BY LIZ FEKETE
LONDON — The European Union Border Control Program, introduced with scant regard to refugee protection and human rights, is leading to an increasing number of deaths on the borders of Europe — and beyond.
Over the last 18 months, research conducted by British-based Institute of Race Relations has identified 742 people who have died attempting to reach Europe. In order to gain entry, the desperate have gambled with their lives. They have attempted to reach Europe by hiding in the wheel-bays of aircraft and in shipping containers on ferries; they have trekked overland over hazardous routes; they have chanced perilous sea crossings.
The majority of those who died are sub-Saharan Africans, but also included in the grim tally are north Africans, Iraqis, Kurds, Afghans, Albanians, eastern Europeans and people from the Indian sub-continent.
The most perilous way to get into Europe is to be smuggled in by sea. In all, 670 people met their deaths while travelling on rickety and overcrowded fishing boats, flimsy rubber dinghies or other sub-standard vessels, which sank, or crashed against the rocks, in rough seas.
A few, whose decomposing corpses washed ashore on Europe's southern coasts, were in sight of their final destination. Traffickers, determined to avoid detection, would have forced them overboard; those who could not swim, drowned. Still others died because they lost their way on the high seas, and drifted for days, even weeks, before finally succumbing to hunger, exposure and thirst.
A further 50 people died between May 2002 and June 2003 after attempting to trek across the Turkish-Greek border or cross the frontier that separates Ukraine from Slovakia. The news that their frozen corpses had been discovered merited just a few lines in the newspapers, as did the fact that four migrants were blown apart after stepping on the landmines which litter the Turkish-Greek border near the river Evros.
Twenty-one people died attempting entry to Europe as stowaways in air or sea carriers, or on coaches or lorries. Hypothermia, lack of oxygen, carbon monoxide poisoning and suffocation due to the terrible heat in the packed containers are among the causes of their deaths.
Desperate 'choice'
Those who seek to enter Europe clandestinely nearly always do so with the aid of traffickers or smugglers. Aware of the risks, and most often pooling the life savings of families to pay the traffickers' charges, they decide that the circumstances in their country of origin are so bleak that they have no other option. That they "choose" to be dehumanised and commodified in this way is the most glaring measure of their desperation.
But this desperation is not acknowledged by politicians, who respond to the emotionally charged, media-generated hysteria over asylum seekers by demonising the desperate as an "invading army" of "illegal immigrants".
It was the laws introduced by politicians throughout Europe, North America and Australia from the 1980s onwards that have set the tone for the ill informed media debate. Intelligent discussion on the reasons for forced migration and refugee flight is curtailed and compassion for the desperate derided.
Until the 1980s, refugee policy was regarded as a human rights issue. This changed in the 1990s. As the number of asylum claims rose, immigration control began to be prioritised by Western governments. Common visa policies (that denied visas to those coming from refugee-producing countries) and carriers' liability fines (which penalised airlines and sea carriers that brought in those without papers) were introduced. Airline liaison officers were installed in refugee-producing countries and readmission treaties negotiated.
These barriers forced the vast majority of asylum seekers attempting to reach the EU to turn to people smugglers and trafficking networks. The detrimental impact of European policies on asylum seekers' rights was never acknowledged.
Instead, new asylum policies were formulated which prioritised the need to combat transnational organised crime above the rights of refugees. In this, the framers of European asylum law were informed by the new strategy of "global migration management", which the richer nations of North America, Europe and Australia were fleshing out in supranational bodies and intergovernmental agencies such as the International Centre for Migration Policy and Development.
In identifying trafficking and smuggling networks as the main obstacle to "managed migration", their framework blurred the legal distinctions between trafficking and smuggling.
Geneva Convention
Trafficking, which involves exploitation that goes on after the arrival in the country of destination, such as bonded labour or prostitution, is clearly a facet of international organised crime. But smuggling, which involves assisting an illegal border crossing with no ongoing exploitation, is not — as acknowledged by the drafters of the 1951 Geneva Convention.
The drafters of the convention, in recognition of the human smuggling networks that had aided Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, had stipulated in Article 31 that those who use illegal methods to enter a country should not be penalised if their purpose in so doing was to seek asylum. Today, Article 31 has been totally undermined by laws which criminalise smuggling.
The EU, the Group of 8 industrialised nations and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (which includes Canada and the US) designated 2000 as the year of the Anti-Trafficking Plan. Subsequently, the 2000 UN Convention on Transnational Crime initiated separate trafficking and smuggling protocols. The smuggling protocol makes it an international offence to assist any person in an illegal border crossing, regardless of whether he or she is a refugee in need of protection. It also states that a migrant who engages the help of smugglers is not a blameless victim but complicit in the criminal act of illegal migration.
By treating all those who seek the aid of traffickers or smugglers as complicit in criminal activity, the UN convention has absolved policy-makers in the richer developed nations of any blame in the mounting toll of deaths at its borders. Blame for the deaths (when they are acknowledged at all) is placed at the door of ruthless trafficking networks.
What is not being acknowledged is the way that the immigration and asylum policies of North America, Australia and Europe have, since the early 1990s, created the market for traffickers and smugglers to flourish.
The death funnel
Each time smugglers or traffickers seek to exploit a new route, the EU attempts to seal it off. Such policies do not to work, nor do they deter people from coming. Refugees are forced to attempt more circuitous and hazardous routes. EU policy is, quite literally, funnelling people to their deaths.
In the 1980s, for instance, sub-Saharan Africans would trek across the Sahara, heading for Morocco and then on to Ceuta and Melilla, Spain's enclaves in north Africa. Spain, aided by the EU, responded with a program designed to make the crossing from Morocco to Spanish territory "impassable".
But still the desperate come, only today they come to Ceuta in the boots of cars or they clamber down into the narrow pipes and drains that carry waste into the Bomba gully, the natural frontier between Spanish territory and Morocco. But more often than not, the displaced and desperate seek to enter mainland Spain by the much more dangerous routes across the Strait of Gibraltar, from the Saharan coast to the Canary Islands or across the Mediterranean Sea.
And the death toll rises — only now the "nautical graveyards" are increasingly in African territorial waters ensuring that the problem is hidden even further from Europeans' gaze.
[Liz Fekete is deputy director of the Institute of Race Relations.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 27, 2003.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.