In July, 150 migrants died after two boats carrying 300 people capsized off the coast of Libya in what was described as the year’s ‘worst Mediterranean tragedy’. Barely three months later, I’d be lying if I said that I now remember the details of that tragic shipwreck. And, to be quite honest, I’m ashamed to say I didn’t give it much serious thought at the time, beyond the usual knee-jerk shock, a couple of Hail Marys and a Requiem Aeternam, before getting on with my day.
The fact of the matter is that most of us have become inured to banner headlines telling all-too-familiar tales of human tragedy. Perhaps the frequency and facelessness of such crises have contributed to our apathy? Official figures released from UN’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM) show that since 2014, a total of 17,480 migrants have drowned trying to reach Europe, with 3,600 others unaccounted for and presumed drowned.
When it comes to migrant deaths and the associated disappearances of men, women and children worldwide (not just at sea, but in detention blocks, asylum units, sweatshops and even urban centres) IOM’s Missing Migrants Project puts this figure at 35,000. And that’s just the last five years.
All this should make us feel very uncomfortable… if we didn’t put our own comfort first. We may pay lip service to the shock in a general way and yet we don’t perceive the reality of the individual personal tragedies. It’s not something we may readily admit but I rather suspect that we have a hard time recognising these as ‘people’ – human beings who merit our full respect and attention. They are migrants, asylum seekers – never ‘people’.
Recent news of the 39 corpses found inside a refrigerated lorry in Essex sent shockwaves all around the world. Indeed, it was like colliding with the lorry itself: only this time the deaths, somehow, felt more ‘real’ and impossible to ignore.
Why was that? Are deaths at sea less gruesome than deaths by refrigerated lorry? Perhaps it’s because the ‘salt estranging sea’ is easier for everyone – particularly politicians – to ignore? Conversely, when the final resting place of 39 mortal beings is a lorry in Essex, it is not just a problem for Britain but one for the international community at large.
How sad it is that the only way these people reached their promised land was in a refrigerated metal coffin
Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel might be the ones signing books of condolence, making speeches and laying wreaths, but all of us – and all governments past and present – bear an element of collective responsibility, even if we are secretly thanking our lucky stars that that lorry was not headed in our direction.
If comparisons are odious, nothing can be more odious than comparing the faces of human tragedy, and yet the Essex container deaths has humanised the issue and forced me to take a hard look at more than two decades of a long, unresolved migration crisis.
It’s about time we acknowledge there will always be people who move, who feel compelled to take a leap into the unknown and who will voluntarily place their lives in the hands of smugglers actively looking to exploit them, even when the risks are extreme.
At this very moment you can be certain that in one or other of the world’s ‘vast open-air waiting rooms’, there is someone seizing the chance to hide inside a boat or a lorry bound for what he imagines is a better life, even at the risk of losing his.
It’s hard to comprehend just how desperate you have to be to arrive at the point where you feel this is the better of two evils; that you have no other choice but to climb into a refrigerated container or an unseaworthy rubber dinghy and embark on a long and perilous journey leaving everything that you know and love behind. In the words of a Kurdish man who tried to cross the Channel in a refrigerated lorry and lived to tell the tale: “Thirty-nine people die in a truck but thousands die in my country. I think it is a good death, better than death in our country. We are between two deaths.”
I have scoured the news for updates, and at the time of writing details are still emerging. What is clear is that important questions need to be asked – and answered. But I think we can all agree that had the 39 people been discovered alive, they would have been denied entry into the UK. And no expressions of official grief either, no victims to mourn or families in our thoughts and prayers; only a commitment to introduce tougher border controls and tougher punishments for both trafficker and trafficked. And besides, no one would be asking whether these people were economic migrants or bona fide refugees fleeing the crossfire of conflict, their countries’ various forms of political and religious intolerance, or the ordeals of sexual abuse.
How sad it is that the only way these people reached their promised land was in a refrigerated metal coffin. And how ironic that a TV series finale (The Handmaid’s Tale) had viewers sobbing with relief when a staggering 52 fictional children were smuggled out of Gilead (a theocratic hellhole) into the safety of Canada.
How is it possible that we are able to remain so resistant to actual human suffering and yet embrace its simulacrum on our television screens? Is it because truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is also a harder pill to swallow?
I am aware there is a school of thought advocating the legal principle of Volenti non fit iniuria – that is to say, if a migrant boards a dodgy vessel or lorry he does so at his own risk and accepts the consequences. And given that, and his ‘irresponsibility’, does it follow that he foregoes the right to be rescued by a blameless and wholly unconnected third party?
Surely such an argument can’t possibly apply to bona fide refugees. Besides, it misses the point. Which is that a government policy that literally forces people into refrigerated containers and rubber dinghies must be deeply flawed and only lining the pockets of criminals.
If sealed borders create ultimately only human tragedy, then the official policies themselves must be part of the problem. Such disasters do not happen because of lack of security and border control – they are the price of it. Tougher controls will only push people to take tougher (and more dangerous) decisions.
Closer to home, we need to understand that we cannot just be Christian or Catholic on Sundays. It may sound self-righteous, but we really must make an effort to see everyone as a child of God. As difficult as it might be for one set of human beings to live with another, very dissimilar, set, there are still many points of contact. And we need from now on to see these people as individuals who have as much right as we to aspire to a better life.