Almost no day passes without hearing of the death of people, fleeing Libya and other countries in the region, attempting to cross the Mediterranean to mainly Italy. And the European response to this ongoing tragedy? Shamefully little! There are estimates of some 30,000 people perishing this year if the present tide continues.
"When you hear on the news that “about 400 migrants are feared to have drowned when their boat capsized”, is there not something that jars? Of course there is. It is the hypocrisy wrapped up in the word “feared”. The response of many people listening, I would suspect, is instinctive horror, but laced with indifference. There is certainly no rush to offer resettlement.
The prevailing view seems to be that this new generation of boat people has calculated the risk, and it actually seems not a bad risk. So far this year, 10,000 people have arrived in Italy; 900 are believed to have died. So someone who embarks on a boat, however leaky the hull, however stormy the sea, would seem to have a 90 per cent chance of arriving.
Amnesty International says that deaths have risen 15-fold compared with this time last year, and blame this on the ending of the EU-funded operation Mare Nostrum. But the odds still look good. So long as the promised lands of Europe lie across the water, they will come – and wouldn’t you if you were in their place?
There is, of course, an element of poetic justice in the present exodus to Europe. We – or to be more precise, the British and the French – managed to mess up Libya even more than it was messed up before, by virtue of our well-meant, but miscalculated, intervention. If more Libyans now want to leave their country, and if its borders, both land and sea, are now so poorly guarded that sub-Saharan Africans take that escape route to Europe en masse, who are we to complain? Do we not have an obligation? You could blame “us” too, for the Iraqis, and Afghans, and Syrians attempting to make the journey by whatever route.
And beyond that, there is the more general moral argument that a human life is a human life. Europeans are rich by any standards. We can well afford to help those less fortunate, so why don’t we just get on and do it?
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