The European migration crisis

The 71 men, women and children found decomposing in a lorry in an Austrian lay-by most likely came from Syria. The youngest was about two-year-old. They had been packed into the vehicle by those who trafficked them and the doors then wired shut. There was no escape and the vehicle, once used to transport frozen chickens, became their coffin. They were discovered when the motorway police noticed blood and body fluids leaking from the vehicle. In Hungary, three Bulgarians and an Afghan have been detained on suspicion of involvement in this latest trafficking atrocity. As the Austrian police were making their gruesome discovery, the maritime graveyard that is the Mediterranean Sea was giving up its latest harvest of the dead. At least 200 died when their boat capsized off the Libyan port of Zuwara, many of them trapped beneath the overturned boat.

The mass exodus of human misery from the states of the Maghrib and the countries caught up in conflict with the rise of the Islamic State, is overwhelming some parts of Europe. At least 2,500 have died at sea this year, and Germany alone is expecting 800,000 asylum seekers in 2015. The European states are all trying to dodge and weave as the flood rises, but there is no end in sight and equally no pan-European solution on the horizon.

A refugee quota system proposed by France and Germany has not found universal support. A summit of European Union (EU) leaders in June was convened to crack the problem and it ended in acrimony and division. The state without internal barriers — the EU — is today busy erecting new walls to replace those dismantled a generation ago. Hungary is erecting a razor-wire barrier along its border with Serbia. Bulgaria is building a wall between itself and Turkey. Ukraine wants to build a wall on its Russian border. And they keep coming across the sea. The UN refugee agency estimates that 300,000 have crossed the Mediterranean by various routes this year, and around 3,000 are arriving daily in southern Europe. And who now thinks that Western intervention in Libya was such a good idea?

Published in The Express Tribune, August 31^st,  2015.

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