Cabbages & Kings: Humanity adrift

“I was torn in conscience and mind
The prophet said we must choose
Between some rules on a stone
Dictated by an almighty voice
And a calf that was made of pure gold
Oh Moses, get real, you call that a choice?”
From The Annals of Kissy Koti by Bachchoo

The late Bob Marley’s song Exodus’ first line went, “Exodus, the movement of Jah people”. Marley was talking about a “back to Africa” movement taking the descendants of slaves from the New World to their roots. This doctrine of return was not formulated by Africans. They had enough problems of their own. The idea was the brainchild of Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican of the early 20th century who started a movement that inspired a lot of debate, raised some money which he was subsequently accused of corruptly siphoning off and never resulted in the exodus which Bob Marley wishfully sang about.

Marley never emigrated to Africa himself. He had record contracts in Europe and the US. It was a metaphor — the exodus from slavery into the Promised Land stood for an ascent from a hard life into a heavenly hereafter. There are, and have been throughout history, movements of people in search of spiritual fulfilment. The hippies flocked to Yogic India and disillusioned, comfortable Westerners had their cake and ate it while following the untaxing diktats of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

The major exodus of humans has been a flight from oppression, sometimes from inhuman, cruel and untenable conditions of life and very many times from the threat of genocide.
In the last century and even now, though there are endless examples of these motives for the movement of populations, the exodus propelled by the movement of labour in search of a better life has in numbers overshadowed if not overtaken both.

In tragic episodes, this spring and summer, the exodus from Africa to Europe has taken thousands of lives and poses today, apart from a headache for European governments and a test of compassion for European populations, one of the central issues of the clash of civilisations. By civilisations I do not mean the clash of values between, say, Las Vegas and Boko Haram. I mean the differential in levels of economic development and the consequent opportunities for material comfort and perhaps even for individual freedoms.

Over the past 20 or more years, on any visit to an Italian, Spanish, Portuguese or French city bordering the Mediterranean, one would come across in the tourist spots gangs of Africans and more recently Bangladeshis spreading imitation designer handbags, fake designer watches, umbrellas, mobile phone covers and now selfie-sticks on rugs on the pavement trying to sell them to passers-by. I have seen them bundle their wares when the police approach and make a run for it into the alleys with which they are familiar.

That paltry game of hide and seek has turned into mass tragedy. The failure of the state of Libya after the removal of Gaddafi by the “Arab Spring” (which now deserves a more appropriate name) and the bombs of European nations, has turned it into the staging post for the exodus of African refugees to Europe. Every day hundreds if not thousands of Libyans, Eritreans, Somalis, Syrians and others pay thousands of pounds to “people traffickers” to buy a passage to Sicily, Lampedusa, Spain or to some Greek islands from different staging posts.

These desperate refugees, mostly young men but also substantially whole families with small children, are packed into boats which are utterly unseaworthy and towed into the Mediterranean and left to drift till they are spotted by the ships or one or another Navy of the European Union nations and, through humanitarian considerations, towed ashore to Europe. There is no prospect of turning these tubs, often leaking and crowded to the point of being swept under the waves in choppy weather, to Africa. They have no means of propulsion, they are directionless rafts in a sea whose occupants trust it with their lives and await the compassion of foreign navies.

The thousands who are towed to shore in Italy are then “processed”. They are confined to camps and have to register their identities, their nationality, are finger-printed and for months or even years subjected to a dubious process of inquiry into whether they are refugees fleeing from imminent danger to their lives, criminals escaping justice or, as has proved likely in most case, fleeing from poverty, starvation and even from the war-ravaged country that has claimed the lives of their communities and families.

Europe doesn’t know what to do with or about this unstoppable exodus. Thousands of the refugees escape the reservations and camps to which they are confined and attempt to make their way to other countries where they can, even as illegal immigrants, find work and try to make a life. Very many of them attempt to get to Britain. Last week the French ferry operators at Calais, the French town from which truck traffic gets on trains and is carried through the Channel Tunnel to Folkestone, UK, went on strike. It stopped traffic on the French highways for hundreds of miles and the convoys of stationary trucks was invaded by thousands of these refugees trying to break into the trucks by stealth and force in an attempt to sneak past UK customs into the country.

The European Union has yet to devise a coherent policy to tackle this refugee problem. There is a nasty and growing point of view that these boat people ought to be left to drown. Another point of debate is whether Europe ought to stem the tide by invading Libya and militarily eliminating the people traffickers. The compassionate view recommends the distribution of refugees in quotas throughout the states of the EU, relieving the burden on the Mediterranean countries. But opinion in Hungary, France and in Britain seems to be growing against this. There is no “solution”, only millions of desperate people.