Resistance and Suffering in Balenciaga Show.. Kim Kardashian grabs attention with her strange appearance The West helped create the refugee crisis and closes its doors in their faces
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Translation: Aladdin Abu Zina
Jonathan Cook - (Middle East Eye) 12/7/2021 Those who make perilous journeys for asylum in Europe are uprooted by wars and droughts, for which the West is largely to blame.* * *The diplomatic row that developed between Britain and France soon overshadowed At least 27 people drowned while trying to cross the canal between the two countries in a rubber boat in search of asylum.
As European countries struggle to seal their borders to refugees, the two countries are fighting a war of words over who is responsible for stopping the growing number of small boats trying to reach British shores.
Britain has demanded the right to patrol French waters and to put border police on French soil, implying that France is not up to the task.
Meanwhile, the French government has blamed the UK for being a magnet for illegal workers by failing to regulate its labor market.
Now, European leaders are in desperate need of quick answers. Therefore, French President Emmanuel Macron called an emergency meeting of regional leaders early this month to address the “migration” crisis, despite not being invited by the British Home Secretary, Priti Patel.
In contrast, a post-Brexit government appears more willing to act unilaterally. It has intensified its "hostile environment" policy towards asylum seekers.
This includes plans to turn back the small boats crossing the Channel, in violation of maritime and international law, and to “keep refugees out” by holding them in remote concentration camps, in places like Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic.
Legislation is also being drafted in the UK to help deport refugees and prosecute those who assist them, in violation of its obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention.
It is not surprising against this background that anti-immigration parties are on the rise across Europe, with governments questioning the legitimacy of most arrivals in the region, describing them as “illegal immigrants”, “invaders” and “economic migrants”.
These designations are not only intended to dehumanize those who seek asylum. It is also designed to obscure the West's responsibility for creating the very conditions that drove these people to leave their homes and embark on a perilous journey in search of a new life.
exercise force
In recent years, it is estimated that more than 20,000 refugees have died crossing the Mediterranean in small boats to reach Europe, including at least 1,300 who have died so far this year alone.
The identities of a few more of those killed have not emerged - most notably Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian child whose body washed up on the Turkish coast in 2015 after he and other family members drowned while on a small boat trying to reach Europe.
The numbers of refugees trying to reach the UK through the Channel, although smaller, are also rising - and so are the deaths.
The 27 people who drowned about two weeks ago were the largest single loss of life at the Canal crossing since the agencies began keeping records seven years ago.
The media barely mentioned the fact that the two survivors separately said that the British and French coast guards ignored their phone calls for help when their boat began to sink.
Yet no European leader seems ready to address the deeper causes of the waves of refugees arriving on Europe's shores - or acknowledge the West's role in causing the "migration crisis".
Reports stated that the seventeen men, seven women, including a pregnant woman, and the three children who died in the incident were mostly from Iraq. Others trying to reach Europe are mostly from Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and parts of North Africa.
This formation is no accident. Perhaps nowhere has the legacy of Western intervention been felt - directly and indirectly - more acutely than in the resource-rich Middle East.
The roots of this can be traced back more than a century, when Britain, France and other European powers divided, ruled and plundered the region as part of a colonial project to enrich themselves, especially through the control of oil.
These colonial states pursued divide-and-conquer strategies to stir up ethnic tensions and delay domestic pressure for nation-building and independence.
Colonists also deliberately deprived Middle Eastern countries of the institutions needed to govern after independence.
However, the fact was that Europe never really left the region, and was soon joined by the United States, the new global superpower, to keep rivals, such as the Soviet Union and China, at bay.
These powers supported corrupt tyrants and intervened to ensure that their favorite allies remained in place. Oil was such a precious bonus that it could not be relinquished to local control.
brutal politics
After the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago, the Middle East was once again torn apart by Western intervention – this time disguised as “humanism.”
The US spearheaded regimes of “shock and awe” sanctions, airstrikes, invasions and occupations that devastated countries that were independent of Western control, such as Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
Those who held these states together may have been autocrats, but until they were dismantled these states provided some of the best education, health care, and quality of life in the region.
The brutality of Western policies, even before the overthrow of the region's strongmen, resonated with figures such as Madeleine Albright, former US President Bill Clinton's secretary of state.
When asked in 1996 about economic sanctions that were estimated at the time to have killed half a million Iraqi children in a failed attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein, she replied, "We believe this price is worth paying."
Groups such as Al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) quickly moved to fill the void created after the West destroyed the economic and social infrastructure associated with these autocratic governments.
These groups brought their own kind of occupation, scattering, repressing, and weakening communities, providing additional pretexts for the West's intervention, either directly or through local agents in the area.
The countries of the region that have so far been able to withstand this Western “slash and burn” policy, or have managed to expel their occupiers - such as Iran and Afghanistan - are still suffering from the crippling punitive sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe.
It should be noted that Afghanistan emerged from its two decades of US-led occupation in even worse shape than when it was invaded.
Elsewhere, Britain and others helped sustain the region's wars, such as the war in Yemen. Recent reports have indicated that up to 300 Yemeni children die every day due to the war.
Yet, after decades of economic warfare on these Middle Eastern countries, Western countries still have the nerve to denounce those fleeing the collapse of their societies as “economic migrants.”
climate crisis
The fallout from Western intervention has turned millions across the region into refugees, forced from their homes by escalating ethnic strife, continuing fighting, losing vital infrastructure, and land becoming contaminated with shells.
Today, most of them live in tent camps in the area, subsisting on food aid and little else.
The West's goal was local reintegration: to resettle these refugees and return them to a life close to where they had previously lived.
But the destabilization that Western actions have caused throughout the Middle East is exacerbated by a second blow for which the West must bear the lion's share of the blame, too.
Societies devastated and divided by Western-led and fueled wars and economic sanctions were not in a position to withstand the high temperatures and persistent drought that the Middle East is now afflicting with the spread of the climate crisis.
Chronic water shortages and frequent crop failures, exacerbated by the weakness of unhelpful governments, are driving people off their land in search of a better life elsewhere.
In recent years, around 1.2 million Afghans have reportedly been forced from their homes due to a combination of drought and floods. In August of this year, aid organizations warned that more than 12 million Syrians and Iraqis had lost access to water, food and electricity.
“The complete collapse of water and food production for millions of Syrians and Iraqis is imminent,” said Carsten Hansen, regional director of the Norwegian Refugee Council.
According to recent research, “Iran is experiencing unprecedented climate-related problems, such as drying up of lakes and rivers, dust storms, record temperatures, droughts and floods.”
In October, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies noted that climate change is wreaking havoc in Yemen as well, with successive severe floods and an increased risk of water-borne diseases.
Western countries cannot escape their responsibility for this. It was these same countries that stripped the Middle East of its origins over the past century and exploited the wealth generated by fossil fuels to ramp up industrialization and modernize their economies.
The United States and Australia had the highest per capita fossil fuel consumption in 2019, followed by Germany and the United Kingdom. China also ranks high, but much of its oil consumption is spent producing cheap goods for Western markets.
The planet is warming due to the oil-hungry Western lifestyles. And now, the first victims of the climate crisis - those in the Middle East who provided that oil - are being denied access to Europe by the same countries that have made their lands increasingly uninhabitable.
impenetrable borders
Now, Europe is preparing to make its borders impregnable to the victims of its colonial intervention, its wars, and the climate crisis generated by its consumption-based economies.
Countries like Britain have absolutely no interest in the tens of thousands of asylum applications it receives each year from those who have risked everything for a new life.
They are people who look to the future. Throughout the Middle East, refugee camps are already under severe pressure, testing the capacities of the host countries - Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq - to cope.
Western countries know that the effects of climate change will only get worse, even as they trumpet the crisis with a “Green New Deal.” Millions, rather than the current thousands, will knock on Europe's doors in the coming decades.
Rather than helping those seeking asylum in the West, the 1951 Refugee Convention may be one of the biggest obstacles they face. It excludes those displaced by climate change, and Western countries are in no hurry to expand the scope of the agreement.
Instead, the agreement acts as a private insurance policy for these countries.
Last month, right after the 27 refugees drowned in the Channel, Patel told fellow lawmakers that it was time to "send a clear message that crossing the Channel in such a deadly manner, in a small boat, is not the way to get to our country."
But the truth is that if the British government and other European countries can continue down the path they are now on, there will be no legitimate path of entry for those from the Middle East whose lives and homelands have been destroyed by the West.
* Jonathan Cook: Journalist and writer, author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.
*This article was published under the title: Britain helped create the refugees it now wants to keep out
