The European Union has called for emergency talks to address the rapidly growing number of people fleeing to Europe to escape violence and unrest in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, sub-Saharan Africa and other regions. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, approximately 2,500 people are believed to have died or gone missing trying to reach Europe so far this year. On Sunday, 37 people died when a boat capsized off the Libyan coast. This came just days after another boat capsized off the Libyan coast killing more than 200 people. Meanwhile, investigators in Hungary and Austrian authorities are continuing to probe the deaths of 71 people who were found abandoned last week inside a truck on the main highway between Budapest and Vienna.
Hungary has responded to the situation by building a 109-mile-long razor-wire fence on its southern border. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports scenes of blatant racial profiling at Budapest’s main train station. Authorities allowed white and lighter-skinned people to pass through, but stopped and demanded papers from virtually all darker-skinned people. On Saturday alone, Hungary detained 3,000 people. Over the weekend, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius accused Hungary of adopting a “scandalous” policy toward refugees.
This is an Afghan refugee named Wahib describing his experience there on the eve of a visit from European officials and French ministers. “Nobody is, like, treating us like as a human being here, you know? Everybody and police are—if you go, like, to city, some police see us, “Hey,” go, “jungle, jungle.” Like, we are human beings, so—they call us “jungle.” You can see that, you know? So, it’s like very embarrassing for me recently. I cannot say about other people, but for me it’s like very embarrassing. It’s just because that our country is not, like, good. It’s—we cannot stay there. There’s a war.”
Dr. Chiara Montaldo talking:
What is happening here, we are receiving migrants since almost two years now. And honestly, the condition of the people we receive are worse and worse, not so much for the traveling in the sea, but really for the condition in Libya, in all the migration way before to come here. And the main point where they are now victim of violence is for sure Libya, where all the people that we talk with, they really tell us that now is really the hell. This is the word that they often use to describe Libya, is the “hell.” There is no security. Many people have been really tortured or have been beaten. They come with the wounds and burns. Many women, but also many men, are raped. So, now what we see, unfortunately, are the consequences of the worsening of the situation in Libya. This is clear.
“We are alive only because we are not dead.” most of the people that we are receiving now are really escaping from death. So, why they risk their life in the sea? They know very well now that the sea is like Russian roulette. So, they can die, they know, because now there are more and more shipwreck and tragedies in the sea. But still they keep coming. Why? Because their condition in their own countries are worsening. First of all, Syria, of course, but not only Syria—Eritrea, Somalia, Nigeria. So, all these people are really escaping from a situation where the risk of life is really high, higher than the trip in the sea. So that’s why they keep coming. Not only this, because actually we receive people from many different nationalities, but many of them, they were already living in Libya. And now, as I told you, the situation is always worse and worse, so all these people, really, most of them, they come because they don’t have choice, and especially because they don’t have other alternatives to this trip in the sea. So, unfortunately, some of them, they could afford to buy a ticket, if they could, but there is no possibility, because there are no legal way in this moment allowing them to reach safely Europe or any way a safe place.
chemical burns on the people, especially who were in the hold of the boats. And the lighter-skinned immigrants will be above, and the darker-skinned immigrants, for example, from Africa, are below, where they’re more likely to get burned, because the immigrants fear that if darker-skinned people are seen, they’re more likely to be turned away.
the chemical burn are symptoms that we see quite often, in some type of landing. It means whenever the boat has some problem of fuel leaking. So sometimes the fuel come out, and because they are sit all in the boat, especially in the lower part of the body, the legs, they have these really burn, like a fire burn, but they are caused by the fuel. And sometimes they are really severe. Sometimes we need to admit them. Sometimes we can treat them at the first reception center.
And it is true that, unfortunately, even in the boat, there is a kind of hierarchy. All of them, unfortunately, are desperate, but there is a kind of a different kind of despair, because, unfortunately, even in the boat, there is a first and second class, if we can say like that. And so, the last of the chain, often they have the worst places, the places more dangerous. And we see more and more people who died because they are in the—they stay in the lower part of the boat, which is normally the more—the most dangerous, because they cannot breathe sometimes. The fuel is there, and the gas of the boat—they are there. So, for example, two days ago, one of our team received people survived from this tragedy. Fifty people died because they were in the lower part of the boat. And they were probably without oxygen, and they died. Unfortunately, in these kind of tragedies, the people in the boat, maybe like yesterday, 400 people in the boat, they fight for life. This is normal. This situation put them in a situation where even in between them sometimes there are tension, and everybody try to save their own life.
Honestly, I think that in front of what we are facing now—people dying, people without alternative—I think that this discussion to send them back, to block our borders are really—for me, they are—we should not discuss about this. We should discuss how to help people who is trying now to save their life. How can we still be here asking ourself should we block them or should not? How can we still be here to think how to protect ourself? I think that all our discussion are to protect ourself. But for me and for my organization, the priority is not protect ourself, is not protect our borders, but to help people who are dying. And they will continue to die if we don’t do anything. And our fences, our barriers and our border are the cause of many of these deaths.
we prefer to call always the people “people,” “human being,” because for us what is important is to provide the care of the people in need, whoever they are, if they are refugees, if they are—whoever they are. So, we always prefer to call people “people,” “human beings.” Then, of course, there are differences, because some of them, they escape from the war; some of them, they escape from extreme poverty; some of them, they are victim of trafficking. So, there are many, many different people and many different reason for which people are escaping now. But, for us, this doesn’t matter. These, for us, are human beings in need, in extreme need, human beings escaping from death, very often, or, anyway, from very dangerous situation. So, yes, we always prefer to call them “human being.”
Kenneth Roth talking:
we’re talking about a crisis. And yes, 310,000, 320,000 people are a lot of people. But Europe’s population as a whole is about 500 million. So what we’re talking about, the number of people who have come this year is less than 0.1 percent of Europe’s population. Now, compare that to the United States, where undocumented people in this country are about 11 million. That’s about 3.5 percent of the U.S. population. So, in other words, the U.S. population has completely integrated massive more people, a much larger percentage than Europe is facing. Indeed, the U.S. has built an economy around these people, so that it would be difficult to send them back. We’re having a debate now about a path to citizenship, but realistically, these people are here to stay, and the U.S. has just incorporated them.
So, this is not really a crisis. I mean, Europe is perfectly able to manage integrating 0.1 percent of its population. The problem is, it doesn’t want to—at least some people don’t want to. We’ve seen real leadership. You saw the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, saying—very powerfully speaking for the need to welcome these people. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has also been very outspoken in this regard. So, we are seeing some leadership in Europe, but the right wing, in particular, is demagoguing this issue and is creating real problems, which are not real problems, they’re political problems.
it’s important to recognize that a very substantial percentage of these people are refugees. That is to say, they’re fleeing conflict and persecution. Yes, there are some economic migrants among them, but most at least have a right not to be sent back to persecution. And once they land on European soil, they actually have a right to have their asylum claim adjudicated, and if indeed they are found to be refugees, as most of them will be, they’re entitled to stay.
So what Europe needs to do is to stop treating the Mediterranean or the often-dangerous land crossing, stop treating sort of drowning and death, as a way of preserving its borders. It needs to find safe and legal routes for these people who really do need to flee, a way for them to get to Europe without risking their lives. And, you know, we’ve seen modest steps in that direction. If you look at sort of the way Europe has responded to the Mediterranean Sea crossing, when the Italians were in charge, they had something called Mare Nostrum, which very much focused on protecting people. The European Union then took over about a year ago with Operation Triton and put a priority on preserving Europe’s borders over protecting people—until this last spring, when a thousand people died in the course of one week, and then it changed. But I’m not sure if it’s changed enough, because even just this weekend we’ve seen a number of drownings off the Libyan coast. Europe should be patrolling much more aggressively near the Mediterranean coast to try to rescue people as quickly as possible, so they’re not continuing to use drowning as a way of preserving Europe’s borders.
there are commonalities between the right wing in both Europe and the United States. And what this is really about is some sense that the migrants are somehow destroying American culture or European culture, that these societies cannot incorporate the changes that would result from welcoming in, you know, hundreds of thousands or, in some cases in the U.S., millions of people. Now, the United States, in fact, is just fine. In fact, it’s been greatly enriched by the immigration. And it’s not as if American culture is radically different today from what it was, you know, two or three decades ago. It’s not as if American democracy is in jeopardy. But this is nonetheless an argument that the right wing likes to put forward, that the American way of life is in jeopardy. And you see very similar arguments in Europe, aggravated by the fact that so many of these asylum seekers and migrants are Muslims. And there’s this terrifying fear in Europe that, you know, largely Christian Europe is somehow going to changed for the worse because a handful of Muslims are going to come in. And so there is this unfortunate right-wing, racist commonality.
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Chiara Montaldo, coordinator with Doctors Without Borders in the Sicilian town of Pozzallo in Italy. She has been providing medical and psychological care to migrants and refugees rescued from boats in the Mediterranean. She recently wrote a piece for The Guardian called “We see more and more unaccompanied children on migrant boats.”
Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
— source democracynow.org