apr 21, 2015 at 2:11pm

      900 illegal aliens, most likely all moslems drown, equals total out outrage, world condemnation, and an emergency EU officials meeting. Thousands of Christians in the middle east, murdered, taken into slavery, raped, ethnically cleansed, everyday... NOT A PEEP!!

      Sandy

      Apr 21, 2015 at 2:18pm

      This article appeared in our local newspaper today. Is Europe expected to absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees? No country can possibly do this. Their social, political and cultural systems would collapse and the result would be nothing short of chaos.
      The US southern border has been inundated with thousands of unskilled refugees, and many of our cities have been overwhelmed by these people. Our educational, medical and social services are stressed to the maximum.
      We now have 11 million illegals in the US, most of whom never bother to even learn the language.
      Europe, BEWARE! It is happening to you now and the only way to stop it is to stop these people from ever reaching your shores. Unless, of course, you want all of Europe to be infiltrated by people who have no wish to assimilate, only to dominate. I suspect most of them are Muslims who despise everything about western society
      Australia has the right idea.

      No Left Nutter

      Apr 21, 2015 at 3:13pm

      I have about as much sympathy for these "migrants" drowning as I do for a home invader who accidently slips and falls off my roof!