Napalm girl, beach boy

Aylan Kurdi’s face in the sand could have been my daughter’s. It was only a day after having celebrated her first birthday that I saw the photo of Aylan’s lifeless body. Without the Bodrum coast as his resting place, his body was laid out in a typical slumbering fashion. At home I could see my daughter sleeping, the gentle rhythm of air as it worked the lungs, that reassuring sound of life coming out of her nostrils. But Aylan’s father Abdullah is living a curse. He had tried to save his wife and two children at sea after their boat’s skipper jumped ship; after leaving one of his sons alive in the water, to swim to the other one and find him dead, he returned to the previous spot to find his son had drowned.

I try to reflect on the kind of desperation that requires a man and his family to flee his home and seek the protection of others.

The Kurdis had fled Kobane, besieged by ISIS forces and given short shrift by the unforgiving Turks, three years ago to move into Turkey, hoping that they could be repatriated to Canada. Abdullah’s sister in Canada had attempted, unsuccessfully, to sponsor their asylum claim. Now he will return to Kobane to bury his family.

This is a nightmare for all of us. A Holocaust is happening right here in our back-gardens, and we appear to be unwilling to provide legal ways of granting protection to refugees. 

At the heart of European leaders’ and our own national leaders’ mistaken discourse on migration – because not even Joseph Muscat or Simon Busuttil want to get it right with their own politicians and supporters – is that everything that has been laid out by the EU so far is designed at strengthening border control, no more, no less.

Federica Mogherini’s plan to have EU forces bombard alleged traffickers’ boats in the port of Zuwara – still in the United Nations pipeline for Security Council clearance – was the most astonishing part of the EU’s agenda on migration. The plan to “identify, capture and destroy” vessels used by smugglers in facilitating migrants across the Mediterranean also involves deploying ground forces inside Libya.

Russia’s ambassador Vitaly Churkin said the council “may well” adopt the resolution this month, limiting it to the high seas so that Libyan approval will not be required.

It is this tendency to treat our Mediterranean crisis of refugee movements as a security issue that has placed human rights on the backburner, and forced asylum seekers and other refugees to take up illegal, dangerous routes of entry. If you cannot offer refugees legal ways of accessing protection, their only route to secure protection is to turn to human traffickers.

It is the only rational response that the market can offer: traffickers are there to offer the service.

The other great disappointment is the stalling talks on the emergency “relocation” of 40,000 Syrian and Eritrean refugees that the European Commission has boldly proposed. It has been in the pipeline since May, and only prompted by the deaths of thousands of migrants – this time from a visible diaspora, the one in Syria – the scale of which has deftly exposed how Fortress Europe contributes to the problem of human trafficking. On one end, Syrian refugees who find closed doors in Europe or a failed asylum system in Greece – plagued by a sovereign debt crisis that leaves humanitarian buffers penniless and ineffective – have poured into Turkey, travelled to Egypt, and then entered into war-torn Libya to cross over into Europe.

The Lampedusa tragedies of 2014 finally spurred Europe into action, and Jean-Claude Juncker himself admitted that EU member states could not be left alone to manage what should be a mandatory, multi-national plan of solidarity.

And yet, the rhetoric has fallen short of reality. Spread over two years, the 40,000 relocation means welcoming 1,500 people a month at a time when over 300,000 people have risked their lives to cross the Mediterranean so far this year. So somewhere along the way, we are being fed with bad math: and our leaders, and the home affairs minister, are responsible for playing along and trying us to feed some chestnut over how far they are ready to go in showing that good old European solidarity.

There’s another glorious bungle to include in the equation: the domestic concerns of each individual 28 member states.

Joseph Muscat has the least to worry: all migrants crossing over from Libya have been picked up by the Italians first through Mare Nostrum, and now as entered into Operation Triton. All those refugees and asylum seekers at Calais and inside the ‘jungle’ have arrived from somewhere, and that includes scores of them who ‘get lost’ once they arrive in Italy, which does not fingerprint arrivals.

It’s chaos that serves to create pressure on individual member states’ borders.

Also problematic are the leaders of the Visegrad Group – Hungary, Poland, the Czech and Slovak republics – who have supported the conservative, somewhat proto-fascist Viktor Orban, who claims Europe is “in the grip of madness over immigration and refugees” and that he is “defending European Christianity against a Muslim influx” by erecting walls to stop refugees. “It is a mad idea for someone to let refugees into their own country instead of defending their borders and then to say I will redistribute them among you. This is an unfair and indecent proposal. We therefore cannot support it.”

On Friday, the Visegrad group said they support Hungary but are not keen on the 40,000 distribution key that member states have to agree upon.

Getting a common understanding in Europe when it comes to human rights and refugees appears simply impossible. Nobody wants to go home to their electorates to explain that they are taking in more refugees. Denmark wants to opt out, as per its rights under the Lisbon Treaty. David Cameron does not appear too keen, having to face his own electorate’s discontent with increased migration at its borders.

I wonder how far can Europe keep fire-fighting against its own obligations to provide migrants with secure, legal ways of accessing international protection; and for member states to start taking their fair share of refugees, Malta included. For months on end since Mare Nostrum, there have been few arrivals, and many dead bodies shipped into our morgues.

Even the United Nations must set itself in motion. The Syrian crisis is ultimately an international sin of passive by-standing. It is a regional crisis that threatens world peace and security but the international community has allowed the problem to fester, giving free rein to the Islamic State to wage its onslaught and spread its tentacles further into the troubled Arab world.

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If the Gozo bishop was economical with the truth when MaltaToday last week asked him about his delayed action with respect to a priest investigated over paedophilia, the sacrament of confession might be in order. Power, even that mandated by the Vatican’s decree, must be kept in check by the independent press. Obviously, were it not for the pro-active ways of the Maltese archbishop, whose history of prosecuting clerical sex abuse speaks for itself, we might still be in the dark about what is happening in Gozo.