Until 1994, I lived in Castricum, a small, but
generally well-to-do town near the North-Sea in The Netherlands. When the sun
was shining, life was good there. We went to the beach and drank beer and
enjoyed life as it came, during my teenage years. I had good times there and
bad times, but I will never forget about my ole’ town.
But what if this small and centuries-old town of 25,000
inhabitants was doomed in a way.
That its inhabitants would become victims of a strange,
but deadly disease, and the whole population would be annihilated within 14
years; one neighbourhood at the time. It would make me feel desperate, even
though I have left this town twenty-odd years ago.
I had to think about this ole’ town, when I read the
news from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) about the number
of (economic) migrants and refugees, who had perished since the year 2000.
Here are the pertinent snips of this article, which was
published in the Dutch newspaper AD:
Since
the year 2000, more than 40,000 migrants have perished during their attempt to
start a better life and future in a different country. This number has been
published by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), last Monday,
29 September. It was based on their own research.
‘Our
message is perfectly clear: migrants die, while this ought not to happen’,
according to director-general William Lacy Swing of the IOM. He called for the
international community to offer more aid to these migrants and do more than ‘simply
counting the number of casualties’.
Europe
is apparently the most dangerous destination for refugees. Since the year 2000,
about 22,000 migrants paid the ultimate price during their attempts to reach
the old continent. Conspicuous is that 4000 people died since October, 2013;
mainly during attempts to cross the Mediterranean sea.
Other
dangerous locations for immigrants are the American-Mexican border, with almost
6000 casualties since 2000, and the Sahara with 3000 people found dead.
There you have it…
My old town Castricum has been totally wiped out – in sheer
numbers of dead immigrants –since 2000. And on top of that, my old neighbourhood,
the ‘Sea Heroes’ area (where all the streets have been named after sea heroes),
and the Composers-area – which combinedly have approximately 4000 inhabitants –
have both been wiped out since October, last year.
These are the number of casualties that you would
expect in a small civil war, but without having one.
And we know that this will go on and on, as long as the
European Union acts like “fortress Europe”: a European continent, which tries to shut almost anybody out who
comes to Europe without friends and family, but with either a strong determination
to change his life for the better or in a desperate attempt to save his life in
the first place.
Many people talk about criminals and ‘fortune seekers’,
when they talk about migrants. Sometimes, these people genuinely fear that
these migrants will start to behave like a kind of Trojan horse, when they are
invited to live within our European borders.
And when you read the news about what is going on in
the Middle East (Iraq and Syria) and some African countries in the first place,
and think about the mounting tensions between groups of people at home, you can
understand some of their statements, without necessarily sympathizing with
them.
Many people are very scared for unrest and religious
tensions at home and think that when they ‘just reject the world’s reality
and substitute their own’, bad things won’t happen overhere, in our
cocoon of false safety.
Still, these numbers of 40,000 dead migrants globally and
22,000 dead migrants on European shores, since the year 2000, are a number of
shame.
When, between the two World Wars, the United States
would have given the European emigrants and refugees for the Nazi violence an equally
warm welcome, as we are giving the African and Middle-Eastern refugees today
and when the number of perished Europeans would have reached 40,000 in those
days, the world might have been another place. Luckily, the US generally didn’t…
Of course, I don’t know whether the European Union
could handle mass migration of hundreds of thousands of people per year,
without a certain amount of chaos and unrest in the various countries. Still, mass
migration has happened at numerous occasions in the past. And in the end it
made our countries and continent stronger, due to the influx of science &
knowledge, art, craftsmanship and – very important – fresh blood and genes.
And of course, I don’t know either, how to convince
desperate people to not step in their shaky, unseaworthy and dangerously
overcrowded boats to make their suicide trip from Africa and Syria to Europe.
However, I think that the European Union has the
conscientious duty to look at the migration problem with a grand vision that
exceeds the narrow-minded “Not In My BackYard” (NIMBY) view, which is so much
in vogue at especially the Northern European countries currently.
With a mixed approach of prevention, common burden
sharing and a larger absorption of refugees within the whole EU, we might indeed
be able to mitigate this enormous problem of human suffering and death.
We cannot just leave the problems to Italy, Greece,
Turkey and Spain with a scornful smile : “That’s your problem, guys and we are
going to do jack sh*t about it, as your colleagues in the European Union”.
It is time to show again, where Europe has been sometimes
great in the past: offering a refuge for people who really need it.
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