THE REFUGEE CRISIS HAS NOT GONE AWAY
23 October 2019 – 20:00 hrs
The Essex Lorry Tragedy echoes other similar incidents: the 58 men and women found dead in a lorry at Dover in 2000; the 71 decomposing bodies of Syrian refugees – the youngest just one year old – abandoned in a lorry at the side of a motorway in Austria in 2015; and the 35 men, women and children discovered in a shipping container at Tilbury Docks in 2014, suffering from hypothermia and severe dehydration.
We suspect that these are not Bulgarians , who have freedom of movement currently, they are more likely to be the bodies of desperate refugees from countries like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, China, Eritrea or Somalia.
According to the UNHCR, 65.6 million individuals have been forcibly displaced because of persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations.
There will always be people who feel compelled to take risks in order to reach sanctuary, especially Britain which fails to take its fair share of refugees. The numbers it does take is a tiny fraction of the overall problem. But the noise this country makes about taking in refugees (a problem that it helped create) is very big.
Images of people gathered at Calais were used as evidence of lax border control in the debates over the Brexit Referendum in 2016. In fact it was evidence of the opposite: the UK has made it so tough to cross the Channel that people get trapped elsewhere – or attempt their own boat journeys. And our leaders have breached the Geneva convention on refugees time and again.
Tougher controls by governments intent on “taking back our borders” push people to more dangerous routes, and to place their lives in the hands of smugglers who may be indifferent to their safety or actively looking to exploit them.
We need to ask ourselves why people would take such risks with their own and their family’s lives? Why could they not secure their rights elsewhere in Europe? Were there people among them who had the right to be here, but could not get here using legal routes because the British government dragged its feet – as it has done with hundreds of lone children stranded in Europe?
We need to ask ourselves why people would take this route and reorganize our asylum and immigration system around people’s needs.
The root cause of these tragedies is not human smugglers, it is the governments that shut down safe and legal routes to sanctuary. This in turn makes it possible for smugglers to charge desperate people up to £10,000 per head to cross seas that we would pay a few pounds to cross in a ferry.
Sadly, with the growing anti immigrant rhetoric of our leaders and their fixation on borders and walls, we should expect to read of more lorry loads of dead refugees entering the UK in the future.
Robina Qureshi
The refugee crisis has not gone away. Please support our crisis prevention work by giving a regular donation here www.positiveactionh.org/donate.