From A World to Win News Service:
The war on refugees in the Mediterranean
May 4, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
27 April 2015. A World to Win News Service. Within less than a week in April, two boats full of migrants from Middle East and Africa were left to sink in the Mediterranean Sea, resulting in the death of at least 1,300 people. This outraged people all over the world and provoked demonstrations in various countries.
When, in October 2013, a boat carrying refugees sank a short distance from the Italian island of Lampedusa and almost 500 people drowned, the world could not believe it. That tragedy caught the leaders of the Western European governments with blood on their hands. But rather than showing remorse or shame for this crime, they took measures to "deter" refugees that have now caused the loss of even more lives. Although shocking, these latest deaths were not unexpected. And more of the same or even worse could happen if the inhumane hostility against migrants is allowed to continue.
The number of refugees drowned in the Mediterranean Sea so far this year is estimated to be between 1,500 and 1,750. (BBC, 23 April 2015) That is more than 50 times as many people who died during the first months of 2014. The death toll has been climbing steadily for several years. The total number was nearly 3,500 in 2014, 600 in 2013 and 500 in 2012.
After the 2013 Lampedusa tragedy, the lack of interest and even deliberate indifference of the European leaders became even more apparent. In many cases, including this one, it was local fishermen and not the authorities who rescued the refugees. After that many people and humanitarian organisations demanded more action and resources from European leaders to help those who risk their lives to escape wars and misery zones. But instead the European leaders increased the chances of drowning by cutting funding to the already insufficient search operations.
Specifically, they decided to cancel the Italian Navy's Mare Nostrum operations in October 2014. This programme is said to have saved the lives of some 170,000 refugees in 2014. Italy announced it would end the programme if the other European countries did not share the cost, a half a billion euros a year. But the EU decision to replace the rescue operations with a police mission was made for political and not financial reasons.
The new Operation Triton is run by the EU border agency Frontex. According to its director Klaus Rosler, its brief is "ensuring effective border control" and "monitor criminal networks" in North Africa and not to save lives. Under Operation Triton, Europe will provide just seven boats and three aircraft to cover a million square miles of sea. This was a deliberate act to deter the refugees from taking this route to Europe. The patrol boats being deployed instead of navy ships are too small and unequipped to rescue people. In fact, when one of these boats did take on refugees found floating in the water, most of them died of exposure on the voyage back to Italy because they were kept on an open deck and there were no trained rescue personnel on board.
The UK government took the most aggressive stand against refugees, making it clear that it "would not support any future search and rescue operation, including Triton, claiming the assistance simply encourages more people to risk the crossing." (Guardian, 27 October 2014) British Prime Minister David Cameron all but explicitly declared that the EU should let migrants drown to discourage others from taking the sea route. But all the European governments agreed to this plan that everyone knew would condemn thousands of refugees to death. Now there is irrefutable evidence that "cutting the incentives" by ending rescue operations has not reduced the number of migrants risking their lives to cross the sea.
After the two April tragedies, EU leaders shed crocodile tears, pretending that the deaths of 1,300 men, women and children were not the direct and predictable consequences of their policies. They blamed traffickers and smugglers for the results of their own crimes. Germany's Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said, "We cannot and we will not tolerate these criminals sacrificing human lives on a large scale out of sheer greed." (Guardian, 20 April 2015) Of course by "sheer greed" he did not mean the competition-driven profit system that leads to wars and massacres, the demolition of whole regions and the plunder of whole continents.
Philip Hammond, the British Foreign Secretary, spoke as if it were the traffickers who forced people to leave their homes. He stressed, "We must target the traffickers who are responsible for so many people dying at sea and prevent their innocent victims from being tricked or forced into making these perilous journeys." (Independent, 20 April 2015) French President François Hollande reiterated that "the emphasis should be on disrupting people traffickers." (BBC, 23 April)
So the choir of European imperialists and their media is once again synchronized to blame the traffickers for the consequences of imperialist-stoked wars and the functioning of the capitalist system worldwide. Refugees are not taking such a perilous route because of traffickers and their boats. If they believe that risking death by drowning is the best alternative they have, this should be understood as an indictment of what the imperialist system has done to them.
The fact is that the flow of refugees will not stop until there is an end to the factors that drive people to risk death. Increasing numbers of people have to leave their land or their job, their community and country and their family, and take such a dangerous path, whether or not the imperialists allow the "incentive" that they might just possibly not drown. Economic hardship in third world countries is caused by the functioning of the imperialist system, and for many people the globalisation of the last two decades has made their situation even more desperate. The wars that massacre people and make life hell for those who survive are also largely caused by direct or indirect imperialist involvement. It seems there is no end to these wars, especially in the Middle East and Africa. Now it is to be expected that people in Yemen – victims of the Saudi-led led military intervention backed by a U.S. aircraft carrier group and the major Western countries – will join refugees from Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia and so on. Are the traffickers the ones forcing them to join these gathering waves of humanity?
The right to seek asylum is included in international agreements that almost all governments supposedly have signed. It has been declared a human right. But the European governments are making it extremely hard for people who have already gone through so much suffering because of the wars and misery in their own country. For example, the war in Syria has displaced about four million refugees, now mostly living in temporary camps in neighbouring countries. But the imperialists, whose meddling in Syria for their regional and global interests fanned the war and the rise of Islamist forces, are refusing to grant Syrians asylum. Apart from Germany, which because of its need for immigrants and political reasons pledged to take in 30,000 refugees, the other 27 countries, including France and the UK, are set to accept only around 10,000 altogether – Britain only 143.
The European states have spent billions on border control and put up all kinds of land barriers, such as the fence on the Greek border with Turkey. They have introduced draconian obstacles to legal entry for people from poor countries. Even when refugees succeed in getting to a destination country, they are criminalised and treated as "illegal" human beings. As other routes are closed to them, refugees are forced to the only alternatives. In fact, it is the imperialists who are creating "business opportunities" for the traffickers.
In the face of public outrage in April the European leaders met to deal with the situation (the public outrage, not the deaths). They agreed to restore funding for naval search operations in the Mediterranean to last year's level. The details of how this is to be implemented are not yet clear. But they clearly agreed to "undertake systematic efforts to identify, capture and destroy vessels before they are used by traffickers". This is another pretext to carry out more raids and invasions in North Africa, more military actions and wars of the kind that did so much to create refugees in the first place – now disguised as 'humanitarian" actions. As usual, when their actions and their system cause horrible situations their only response is to use their killing machine to deal with the symptoms. Further, they are seeking to divert people's attention from those really responsible. This is shameful. They cannot be allowed to create more tragedies.
The capitalist/imperialist system is the source of the misery of the people. People who cannot accept the brutalization and murder of their fellow human beings should target this system, and especially reveal the fact that the immigration "issue" is part and parcel of its functioning.
A World to Win News Service is put out by A World to Win magazine (aworldtowin.org), a political and theoretical review inspired by the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic center of the world's Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations.
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