Who Are The Real Human Traffickers?
By Finian Cunningham January 04, 2015 "ICH" - "Press TV"- This week saw yet another ship-load of refugees marooned on the Mediterranean high seas trying to make their way to "fortress Europe".
Some 360 people, including pregnant women and children, nearly lost their lives as the cargo ship they were onboard made its perilous way towards the southern Italian rocky coast. The crew had reportedly jumped ship, leaving the "ghost vessel" to its fate.
The Western media were quick to condemn "heartless" human traffickers who abandoned those onboard to a possible watery grave. As it turned out, the freighter-turned-refugee ship was salvaged by the Italian coastguard and all lives were saved.
It was the third such incident in the past two weeks. On December 21 another drifting ship packed with some 400 refugees had to be dramatically rescued at sea and steered to safe mooring in the Sicilian port of Augusta. Again, as in the incident this week, human traffickers had abandoned the ship and left those onboard at the mercy of the seas.
Of course, criminal gangs that prey on refugees are the immediate culprits. It is estimated that unscrupulous traffickers can buy a decrepit cargo ship for a few hundred thousand dollars, pack it with hundreds of desperate refugees and make off with millions of dollars in extortionate passage fees. Nice profit for very dirty work.
Many of the would-be refugees never make it to mainland Europe. Over the past year, some 3,000 people have perished in the Mediterranean onboard rickety vessels that were far from seaworthy. The Italian coastguard has plucked 160,000 people from the sea in the last year alone – a figure that has escalated on previous years and underlines the crisis of immigrants trying to reach Europe.
But who, ultimately, is to blame for this crisis? Why have numbers of desperate refugees willing to risk their lives trying to reach Europe suddenly exploded?
Refugees coming from North Africa to Europe across the Mediterranean is not a new phenomenon. But what is significant about the latest surge in numbers is that most of the refugees are from Syria and Iraq, according to the United Nations and other monitoring groups.
Of the 360 onboard the ship rescued this week off Italy's Calabrian coast most were from Syria. The same goes for the other two vessels salvaged in the past fortnight.
The crisis of immigrants trying – and dying – to reach Europe is thus a direct consequence of the conflicts raging in Syria and Iraq. Millions of people are fleeing from violence in those two countries. Their homes destroyed, their families butchered, their livelihoods decimated, who can blame those people for trying to seek refuge?
But who should we blame, ultimately, for this appalling humanitarian situation? ISIS terrorists, human traffickers? Well, to a degree, yes. But the real culpability lies squarely with the European governments who in league with Washington have covertly launched a criminal regime-change war in Syria since March 2011.
Britain and France, in particular, are the two European powers that have, along with their American ally, fomented and fuelled the conflict in Syria to overthrow the government of President Bashar al Assad. Over the past four years that country has been turned into a charnel house by these Western governments supporting a network of international mercenaries for the illegal objective of regime change.
Now these same Western powers have launched air strikes on Syria and Iraq – with the stated purpose of "wiping out" the so-called Islamic State mercenaries that they unleashed in the first place.
The humanitarian consequences should be obvious – except to the Western media, who try to disinform on the iniquitous cause-and-effect. Millions of Syrians and Iraqis are fleeing from the mayhem that Western powers have engendered, as they desperately seek relative safety in Europe, crossing hell and high water if that's what it takes.
The humanitarian disaster unfolding in the Mediterranean is the tragic blowback of covert state-sponsored terrorism by the US, Britain and France in the Middle East. That's the bottom line no matter how the Western media try to dissimulate it.
To the burgeoning numbers risking their lives attempting to cross the Mediterranean are nationals from Libya, Palestine, and the African countries of Mali, Niger, and the Central African Republic – all countries where US-led NATO powers have directly fuelled violence.
So, let's not be distracted by Western media hype about anonymous "heartless human traffickers" abandoning "ghost ships" of refugees on the rocks of European coastlines.
The real heartless human traffickers are the governments responsible for creating the flood of refugees from the Middle East and Africa in the first place.
This is a crisis made in Washington, London and Paris.
Ironically, and sickeningly, it is the British and French governments who are the most strident in the European Union wanting to take a tough line on refusing entry of refugees into Europe. The Italian government to its credit last year ran an emergency naval rescue program, Mare Nostra, "Our Seas", that saved the lives of many. That program had to be jettisoned at the end of last year because of a monthly cost of EURO 10 million to Rome.
Britain and France refused to contribute financial support and the Italian rescue response had to be terminated. The London government said the Italian naval operation was acting as a "pull factor" in encouraging would-be refugees to take to boats.
More pertinent is not "pull factors" but instead to understand the "push factors" for the flow of refugees. The biggest push factor in Europe for the immigration crisis is the British and French governments sowing deadly conflict in the Middle East and Africa that forces refugees out of their countries.
The real human traffickers are not anonymous low-level scumbag criminal gangs. The really big scumbag ones sit in plush government offices in London and Paris.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, he is now located in East Africa working as a freelance columnist for Press TV and Strategic Culture Foundation (Moscow).
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