The business of building walls

by columnist, Andrea Germanos

As Europe marked the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is tragic that so many new walls have been built across Europe to keep out the most vulnerable people on the planet.

Stay with us for a report which appeared on the Common Dreams website, titled, “'The Business of Building Walls': New Report Shows Companies Cashing In on Europe's Expanding Anti-Migrant Barriers”. This interesting report has been written by columnist, Andrea Germanos.

There were plenty of headlines over the week marking the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but new walls in Europe are very much a big business.

That's the focus of a new report published recently by the Transnational Institute (TNI), the Dutch campaign against the Arms Trade (Stop Wapenhandel), and Delàs Center.

Entitled "The Business of Building Walls," the publication builds on the groups' 2018 report on walls. It names the beneficiaries of this new wave of barriers, which include not just physical walls but also "radar systems to the drones to the surveillance cameras to the biometric fingerprinting systems"—all aimed at blocking refugees and migrants.

This business, the report adds, "has both fueled and benefited from a massive expansion of public spending on border security by the European Union (EU) and its member states."

Niamh Ni Bhriain of TNI said: "As we celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is tragic that so many new walls have been built across Europe to keep out the most vulnerable people on our planet. This report shows that the new era of building walls is driven by a powerful military and security industry that have shaped EU border policies and reaped the financial rewards."

Since 1989, "European countries have constructed about 1,000 kilometers of border walls and fences, more than six times the length of the Berlin Wall, to keep out refugees and migrants. Most of these have been built since 2015, when the crisis in Syria was at its height," says the report. While Europe had just two walls in the 1990s, the number shot up to 15 in 2019, which combine to a length of 1,000 kilometers.

If anti-refugee maritime operations are included to the count ships, aircraft, and drones used to patrol the Mediterranean, the length of Europe's walls add an additional 4,750 kilometers.

Building Fortress Europe comes with costs, as a press release accompanying the report sums up:

“Data shows at least €900 million has been spent on land walls and fences, €676.4 million on maritime operations (2006 to 2017), and €999.4m on its virtual walls (2000-2019).”

Winners and losers of the wall business are evident:

“A Europe full of walls has proved to be very good for the bottom line of a wide range of corporations including arms, security, IT, shipping and construction companies. The EU's planned budgets for border security for the next decade show it is also a business that will continue to boom.”

Three European military firms—Thales, Leonardo, and Airbus—have been the biggest beneficiaries, according to the analysis. It notes that:

• Thales also produces maritime surveillance systems for drones and is working on developing border surveillance infrastructure for Eurosur, researching how to track and control refugees before they reach Europe by using smartphone apps, as well as exploring the use of High Altitude Pseudo Satellites (HAPS) for border security, for the European Space Agency and Frontex.
• Leonardo was also a member of a consortium, awarded €142.1 million in 2019 to implement and maintain EU’s virtual walls, namely its EES. It jointly owns Telespazio with Thales, involved in EU satellite observation projects (REACT and Copernicus) used for border surveillance.
• Pan-European arms giant Airbus is a key supplier of helicopters used in patrolling maritime and some land borders, deployed by Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania and Spain, including in maritime Operations Sophia, Poseidon and Triton.

The report says, "Perversely these firms are also among the top four biggest European arms dealers to West Asia and North Africa, thus contributing to the conflicts that cause forced migration."

There are big losers in the border wall business as well. As the report notes:

This is also a deadly business. The heavy militarization of Europe's borders on land and at sea has led refugees and migrants to follow far more hazardous routes and has trapped others in desperate conditions in neighboring countries like Libya. Many deaths are not recorded, but those that are tracked in the Mediterranean show that the proportion of those who drown trying to reach Europe continues to increase each year.

The report's author, Mark Akkerman, called for a new, more humane approach to help those uprooted from their homelands.

He wrote, "Today's walls need to be replaced by policies based on providing shelter, assistance, and a safe future for refugees as well as working on eliminating the reasons people are forced to leave their homes in the first place."

As Trump launches immigration raids Democrats back mass deportations

Popular revulsion and anger mounted this weekend ahead of nationwide immigration raids announced by President Trump. Social activist and writer, Eric London, has more on this in an article titled “As Trump launches immigration raids Democrats back mass deportations.”

In the working class and among broad sections of the middle class, there is deep disquiet and shock over the horrific treatment of immigrants. But in the ruling elite, the political and media establishment is responding to opposition from below by closing ranks behind Trump and his fascistic advisers.

Tens of millions of immigrant workers and their families are living in fear as the state apparatus begins a military-style crackdown. Many immigrants have gone into hiding.

The Guardian reports that some immigrants are stockpiling food, because, as one Atlanta, Georgia resident explains, “Who knows when we’ll leave the house.” NBC News reports that many US citizens in immigrant neighborhoods have begun carrying their US passports for fear of getting swept up in raids.

The growth of popular opposition found expression in the larger-than-expected demonstrations that took place this weekend in 700 cities across the country. In many areas, neighbors are using social media to warn immigrants of police activity. The Wall Street Journal reported that residents of two buildings in Harlem turned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents away during a raid on Saturday.
The opposite sentiment predominates in the ruling class. In Tacoma, Washington, hours after a nearby pro-immigrant demonstration concluded Saturday, police shot and killed a 69-year-old protestor who lit an ICE van on fire at a for-profit detention center.

On Friday, just hours before Saturday’s nationwide demonstrations, Vice President Mike Pence carried out a highly provocative, televised visit to two Texas detention camps. Flanked by guards and protected by a chain link fence, Pence viewed a warehouse full of immigrant men reeking of sweat and urine who begged him to provide them with toothbrushes and showers. Pence declared that he “couldn’t be more impressed with the compassionate work that our Customs and Border Protection are doing here,” adding, “It’s time we moved past the harsh rhetoric of the American left.”

The aim of this stunt was to make clear that the administration will not be moved by social protest and to test how far it can go in counting on the complicity of the Democrats. The answer from the Democrats and the pro-Democratic media was to give the White House a blank check to expand its network of concentration camps, intensify its police state tactics and accelerate its program of mass deportations.
On Sunday, a group of congressional Democrats visited Texas detention facilities and repeated Pence’s praise for the guards. In editorial board statements published in Sunday’s print editions of the New York Times and Washington Post, the publishers of the Democratic Party-aligned newspapers effectively endorsed the anti-immigrant pogrom.

The Times statement, titled “All Presidents Are Deporters in Chief,” denounced left-wing opposition to Trump’s attack on immigrants. It declared that “the office of the presidency comes with the responsibility to enforce the nation’s laws—laws that require that the borders be secure and that some of the people who aren’t legally authorized to live here be deported, after being afforded due process.”

This “shouldn’t be a provocative assertion,” the Times continued, while condemning “inflamed passions” and opposing those advocating “greater extremes,” including “calls to abolish ICE outright.” The editors concentrated their fire on those on the left who are “flirting with radical changes to the country’s immigration laws,” and concluded by declaring that “the next president has to be ready to assume the role of deporter in chief.”
The editorial in Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, titled “Cynical immigration raids,” was placed below the lead editorial, a denunciation of “China’s concentration camps for children.” The Postcomplained that the planned deportations were “mainly for show,” and declared: “ICE is an enforcement agency and is within its rights to deport undocumented migrants who have been ordered removed after receiving due process of law.”

In the context of the raids and the widespread protests, these statements can be read only as endorsements of Trump’s police state policy.

For all their differences with Trump—mainly on foreign policy questions—the Democrats and the editors of the Times and the Post join with Trump in upholding the reactionary framework of “border security” and the supposed criminality of desperate workers fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries, the product of a century of US imperialist exploitation and domination.

They are united by their common interest in defending the capitalist state and the economic system that creates destitution at one pole and obscene levels of wealth at the other.

In contrast, when the Democrats view thousands of people in the streets, the threat of social revolution and the loss on their wealth flashes before their eyes. In the face of growing opposition from below, the Democratic faction of the ruling elite lines up behind Trump and demands the strengthening of the repressive apparatus of the state.
This is why House and Senate Democrats voted in June to provide Trump with $5 billion to fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), giving the administration the funds it is now using to conduct raids and lock up children in desert camps.

These votes were not capitulations to Republican demands, but conscious political decisions to provide the police and immigration Gestapo with whatever legal and material powers they require to crush opposition and defend the capitalist status quo.

All talk of halting the persecution of immigrants by pressuring or appealing to the Democratic Party is hopeless illusion or deliberate deception. Those who advocate such a program are servants of the ruling class whose goal is to channel opposition back into the Democratic Party where it can be rendered harmless.

There is no constituency in the ruling class for the defense of democratic rights. Only the working class, leading healthy elements of the middle class, can defend immigrants from Trump’s dictatorial policies.

Regardless of immigration status, all workers must understand that they are the ultimate target of the anti-democratic methods used against immigrants.
Concentration camps for “illegal” immigrants will soon be filled with workers engaged in “illegal” strikes and protests. The entire working class in the US and internationally must link its demands over wages, benefits and social equality with the defense of immigrant workers.
Imperialist war and capitalist exploitation have decimated Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, Africa and West Asia. Workers and toilers of the world must be given the right to choose freely between remaining in their homelands or migrating as they please. This means providing millions of people with housing, education, water, food, public transportation, access to culture and other basic social rights. It means dismantling the war machines of the capitalist government and placing the transnational corporations under due control so that their power can be harnessed to meet human needs and not private profit, unless there can be no national solution to the wars and social catastrophes driving tens of millions from their homes.

Amid global crackdown on refugees

Eric London

The world is pulsing with hundreds of millions of people desperate to flee their homes under the weight of the crisis of world capitalism. According to a recent Gallup study, a sixth of the world’s adult population—some 750 million people, not including children—want to flee their home countries to escape war, poverty, conflict and disease.

Social activist and writer Eric London has more disclosures in this regard under the heading of “Amid global crackdown on refugees.”

The statistics expose the devastating impact of decades of imperialist war and corporate exploitation. In the more than quarter-century since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the ruling classes of the major powers, led by the United States, have unleashed an unprecedented wave of military plunder and social counterrevolution, killing millions and laying waste to broad swaths of the world.

A third of the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa want to escape. The region, which is rich in minerals and oil coveted by French, Dutch, Belgian and American corporations, has a life expectancy of 46, while 70 percent of the population lives on less than $2 per day.

In Latin America, 27 percent of people want to leave their home countries to escape the aftermath of US invasion, IMF austerity and US-backed crisis. Twenty-six percent of Eastern Europeans want to flee the near-universal devastation that has followed the privatization of state industries by the Stalinist bureaucrats-turned-oligarchs.

Twenty-four percent of Middle Easterners and North Africans wish to leave in search of shelter from the storm of bombs and missiles that the US has rained down upon the region since the Persian Gulf War.

In 13 countries, nearly half or more of the adult population finds life unbearable. In Sierra Leone, a country ravaged by the bloody fight to turn over diamonds to European jewelers, 71 percent of adults want to flee. In Haiti, 63 percent want to leave after more than a century of American invasions and occupations.

Fifty-two percent of Salvadorans and 47 percent of Hondurans want to escape the violence and poverty that dominate Central America following the civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Forty-eight percent of Nigerians want to leave their country, bled white from the extraction of crude oil by Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell.

This year, the ruling classes of Europe and North America implemented unprecedented anti-immigrant policies and inflamed xenophobic sentiment to distract from growing social inequality and strengthen far-right forces that will be used against the working class.

In June, the European Union agreed to cut migration and erect concentration camps to house immigrants in North Africa. In August, French President Emmanuel Macron signed a law slashing asylum eligibility.  

Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini repeated threats to deport 500,000 immigrants and the entire Roma population. In the United Kingdom, the Tory government is preparing a Brexit deal that may cut the country off to Eastern European immigrants. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany held anti-immigrant demonstrations this summer with the encouragement of the state.

Nowhere is the anti-immigrant scapegoating more fierce and dangerous than in the United States. In April, the Trump administration began separating children from their families at the US-Mexico border and erected tent-city internment centers to house the children.

In October, Trump deployed thousands of troops to the southern border. Thousands of participants in the Central American migrant caravan have been sleeping in the streets of Tijuana for months. When two Guatemalan children died in US custody this month, the government blamed their impoverished indigenous parents.

“Left” populist demagogues around the world play the most criminal role, justifying the anti-immigrant measures of the far-right and attempting to poison the working class with nationalism. In the United Kingdom, Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn echoed United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage when he told a Scottish Labor conference in March that Britain should curb the entrance of foreign workers.

In Greece, the government of the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) has jailed hundreds of thousands of refugees in internment camps and recently deployed police to brutally assault immigrants attempting to cross the Evros River from Turkey. Syriza’s position on immigration is summed up in a recent report from Human Rights Watch that says: Abuse [by Greek police] included beatings with hands and batons, kicking and, in one case, the use of what appeared to be a stun gun. In another case, a Moroccan man said a masked man dragged him by his hair, forced him to kneel on the ground, held a knife to his throat, and subjected him to a mock execution. Others pushed back include a pregnant 19-year-old woman from Afrin, Syria and a woman from Afghanistan who said Greek authorities took away her two young children’s shoes. In the US, Bernie Sanders begged Trump in January to “work with us to make sure we have strong border security.”

The actual alternative to the current existing immigration policy is not ‘open borders.’ It is enforcement of existing employment laws, followed by the development of new employment and immigration laws, leading to a fair, pro-worker system of immigration. This is a thinly veiled, foul appeal to anti-immigrant nationalism and chauvinism, in no basic way different from that of the trade union bureaucracy under the Trump administration.

With such actions and statements, Corbyn, Syriza and others expose their hostility to the working class. They are pledging that they will use state violence against workers demanding a redress of their grievances.

However, the so-called ruling class has assumed a right to jail desperate workers escaping imperialist war or prevent them from seeking safety and a better life in another country. Immigrant workers are not to blame for growing poverty and declining living conditions in Europe and America. The real enemies of the workers are the same imperialist governments and transnational corporations that are responsible for forcing immigrants from their homes in the first place.

All activists and aware people and human rights NGOs should demand and insist the immediate release of all interned immigrants and the provision of trillions of dollars, confiscated from the banks and corporations. This are expected to provide all immigrants with decent-paying jobs, housing, social services, education and safe passage to a destination of their choosing without fear of deportation.

Let’s not forget that Capitalism has turned broad swaths of the world into a foul prison, holding workers and the poor in nation-state straitjackets from which a sixth of the world is fighting to escape.

Trump administration ends funding for Palestinian refugees

After weeks of speculation and leaks, the Trump administration announced Friday that it is to end all its payments to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA, including the $290 million planned for this year.

The US State Department also attacked the agency’s “endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries,” rejecting UNRWA’s definition of Palestinian refugees, which includes not only the 750,000 who became refugees in 1948-9, when they fled or were driven out by Israeli forces, but their descendants who together total some five million. In future, only those who became refugees in 1948-9 will be deemed refugees by the US administration, of course without any due efforts till now in this regard.

The US has hitherto funded nearly 30 percent of UNRWA’s total budget that provides health care, education and social services to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. It was set to give around $360 million this year, releasing $60 million in January, but withheld a further $65 million of the $290 million it had been due to provide.

The loss of funding will be felt beyond the occupied Palestinian territories, in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria where UNRWA funding provides a vital safety net for regimes that have hovered on the brink of bankruptcy for years.

Although Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and others have offered more than $200 million in additional funding, and Germany said it too would boost its financial support for the agency, senior Israeli diplomatic officials said that Washington had indicated its intention was to “close down UNRWA altogether” and transfer its functions to other agencies.

UNRWA commissioner-general Pierre Krähenbühl in an interview with Associated Press contradicted Washington’s assertion that the agency was inefficient. He said, “I can say with a great degree of confidence that the decision to withhold funding was not related to UNRWA’s performance, because in November I had received very constructive and openly positive feedback on those issues.” Instead, it was meant to punish Palestinians for protesting Washington’s recognition of al-Quds as the capital of Israel.

He warned that although its 711 schools that educate the 526,000 Palestinian refugee children in Gaza, the West Bank, East al-Quds, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria would open on time, the agency only had enough money to keep them open until the end of September. It needed a further $217 million to keep the schools running the rest of the year.

A few weeks ago, UNRWA announced cuts to its services that would mean laying off more than 100 of its 13,000 staff in Gaza, transferring some 580 to part-time contracts and cutting salaries of hundreds more, sparking angry protests and causing UNRWA to “lose control” of its compound in Gaza for more than two weeks.
The situation is particularly acute in Gaza where about half of its two million population are dependent upon food aid from UNRWA, which also runs more than 250 of Gaza’s schools and 22 medical centers. A spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called the US move a “flagrant assault” against all Palestinians and a breach of UN resolutions.

Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians’ chief negotiator in the defunct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, said, “The American administration’s decisions on al-Quds, refugees and settlements embody annihilation of international law and security and stability in the region.” He added, “They are gifts for radical forces and terrorism in the region.”

The US move has delighted the usurper regime’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who earlier this year declared that UNRWA “needs to pass from this world.” He said, “The time has come to dismantle UNRWA and have its parts integrated into the UN High Commission for Refugees.” He claimed that “UNWRA is one of the main problems perpetuating the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.”

Ron Prosor, a former Israeli ambassador to London and the UN, led the campaign against UNWRA on Israel’s behalf. He said, “The time has come to state the truth. There are no more than half a million refugees from 1948. All the rest are hitchhikers getting a free ride; it is about time that they rehabilitate themselves in the places they live.”

According to Prosor, a review of the refugee issue, begun under the Obama administration, noted that the number of UNRWA-registered refugees was ten times the original number, with the result that “UNRWA has become a monster employing tens of thousands of people in order to perpetuate a whole industry. This makes any attempt to discuss a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict impossible.” The Zionist regime’s diplomat said that only the original refugees should be recognized as refugees.

Last month, Foreign Policy magazine revealed that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East envoy, called for “an honest and sincere effort to disrupt UNRWA.” In January, Kushner sent an email to several senior officials stating that UNRWA “perpetuates a status quo, is corrupt, inefficient and doesn’t help peace.”

Dissolving UNRWA—and redefining the number of Palestinian refugees—is aimed at making their right of return to their former homes in the occupied lands called ‘Israel’, a key issue in any “final status” deal aimed at settling the Israel-Palestine conflict, simply disappear. Israel has always refused to grant the Palestinians their internationally recognized legal right of return.

The shape of the “ultimate deal” that Trump promised on taking office, to be brokered by Kushner and US ambassador to the occupied lands, David Friedman, ardent supporters of an expansionist Israel, has long been clear. The Palestinian Authority must accept its role as security guard for Israel and US imperialism in the region and settle the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Israel’s terms: the abandonment of al-Quds as the capital of any Palestinian state made up of non-contiguous towns and villages, and no right of return for the Palestinians who became refugees in 1948-9 and 1967.
Trump’s decision to recognize al-Quds as Israel’s capital and move its embassy there from Tel Aviv marked the definitive end of a decades-long US policy, which formally upheld the position that the status of al-Quds could only be determined through a negotiated settlement between the usurper regime of Israel and the Palestinians.

In another move clearly intended to force the PA to submit to its terms, the White House announced that it also intended to cut more than $200 million in bilateral aid to the Palestinian Authority that was agreed following the implementation of the 1993 Oslo Accords. US State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert said that aid to the PA “does not provide value to the US taxpayer.”

The Palestinian Authority already has a $1.8 billion financial deficit for 2018, due to Israel’s withholding of millions of dollars of the funds it collects on the PA’s behalf and the reduction in contributions from other countries, that will be further exacerbated by the US cuts.

The cuts, ostensibly the result of a review of aid to the PA, are widely seen as a punishment for the Palestinians anger over Washington’s decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to al-Quds, thereby recognizing Israel’s control over the entire city, including East al-Quds that Israel illegally annexed after the 1967 war and the Palestinians consider as their capital. In the words of US President Donald Trump, it served to take the al-Quds problem “off the table” in any “deal” between Israel and the Palestinians.

Now the Palestinians’ right of return is being taken “off the table.” US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley questioned Palestinian claims to a “right of return” to the occupied lands, saying the issue should be taken “off the table” and suggesting the Trump administration would consider rejecting the demand that all the original refugees and their descendants be allowed to return to what they called modern-day Israel in any final deal.

The US froze millions in aid to the PA earlier this year after the passage of the Taylor Force Act that made funding conditional on the PA ending financial support for Palestinians in Israeli jails convicted of the alleged terrorist offences. The freeze severely affected Palestinians’ access to medical services and food aid.

That was from an article by Jean Shaoul, professor of public accountability at the University of Manchester, UK.

The refugee crisis: The good, the bad and the ugly

Today is the 14th anniversary of 9/11, but we won’t talk about the scores of unanswered questions regarding that terror attack. Instead, we are focusing on the Middle East refugee crisis which, incidentally, has its origin in 9/11 and which has brought out the good, the bad and the ugly sides of Europe. 

The 9/11 attacks led to the war on terror. The United States and its Nato allies sent troops to Afghanistan and Iraq and brought about regime changes by unleashing brute fire power. Their success encouraged them to meddle in Libya. They removed the Muammar Gaddafi regime. They then targeted Syria, but decided to adopt a different strategy – arming and training various rebel groups. The strategy backfired and a monster called ISIS was created. More than four million of Syria’s 22 million population have now become refugees while another seven million are internally displaced. Sadly a three-year-old Syrian child had to drown in the Mediterranean Sea for the world to stop and take note of the Syrian refugee crisis, which is now more than four years old. 

Publishing the picture of the three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s body on a Turkish beach, world newspapers in their headlines screamed “a picture that changed the world.” If pictures could change the world, if lifeless bodies of little children can change the world, the world would be a better place today. Driven by greed for more power and wealth and warped ideologies, we generally do not care much about other people’s misery. In justifying our crimes against humanity, we describe the destruction which we bring upon our fellow human beings as collateral damage or a price worth paying for.


Palestinian girls on Gaza city beach put flowers on a sand sculpture depicting Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old boy who drowned off Turkey. The sand sculpture replicates the photograph of tiny Aylan’s lifeless body on the beach at Bodrum. The picture rapidly went viral on social media and caused a global outcry as it put a human face to the dangers refugees risk trying to reach safety in Europe.  AFP

If we are as compassionate as we claim to be, then how did we explain the continuation of the Vietnam War with all its brutality and barbarism even after we saw the picture of a naked child who was hit by a napalm bomb? Decades later, we sat before our TV sets and enjoyed the fireworks over the skies of Iraq as the United States unleashed its hellfire missiles and bunker buster bombs on that country, showing little or no remorse for civilian deaths. According to Informationclearinghouse.org, 1,455,590 Iraqis have died in the US war and occupation of Iraq. Stonehearted and desensitised, we failed to stop the war even after we saw the visuals of children dying in Iraq. Instead, we rewarded George W. Bush by reelecting him. 

If pictures can change world, how come we did nothing to stop Israel’s wars on Gaza? The world saw Palestinian fathers carrying their children’s corpses dug out from heaps of rubble to give them a decent burial. Some 500 children died and more than 1,500 children were wounded in Israel’s attacks on Gaza last year. Yet the big powers and powerful Arab states which had the ability to stop the war turned the other way, not because they could not see the heart-rending visuals, but because they let it happen to teach the Palestinian resistance group Hamas a lesson. In July this year, the world saw the picture of the burnt body of an 18-month-old Palestinian toddler, but we did little or nothing to protect the Palestinians who were being persecuted. So much for our compassion! Is our human compassion reserved for only natural disasters such as the 2004 tsunami and last year’s Nepal earthquake?

If we are moved by the human misery brought about by wars, we should have responded when the first stream of refugees left Syria or at least when the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in December 2013 described the Syrian refugee crisis as the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. 

So why are we trying to become Good Samaritans now? Turkish journalist Nilufer Demir’s moving photograph of the dead boy on the beach couldn’t have come at a better time. It turned the focus on hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees, some of whom were embroiled in a standoff with Hungarian officials while others languished in detention centres in the Czech Republic, Greece, and other frontline European states. The world began to see other pictures of thousands of exhausted refugees, including hungry children, behind barbed-wired detention centres. 

Europe may be opening its doors to the refugees now, and talking about European values, but days before the deaths of Aylan Kurdi, his five-year-old brother and their mother, it was a different Europe.  Hungary ordered police to attack defenceless refugees with batons and tear-gas – and the Czech Republic stamped registration numbers on refugees’ forearms, like during the Nazi days. Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron refused to take any further refugees from the Middle East.  European Islamophobes warned their governments that the refugees were terrorists and were on a mission to Islamise the Christian continent. They even challenged Pope Francis who on Sunday said he would give temporary housing in the Vatican to at least two refugee families and asked every one of the more than 1,300 European parish communities, monasteries, and other Catholic institutions to do the same. 

A Hungarian bishop said the Pope was wrong. “They are not refugees. This is an invasion. They come here with cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’. They want to take over,” Bishop Laszlo Kiss-Rigo, the spiritual leader of Southern Hungary said. 

The concerns the bishop and others are raising have some validity because scores of European Muslims, most of whom were once migrants, have been involved in terrorist activities in Europe and joined ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), the terror group playing havoc in Iraq, Syria and other parts of the Middle East. But if one looks at the crisis from another point of view, Europe has a moral duty to accept millions of refugees from the Middle East. This is because most European countries should take part of the blame for creating the present Middle Eastern crisis. Countries such as Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Denmark and Norway were part of the coalition that bombed Libya and provided weapons and training to anti-Gaddafi rebels, including groups affiliated to al-Qaeda. 

In Syria, too, most European nations, Britain included, together with regional countries such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, in their bid to oust President Bashar al-Assad, are helping one rebel group or another. Syria was a stable country until these countries decided to implement the regime change formula there, after it worked in Libya, the refugee crisis notwithstanding.

Thus, Europe’s Middle East meddlers cannot wash their hands of the refugee crisis. While most European countries now adopt a cautious compassionate stance, Germany’s brave welcome to the refugees should be commended, though some economists say the refugees could fill the vacancies in the job markets and give the German economy a fresh gallop.

Then what about the Arab and Islamic countries in the region? Just as Egypt closed its Rafah border to the Palestinians during the Gaza war, most Arab and Islamic countries in the region, with the exception of Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, have closed their doors on Syrian refugees. They have apparently forgotten that Prophet Muhammad himself was a refugee, and providing refuge to a person irrespective of his or her religion is a fundamental tenet of Islam.