In 2015, photographs of
the three year old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body washed up on a
Turkish beach became a potent symbol of the sheer brutality of the
Syrian War and a catalyst for world action. Or, so we hoped. While refugees
and migrants are still perishing in the Mediterranean in their thousands, the
global outrage which the single tragedy of Aylan Kurdi’s death provoked has
long since washed away.
Here lies the powerful undercurrent
within European politics which runs deep, deeper and far more problematic an
issue to EU leaders than Brexit even. Migration has only intensified since Aylan Kurdi’s death four years ago and along with it, our empathy, our immutable connection to refugees as
humans and any promises of EU leaders to propagate action. The resentments of right-wing
politicians in Matteo Salivin's camp rely on
reducing the tragic circumstances (and all too often the tragic ends) of
refugees to a set of desensitising statistics. This news fatigue is the most uncomfortable truth about European migration because it demonstrates that we have become subdued, numb even, to the loss of human life.
Although Russia and Turkey have managed to establish a demilitarised zone around the last rebel stronghold of Idlib, Bashar al Asaad’s full-scaled attack on the region is imminent, particularly as most of the region is now under al-Nusra. While an assault on Idlib could well represent the end of the war, it certainly won’t represent the end of Syrian people’s agony, as rebel groups continue to fragment and the threat of ISIS and their exploitation of the political instability in the region by filling the political vacuum with Salafi jihadism is an ever growing one. More recently, flooding threatens to destroy refugee camps in Idlib, rendering thousands of people homeless.
In the case of Syria, the daily realities of life in a war zone do not seem to matter. Better yet, says the British mainstream media, to wait for the government to propose a bloodbath campaign in the last rebel-stronghold of Idlib, before we decide to write about it in detail. After all, that ought to make for an interesting read.
One of the keys to solution
building is to restore our empathy, but without a
photograph, a background story, without a name even, quite often we end up
doing nothing at all. In the current epidemic of news fatigue, we are desensitised
to the plight of almost an entire country made homeless and the sheer brutality
they have escaped from. There has to be
some other kind of global response, lest we simply sleep through the enormous
devastation caused in Syria. Personal stories are doubtlessly the best way to
restore our empathy, to strike an emotional chord and connect reader to
storyteller, as we imagine the hundreds of thousands other Aylan Kurdis who do
not make front page news. From these brutal and heart wrenching imaginings of
life as a refugee, we will push for laws and institutions with a foregrounding
in moral reasoning and an European consciousness which stops using ‘European
migration’ as a blanket term to hide their concerns with race, religion and
terrorism, but an European consciousness which considers the loss of human life
to be the biggest loss of all.
Antonia x
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