[EN] SURVEILLANCE, MIGRANT DEATHS AND HUMANITARIANISM IN THE MEDITERRRANEAN

ÖZGÜN TOPAK 

Smugglers are not the cause of migration; they are the consequences of the EU’s expanding border surveillance regime. The EU should concentrate on saving migrants from this regime.

All Lives Matter. Vigil for drowned migrants. Malta. Demotix/Ian Pace. All rights reserved.Migrant deaths systemic in the Mediterranean continue, with this one accident causing more than 800 deaths, 1,600 since the start of 2015. The end of Italy’s Mare Nostrum Search-and-Rescue Operation in November 2014 played a role in the rising death toll. Mare Nostrum was replaced by Frontex-led Triton, which is a lesser scale operation that prioritizes border control over search-and-rescue.

However, migrant deaths in the Mediterranean are not only explained by the absence of military-humanitarian operations. A broader look at the shifting migration routes towards the EU demonstrates that it is as a result of increasing surveillance that migrants die.

Surveillance has forced migrants to find riskier routes for making the crossing. The more surveillance has intensified the more migrants have felt the brutal reality of European borders. Many have died in the process. What we need, rather than this type of humanitarianism is a human rights approach to curb surveillance.

[EN] DYING TO GET INTO EUROPE'S SELF-IMPOSED MIGRATION CRISIS (1)

robertjprince.wordpress.com

Migrant ship off coast of Lampedusa, Italian island in the Mediterranean

A Maltese member of parliament, one Joseph Muscat told the BBC: “What is happening now is of epic proportions. If Europe, if the global community continues to turn a blind eye… we will all be judged in the same way that history has judged Europe when it turned a blind eye to the genocide of this century and last century.”

1.

A continued tightening and militarization 0f European immigration policy – not unlike that implemented in the United States towards it southern neighbors – along with 35 years of World Bank-IMF economic domination/strangulation of Africa have mixed into a toxic cocktail of death and suffering from the growing number of people – men, women, children – trying to escape a dangerous and empty present and a future with no end in sight of war, repression, economic and political collapse in both the MENA countries (Middle East and North Africa) and Africa.

Tens of thousands just pick up and try to reach Europe where they hope to find salvation. They walk across the Sahara from the Cameroon, Mali, Somalia and Southern Sudan to the North African coast or die trying. They leave Syria and Iraq any way they can, by foot through Turkey, by sea to Cyprus and from there hopefully to Europe. But as their overland options have narrowed due to increased security at the Bulgarian and Greek borders and within Turkey itself, migrants increasingly take their chances at sea, trying to cross the Mediterranean to what they hope will be salvation of more often not is simply another version of purgatory.

While Europe’s immigrant crisis is not new – it has been going on for decades and has been the subject of moving films, studies, reports for the past quarter century at least, since the collapse of Communism – the crisis has swelled in the past few years to even more unwieldy – and inhumane – proportions. Conflicts in Syria, Mali, the collapse of Khadaffi’s government in Libya as a result of the NATO-led invasion, along with conflicts of longer duration (Eritrea, Somali) have aggravated an already desperate, and from a European viewpoint, shameful situation. Add to this the deepening public hostility in European countries to immigration that has triggered an increasingly repressive and hostile legal framework and the explosive brew is complete.

ΔΙΑΔΗΛΩΣΕΙΣ ΕΝΑΝΤΙΑ ΣΤΟ ΦΡΑΧΤΗ ΤΟΥ ΕΒΡΟΥ, ΣΤΙΣ ΚΑΣΤΑΝΙΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΣΤΗΝ Ν. ΟΡΕΣΤΙΑΔΑ - 9/5/2015

Φωτογραφίες: http://www.e-vertigo.gr