Weeks back, the distressing picture of the lifeless body of an innocent toddler on the banks of a Turkish island encouraged humanity, for once, to turn its eyes from the Wall Street and Shanghai, to the shores of Italy, Greece and Turkey. But alas, it carried humanity only so far.
Aylan’s corpse has a story to itself, a story which he shares with scores of other Syrians, Iraqis and Africans- a story of deprivation, disappointment and pain. These are the common citizens, with no ulterior political ends or higher ambitions, who have been failed by their States, and by the world at large. And it is for the sake of their lives and the lives of their families, that they have had to leave their homes in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Sudan and Nigeria. In their quest for hope, hundreds of thousands of them have agreed to investing their life savings in buying their families a perilous journey through the Mediterranean, atop wooden dinghies, so they could be lifted from deprivation to hope-from the hellhole that their leaders have made out of their homelands to the paradise that their ex-colonizers have built with the blood of their ancestors. It is but the urge of survival that drives a human being to flee from his society, his business, his language and his homeland, and head to a foreign land, of a foreign language and an alien society with nothing more than a pair of tattered clothes and a strong will to live. The existence of such deprivation, such suffering, questions at best, all the glories of prosperity that we congratulate ourselves with. An irony isn’t it-we have resources to send spaceships off to Mars, but are powerless before the politics and economics that have trapped these deprived beings in a vicious circle of disappointment.
Calling this a ‘European Migrant Crisis’ is doing a massive disservice to its true nature. Firstly, the people under consideration are barely migrants. They are not ‘migrating’ as such to Europe out of informed, voluntary choice. The people under consideration are ‘refugees’, fleeing civil strife in failed states. Calling them ‘Migrants’ absolutely distorts the true magnitude of the crisis at hand, and makes them appear like Indian and Pakistani engineers ‘migrating’ for well-paid jobs to the United States. Secondly, calling the crisis ‘European’ is a massive abomination. It makes victims out of comparatively prosperous Europeans, and thus heroes out of their right wing fanatics. The victims are the war-ravaged refugees and the crisis is anything but European.
The waves of refugees that have hit European shores are actually a result of the real crisis, this crisis being an absolute degeneration of the State and an unfortunate collapse of the Rule of Law under multiple fragile Governments. The Arab Spring began with the overthrow of ZineAbadine Ben Ali in Tunisia. Sadly, it was only here that a peaceful transition to democracy was observed. In the rest of the states, what transpired was a spillover of unrest which in the first place was a function of economic stagnation, lack of opportunities and massive discontent towards autocratic and heavy handed dictators. The call was to displace the dictator, with no clear aim of establishing democracy. The counter-revolutionary forces, thus proved to be much toopowerful , rendering the revolution from an uprising to a general state of chaos. Syria and Libya are prominent examples. The opposition in Syria stands fragmented, with conflicting agendas from democracy to Jihadism fighting against one another other than fighting the dictator. Libya witnessed the bloody purge of its dictator and his sympathizers, only to be plundered by militias claiming their share in power, cornering the legitimate government in a remote city, where the politics grant a renegade general greater power than the Prime Minister. Iraq saw an institutionalization of ethnic division, and such majoritarian, non-inclusive government made it a breeding ground for what would become one of the largest current threats to Middle Eastern peace, the ISIS. The Central African Republic and Sudan find themselves in the midst of ethnic strife, while Nigeria finds itself reckless in the face of an Islamic insurgency.
In the meantime, the US kept setting itself ‘red lines’, which were crossed and trampled, but no intervention was seen. Where, intervention occurred, a hasty and irresponsible retreat simply amplified the magnitude of the crisis. Syria being the example of the former error of omission, and Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya being the example of the latter error—of commission. The crisis has now mutated to an extent of complication that cannot be sorted even by military interventions. For example, displacing Assad leaves Syria open to holiday for anarchists in the face of a divided, fragmented opposition, while ethnic strife in Iraq has gone far beyond the Islamic State with Shia militias perpetrating crimes against innocent Sunnis with the same hatred that the ISIS slaughters innocent Shias. Further, political complications arise when all of these violations of humanity are viewed in light of the larger Shia-Sunni conflict in the Middle East.
More than 250,000 people, including thousands of young Aylans have been slaughtered in Syria. Multiple thousands have been killed in Iraq and Libya. The numbers of Internally Displaced Persons and Refugees are at all-time highs and have had to stay in severely inhuman and over-populated refugee centers in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. In making these cold computations, we ignore the doom that absolute economic stagnation and the abject lack of healthcare and education facilities has let lose. It is this story of gloom and grief that every single of those 300,000 refugees who have gambled on their lives has to tell. The media shows us their pictures, herded like cattle 
along the borders of Hungary, but it is these stories that have come to define these human beings.
Europe is still amidst massive apprehension since there is nothing that it can consciously do to stem the flow of refugees. Right-wing political parties have already made it to the European Parliament on the anti-immigration paradigm, and Islamophobic organizations such as PEGIDA have started to exact considerable support. This makes the internal political state of multiple European countries too volatile with respect to the idea of immigrants. While many of the nonsense allegations of the right responsible for massive Xenophobia have been disproved by research, and while the need for labour is becoming increasingly pronounced in an ageing economy, the right, generally, does not require statistics to make their case before electorates. Jobless youth and a tinge of good oratory tend to be enough. Apart from the laudable responses of Germany and Austria, the refugee distribution plan has acquired a much divided response, ironically, from the European ‘Union’.
This is not just a story of disappointment and deprivation; this is indeed a story of shame. It is a shame on humanity, that humanity as an identity has taken a backseat to the identities of culture, ethnicity, nationality and history. While the depradations of autocrats and fundamentalists is testament to this fact, there si indeed an international dimension to it. That geopolitical divisions should prevent the international community from reaching a consensus on handling Syria even after 300,000 deaths is condemnable. That Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran should be the first to fund rival factions in civil wars and last to welcome refugees that this war creates is condemnable. That the US should bow out of wars to which it is a stakeholder without the establishment of stability is indeed condemnable too. No international law or rulebook binds these states to take the aforementioned initiatives. But shouldn’t the shared heritage of humanity and a solidarity towards this identity be adequate in principle for electorates in democracies to encourage governments to engage in constructive action?
Similarly, public opinion in Europe remains highly divided over the refugee crisis. When the Archbishop of Hungary calls refugees ‘invaders’ and claims them to be yelling allahuakbar, the sheer extent of inhumanity is out in the open for all to see. As against this, when the Pope calls for all parishes in Europe to accept at least one refugee family, an example has been set. When Angela Merkel is prepared to have her coalition broken up over the issue of welcoming asylum seekers, be it for economic gain or political gain, she exhibits political will. It is the latter that needs to be endorsed, and the former, denounced.
International relations are devoid of principle, they are true politics of self-gain at play. However, the need to promote the vitality of the shared identity of humanity is the need of the hour, with problems such as Global Warming calling for Global Action, which is being subsumed by geopolitics. This might indeed be dismissed as wishful thinking or ‘the same clichéd paradigm’. However, with policy implications that go far beyond one stakeholder, international and environmental problems are the current threat to human welfare. Whether China creates a greater carbon footprint, or the US-the heat will be felt by the citizens of these and more states. Similarly, the degeneration of the State in one corner of the world will breed elements that threaten all, just like the Islamic State.
This refugee crisis is also one such area, where collective action is the only solution. In an increasingly globalized world, integration is the constant. While capital gain and profit is getting interrelated and integrated in all arenas, humanity cannot remain a divided identity. That is an inherent contradiction that globalization cannot be complacent with. A stronger feeling of commonness and solidarity among the citizenry of the world has in store economic gain, collective security as also intrinsic value.
It is this end that humanity, today, needs to strive to achieve.
Tags: Aylan European migrant crisis Migrant crisis
