By HANS LUCHT
Published: October 7, 2013
COPENHAGEN — A FEW years ago, a young woman I met in a small fishing village in central Ghana told me that, after her husband left to try to get to Italy, she stepped out into the courtyard of their home and saw his ghost at the gate.
“I nearly passed out,” she said. “I had goose bumps all over my body.”
The day after his apparition appeared, she said, confirmation arrived from Libya that he had perished in the Mediterranean. “The whole thing really devastated me,” the woman told me, as I researched a book on undocumented African migration to Europe. “We were only at the start of our lives.”
Last week it happened again off Sicily. More than 100 refugees from East Africa, mainly Eritrea and Somalia, are believed to have drowned off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa. The difference with this latest catastrophe was not only in the magnitude of human loss, but in the visibility and nearness of death.
This time, scores of bodies have been recovered from the Mediterranean. But usually, the bodies of migrants lost at sea vanish. Their screams do not reach us Europeans from the sea, nor from the detention centers our governments have paid North African governments to construct, in an effort to stem the human tide from south of the Sahara.
We Europeans can honor the dead only by engaging in a new discussion about what direction the Continent should take on refugees. Instead, our governments have dithered, unable to come up with a common migration and refugee policy. Countries like Italy and Spain complain — with some justification — that they cannot be a gateway for Europe without cooperation and support from their neighbors, but the economic problems afflicting countries from France to Greece mean that migrants have become unwelcome scapegoats. The price of this transnational bickering and selfishness has been a massacre by negligence, right at Europe’s doorstep.
Eritrea and Somalia have been ravaged by conflict and hunger. Countries like Italy routinely send rescue boats into the Mediterranean to pick up migrants stranded off the coast, but this is only a belated Band-Aid. Europe’s professed commitment to human rights, including, in principle, a duty to give refuge to those escaping persecution and misery, has not been matched by meaningful policies.
After the latest disaster, policy makers promised, predictably, to crack down on the smugglers who lured Africans onto their unseaworthy boats. But as appalling as human trafficking is, the deaths cannot be explained so easily. Africans, like desperate migrants everywhere, watch TV and read newspapers. They know the risks. The tragedy is that they put their lives on the line because they feel they have no other choice.
For all of Europe’s economic woes, it is well within the capacity of the European Union to resettle these migrants. The real barrier is the devaluation of African lives. For this there is no quick fix. A unified, humane policy on refugees and asylum seekers is needed. So is a long-term commitment to social and economic transformation in sub-Saharan Africa, to which Europeans owe a moral debt.
Later this year, officials in Brussels are expected to unveil a new border-surveillance system for the European Union. Like the fence between the United States and Mexico, this system, known as Eurosur, is a dream of security hard-liners and the global weapons industry. Will the result will be “Fortress Europe” — a sci-fi border zone patrolled by drones?
Spending billions of euros to erect barriers, at sea or on land, will not stop human migration. Desperate people will always resort to desperate measures.
What is needed, and must be demanded of our political leaders in Europe, is a show of hands — a rededication to the humanitarian values for which free Europe has been admired around the world in the decades since World War II.
Instead, as the bodies disappear outside public scrutiny, the moral horizon has been vanishing. There is a growing acceptance that a watery graveyard is a necessary evil for the maintenance of a free and prosperous Europe. This is a disgrace: the suffering in the chilly waters off Sicily calls into question the moral integrity of the entire border system (to the extent it can be called one).
The young widow in Ghana was left to rear a son. When I met her, she was selling toffee and oranges from a roadside table. She went to church every night. She told me she still thought of and prayed for her husband.
“He was a humble and hardworking guy, a quiet type,” she said. “Things weren’t all that bad for him. In Libya he earned the respect of his colleagues because of his humility and meekness. I really lost a good person in my life.”
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