On 23 April David Cameron and other EU leaders met at an emergency summit in Brussels to cobble together their response to the ‘crisis in the Mediterranean’. This followed the death by drowning of 800 people in the worst disaster to date involving refugees attempting to cross from Africa to Europe. During the weekend of 2/3 May Italian and French ships rescued nearly 6,000 migrants off the coast of Libya and retrieved ten dead bodies. So far in 2015 some 1,500 people have died while attempting the crossing in unseaworthy overcrowded boats. These deaths are not due to some natural disaster; they are entirely the result of the wars, occupation and poverty created by imperialist foreign policy, together with the immigration laws of ‘Fortress Europe’.
There is no safe and legal means of fleeing from Africa or Asia to seek asylum in Europe, and what was always a dangerous route became much more perilous following the ending on 31 October 2014 of the Italian search-and-rescue operation Mare Nostrum and its replacement by the EU border Agency’s Operation Triton. Unlike Mare Nostrum, Triton – which operated with a third of the previous operation’s budget – was designed to police but not to save. While Mare Nostrum patrolled the whole of the sea, Triton operated only within 30 miles of the Italian coast.
In the year before the change in operations, some 150,000 migrants had been rescued by Italian ships. Even with this level of patrol, in the first ten months of 2014 around 3,000 people died. According to UNHCR estimates, a total of 165,000 arrived in Europe via the Mediterranean in the first ten months of 2014, compared to 60,000 in 2013.
At this stage the ConDem coalition government made it abundantly clear its opposition to any type of rescue operation, with Conservative peer Lady Anerley telling the House of Lords: ‘We do not support planned search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean. We believe that they create an unintended pull factor, encouraging more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing and thereby leading to more tragic and unnecessary deaths.’
The British government does not care how many migrants drown in the Mediterranean or how many are saved. Its main worry is that some of those who do make it across the sea will then move north towards Calais, where camps of refugees waiting to attempt the further crossing to Britain continue to line the shores of northern France.
The largest numbers of refugees are from Eritrea, Syria and Libya. Labour leader Ed Miliband hypocritically castigated Cameron for insufficient ‘post-conflict planning’ in Libya, despite his own party having been indistinguishable from the Tories in its support for the destruction of that previously stable country’s government and infrastructure, leaving it as a wasteland semi-governed by warring Islamic factions. In government Labour waged criminal and barbaric wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, inevitably creating hundreds of thousands of refugees. Despite all this, and despite the endless rhetoric employed by every bourgeois British party, from Labour to UKIP, about Britain being ‘swamped’, relatively few refugees come here, or are allowed to remain if they do. In the past four years of war in Syria – a conflict fuelled, stoked and waged by proxy by the British government among others – Britain has provided just 143 resettlement places, as opposed to 30,000 in Germany, for example.
As the hazardous crossing attempts continued, the EU leaders paid lip-service to the enormity of the ongoing tragedy, but they are concerned neither with recommencing search-and-rescue operations on a scale which might save more lives, nor with creating any kind of safer route of exit. Instead their focus was on condemnation of traffickers who profit from the refugees, militarised ways to prevent boats leaving the Libyan coast, if necessary by torpedoing them on shore, and measures to police, detain and attempt to return those who survive the perilous crossings.
All this comes at a time when British political parties are falling over one another to appear the ‘toughest’ on immigration in the run-up to the coming election. Other than the openly racist, ‘little England’ UKIP the bourgeois parties favour some immigration – of a sort that they can manage, turn on and off according to the dictates of capital and use to keep down the wage levels of all sections of the working class, British and migrant. But, whatever the level of their rhetoric, they all reject the right of migrants from Africa and the Middle East, where imperialism continues to wage barbaric war and plunder resources, to seek sanctuary in Britain.
The Revolutionary Communist Group supports the unconditional right of migrants from oppressed nations to come to Europe. We make no distinction between ‘refugees’ and ‘economic migrants’ and oppose all British immigration controls which – while Britain continues to wage war and plunder resources around the world, causing migrants to flee to Europe – will always be intrinsically racist.
Allow safe passage across the Mediterranean and the Channel!
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!
Nicki Jameson
