Grave human tragedy
It is shocking that well over a thousand migrants making for Europe were killed in shipwrecks in the last ten days alone. It is not as if Europe still does not understand the nature of this particular crisis. And clearly migrant smugglers are now willing to try much harder routes – some of which they were avoiding before – as more and more flee the death and destruction of the Levant and Maghreb for the safety of Europe. The EU’s crisis management has not up to scratch despite having the resources as well as the capability to deal with this problem – at least in the immediate term.
Yet this tragedy raises far more important questions than Europe’s response to this refugee tsunami. Is it really fair, after all, that Europe must now handle the Muslim world’s breakdown, from Syria all the way to Libya? But shouldn’t this question have been raised when Nato was enabling its no fly zone over Tripoli as the noose tightened around Gaddaffi? They didn’t mind leading from behind back then, when Saudi Arabia facilitated Libya’s revolution by pouring al Qaeda like hordes into the country – which worked alongside Nato air cover. And shouldn’t think tanks and governments in the west have debated all sorts of fallouts of letting outsiders inflict a merciless, cruel civil war on Syria?
There is, therefore, poetic justice of sorts in people devastated from wars in the Muslim world now making for Europe, Canada, etc. Their lives were destroyed because western powers found in just too convenient to back the GCC sponsored push to break the government in Damascus; so much so that millions of lives have been affected and hundreds of thousands have been killed. The only way to put an end to this madness – which leads to such refugee movements – is to restore normalcy in countries where outsiders have caused much of the disruption. The countries that work to such an end will make the greatest difference in this catastrophe.