Too many times over the past decade, the Maltese islands heard the news about the lives of irregular migrants being lost at sea. The recent news of yet another deadly trip across the Mediterranean Sea does not come as a complete shock. Yet, its impact was overwhelming.
The number of irregular migrants/refugees believed to have died at sea all at once is too great. It is estimated that between 700 and 900 lives have been lost. This tragedy has been so overwhelmingly powerful that it seems EU member states have finally gotten exhausted of pointing fingers at each other and instead, this time, they had no other option but to head into the core of the issue which, as identified by Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, is human trafficking.
Finally, the EU is treating one facet of the issue. Nevertheless, the blame game has not ended. This time, it continues in several different forms. So let us introduce the first one.
Some politicians are now blaming this issue of refugees on the conflict in Syria and, most of all, on the failed State of Libya. They seem to have forgotten or, rather, are conveniently ignoring the fact that, even when Libya and Syria were fairly stable states, the Mediterranean countries of Europe still received a continuous flow of irregular migrants/refugees, mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa.
The blame-game now also comes from outside Europe. While speaking on CNN, Bobby Ghosh, a global affairs analyst, was eager to point out that, indeed, Europe deserves to be faced with such a tragedy since, according to him, it is to blame for the instability in Libya.
Ghosh remarked that the EU was a “key player” in bringing down Muammar Gaddafi. This accusation that Ghosh readily makes is yet again a misguidance of the key issue and also a misguidance of how the downfall of Gaddafi came about.
It is important to point out that the US, the constant fighter for democracy, was also a major player in the downfall of Gaddafi and for a US citizen to blame the failure of the Libyan State on Europe is a gross misrepresentation of facts.
Europe now finds itself in a diplomatic frenzy to bring the Libyan tribes together, something which the late Gaddafi had taken care of when he lead the Libyan revolution and united the tribes of Libya in 1977, creating the ‘Jamahiriya’ or ‘State of the masses’. But it seems as though Gaddafi was too eccentric for the West’s taste at the time.
It is time for African nations to make it their responsibility to start putting their act together
And the US’s fight for ‘democracy’, for better or for worse, is never ending. So, ultimately, Gaddafi had to be taken down.
But this argument is a divergence from what is really happening. Malta had been receiving hundreds of irregular migrants a week from sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere over this past decade, long before Libya turned into a failed State.
To continue to deviate talks from tackling the main issue, we then have those who just love yelling out ‘racist’.
The mess involving Africa and Europe should have been dealt with years ago. But whenever the issue came up, too many were too busy calling out ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobe’ to avoid addressing the matter. After the latest devastating tragedy, it has not been different.
Karl Sharro, a Lebanese-Iranian satirist who has been published in numerous international news reviews, tweeted this: “The tragedy of the boats is the EU’s biggest ever moral failure.
It celebrates freedom of movement but not if you are the wrong colour.”
Firstly, Sharro is misguiding his 50,700 followers on Twitter and, in addition, mudslinging Europe. If anything, what Europe has done was to continuously invite those who struggle to come into Europe. In fact, Europe has made Africa’s problems its own.
African countries have a tendency to expect the West to save them like some superhero. The S&D group continues to highlight how much more the EU should do to welcome irregular migrants/refugees. Europe has turned Africa’s failures into its own burden to be fixed. Wherever those failures stem from, I believe that it is time for African nations to make it their responsibility to start putting their act together.
In the midst of the latest catastrophe, there are two things that we have not yet seen but would love to: the US helping out in this international tragedy (just like it dragged Europe to help them in destroying Libya and to relive their reminiscences of the Cold War with Russia) and, most importantly, African leaders speaking up for their fleeing citizens.
The German newspaper Die Zeit reported thus on its front page on April 23: “We don’t want them to drown. We don’t want them to come either. So what do we want to do?”
I think it is time to recognise the fact that, yes, there are indeed struggles in Africa, North Africa and the Middle East. In some ways the EU, in its mission for human rights, should help. But it is also time that these troubled nations find a way of making their citizens their own priority and put an end to this miserable act which has burdened Europe.
If William Swing, director general of the International Organisation of Migration, does not see this wave of migrants as an invasion, he should surely realise that this is indeed an exodus.
Eugenie Megally reads politics and international relations at the University of Kent.