The second emotive issue I am going to tackle tonight, while my head is in the right place to do it, is that of refugees and other migrants drowning en route to Europe from North Africa.
While regrettable, the deaths at sea attributed to the current "refugee crisis" are not something the citizens of Europe should be made to feel guilty for, unless they are personally a part of the trafficking organisation responsible for providing the boats to the people in an unseaworthy condition or overloading them or both or of any other ruse designed to prise money from people with no concern for their wellbeing.
The drownings etc. are a symptom of a much larger problem and one that cannot be solved by the EU, no matter how many rescue craft are or are not deployed. There is even a strong argument that a greater chance of being rescued in the event of difficulty decreases the perceived risk involved in attempting a crossing and encourages more to give it a go.
To use the analogy of "Russian Roulette", with each boat being a chamber in a revolver and lack of seaworthiness or overcrowding being the bullet therein, it seems the gun is now fully loaded and there is an approaching certainty the crossing, the pulling of the metaphorical trigger, will result in death, injury or sickness.
People pay huge sums to play the game and it costs even more to pick up the pieces of the players at the end but, and here's the catch, the game is being played outside the EU so it has no power to stop it, just to clear up the mess from it that does or would otherwise wash up on its shores.
It is no more responsible parenting to send or take one's child to sea under the conditions we see across our news media than it would be to point a loaded gun at their heads directly and to pull the trigger.
I find it barely credible that it causes an outcry in the UK to suggest sending appropriately skilled people out to where the games are being organised and to discreetly disrupt the traffickers' activity such that so many people do not commit what is tantamount to suicide and infanticide by paying to play.
This is not an action movie, these are not crowds surging from imminent death at the hands of armed hordes onto whatever craft is in front of them at that given moment. Even those presumed refugees are already displaced. They are not plucking themselves directly from a war zone, they have already extracted themselves a considerable distance and are deciding where to pay to go next.
Of the hundreds of thousands of people currently displaced by war, predominantly from the Middle East and Africa, a relative few have the desire to travel to somewhere as far away or as different as the EU and of them a relative few would have the means with which to pay traffickers' rates for the journey.
So an earlier conscious decision, taken weeks or months before the decision to board an unsuitable watercraft in which to cross the Mediterranean Sea, could easily be considered to be where the tournament of Russian Roulette began, any number of games having already been played between leaving home and reaching the coast of North Africa.
There has to be a point at which running away from something to achieve safety becomes a different journey, when safety has already been achieved and the decision to continue running into the far distance turns it into a quest for something else. That something else is usually money.
Traffickers don't offer sea crossings for free so any adult on board their vessel has made a decision to gamble what they have against what they dream they might one day have and has bought a place in the last round of Russian Roulette, the one where all the chambers of the gun are loaded and it comes down to luck and the benevolence of the EU whether they are rescued from the brine or they die.
I have no problem with people dying from their own greed and stupidity but I do have a problem with people putting their children's lives at risk because of it. Understanding human nature as I do, I am aware there will always be idiots prepared to take potentially fatal risks so the only way I see of keeping these children safe from their parents' idiocy is to take away the boats.
It would probably be cheaper, too, for the EU to buy and scrap every potential trafficking vessel than it is to keep scooping people out of the water when they break down or sink. It might give people from some parts of the world the incentive to sort their own countries out rather than just move out, too.
In Europe now we have a peculiar situation in that our own rules generally prevent our direct intervention in the politics of troubled areas so we don't have the option of sorting the problems out at source, helping places become safe and prosperous enough that populations don't feel the need to seek asylum elsewhere.
Until someone changes the rules elsewhere in the world, there is nothing more we in the EU can do than clear up any mess that reaches us. It is not appropriate for us as individuals to feel guilty that other parts of the world choose not to follow our political example and experience problems from which people flee as a result.
Some numbers:
Of the people arriving in Italy by sea in 2014, just over 25,000 were men originally from Syria and just over 24,000 were men originally from Eritrea. Just over 6,000 women arrived from each country, too. The published number of minors I have to hand does not differentiate between girls and boys but I guess the split to be no less skewed in favour of males. However you view these figures, they do not convincingly represent a flow of refugee family units.
The Gambian arrivals numbered almost 7,500 men and only 28 women, very clearly suggesting economic migration to be the principal driver for migrants attempting illegal entry to the EU from that region. Malians numbered over 9,000 men and just 27 women, indicating a similar situation.
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