What I care about is that it’s a human life. It’s a human life when it’s a two-year-old boy, and it’s still a human life when it’s a 25-year-old man. To me, there is no real difference. People are dying right on our doorstep, and not enough is being done to stop this.
Of course I felt a stab in my heart as soon as I saw the front page of the Times of Malta last Thursday. It was a bold move and one to be commended too. Whoever took the decision to use that photo wanted to jolt readers into realizing the extent of the cruelty behind what’s going on out there. Hate has been spreading like wildfire online, and many people are finding it ever increasingly easy to speak of migrants like they are some inanimate object; with no life, no hopes, no story.
People use social media and hide behind anonymous profiles to spread hate. They forget, or sometimes even don't care, that the people they are talking about are people like them, made of flesh and blood, with the only difference being that these migrants were born x miles south of the equator instead of north.
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That is the reason why that picture needed to be printed and shared. It's true, statistics do not resonate as much when you're talking about the loss of a life, a picture though can speak volumes and this picture quickly became a symbol of the cruelty of the Med. But the reaction to said picture speaks even louder.
In the days that followed, there was little to no hate rampaging online. People posted the image on social media and commented about how sad it all was. What is sad, however, is needing a picture of a child to kick us into feeling compassion.
Then last Friday The Times carried a article about Joseph Muscat and his thoughts on what had happened in the past week. It's good that the Prime Minister has finally come to his senses and realised this is an issue that needs to be talked about. He has come far since he viciously split up families and tried to carry out pushbacks two years ago and his influence will also go a long way.
However, I still find it troubling that suddenly all our politicians have found their voice when talking about migration. The truth is that what is happening in the Med is not a new phenomenon.
According to the UNCHR, 218,000 migrants are estimated to have crossed the Mediterranean in 2014, and 3500 of them are known to have died while attempting the crossing. This year, between the 10th and 17th April, 13,500 migrants were rescued at sea, and another 1,600 lost their lives. Yes, we are talking about a significant increase in crossings but this has been happening year after year, after year. And year after year the misinformation in Malta grows, as does the racial hatred, yet politicians' silence has been deafening.
Until recently it seemed like we lived in a society where votes counted more than lives.
News about migrants coming in would incite racial hatred, not compassion. As though crossing half a continent, making your way through dangerous places like Libya, and finally being packed on unseaworthy vessels to cross the Mediterranean sea is an easy journey and like it's an easy decision to leave your home with your family to make such a journey.
The unfortunate truth is that here in Malta, if we don't see expressions of compassion from our politicians, many of us will take it to be a tacit form of approval to either ignore the plight of these migrants or even worst as an endorsement of the racists and bigots amongst us. So even though I'm the first to advocate free thinking, I'm really glad that finally our politicians and the media are leading the way towards a more compassionate and inclusive society, so that hopefully then we can start to help these people before it becomes too late and they switch from being fellow human beings to mere statistics.