More people have drowned in the sea around Malta and Lampedusa over the last couple of days. And those are just the ones we know about. The calls for EU action have been predictable. And they are as unhelpful and pointless as ever. This is not something that can be solved through discussion. Nobody has a magic wand. Saying that “the EU” (of which we form part) must “wake up and smell the coffee” is just another way of passing the problem on, of pretending to do something about it by playing tough with the wrong people.
Our Prime Minister has made those calls again. This time, he also gave us what he thinks are the solutions: more sea patrols, helping Libya patrol its borders better, and aid to those countries from where people are fleeing. All three are absolute non-starters and the first two are actually inhumane. Muscat appears to be confused as to what his aims are. Is it to stop people leaving their countries, to stop them leaving Libya, or to stop them getting to Malta? Unless the purpose of more sea patrols is to prevent people from drowning, the motivation – of turning them back – is despicable. It is little better than marine-based pushbacks. You stop them entering your waters and then what? You tell yourself that it’s not your problem. They can stay on the high seas or they can go back to Libya. And once they’ve gone back to Libya, what then? Do we carry on telling ourselves that they’re not our problem but Libya’s, that if they are treated horrendously in Libya and have no way of leaving, we don’t care?
It’s the same with the Prime Minister’s demand for EU assistance to help Libya police its borders. Libya doesn’t want better policing of its borders. That’s not something it cared about under Gaddafi, and it’s not something it cares about now. In any case, the suggestion is a horrifying one that reveals how little our Prime Minister knows of the geography of the region, of the reality of the journey that is made, and of the appalling abuse African immigrants suffer in Libya.
I shall give our Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt, and assume ignorance rather than sociopathic sadism – because if it’s not the former, then it has to be the latter. When he speaks of patrolling Libya’s borders, what he means is helping Libya prevent sub-Saharan Africans from getting in, and once they are in, helping prevent them leaving by sea towards Europe. So what is he proposing, exactly – that armed guards at Libya’s desert border force back people who have just made a horrendous trek, one that is quite beyond our imagination, and who are half dead from making it, who will die if any return journey is attempted? Or does he propose that Libya collects those people at its border and forcibly repatriates them – carrying out the very pushbacks which Muscat and his Homeland Security Minister wish to do but can’t because Malta is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights (and Libya, of course, is not)?
Intensive patrols of Libya’s coastal border are only a slightly less inhumane suggestion. The purpose of any such patrols would be to stop asylum-seekers from leaving towards Europe. I don’t for a moment imagine that our Prime Minister is suggesting that these intensive patrols will stop people boarding death-trap boats and placing them on more seaworthy ones. No – the idea is to stop them leaving Libya for Europe. And then what? They can’t go back to the place from which they fled, and they can’t leave Libya. They are trapped in Libya, a signatory to no human rights convention under the sun, there to be abused.
The other suggestion, that of helping “those countries” to restructure so that people needn’t feel they have to escape, is foolish in the extreme, and it demonstrates a quite phenomenal lack of knowledge. It also assumes that everyone who runs away does so for economic reasons, when those are the very people who are not refugees and who are not granted asylum. Exactly what does Malta’s prime minister suggest “the EU” does to overhaul politics, society and culture in myriad sub-Saharan African states so that human rights are first acknowledged and then safeguarded? The process in Europe took thousands of years, ending only 25 years ago when the Berlin Wall came down. It’s shocking, really, how many forget that – how many forget that until the end of 1988, it was Europeans who were trying to escape across the Iron Curtain and into the West, and who got shot and killed, or imprisoned and tortured, for their pains. What truncated memories we have.
It is hard to accept, but there is practically nothing we can do about this except save the drowning, sustain the living, and tell ourselves that there, but for sheer good fortunate and happenstance, go we.
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