Illegal Aliens: Crocodile Tears, Then Indifference

By Pierre Haski
Rue89

Monday 04 June 2007

The body of a migrant floating of the coast of the Canaries on January 18th. (Photo: Juan Medina/Reuters)

About twenty corpses of Africans were fished out of the Mediterranean Sea by a French ship that returned to Toulon on Sunday with its grisly discovery. Statements full of emotion. And then ... nothing.

In several days, the world's richest countries will meet in Germany for the annual G-8 Summit. All they have to do is look a little farther south to find a subject that is worthy of more than one conversation among the Masters of the World.

The fate of those Africans who - by the Atlantic or the Mediterranean - attempt by any means to arrive at Europe's shores and disappear in their thousands every year from on board their fortuitous craft, is among subjects that pop up on the television news when there are strong pictures like the one of the men hanging from fishing nets found not far from Malta last week. But the rest of the time, these dramas plunge back into the black hole of news indifference.

There are two dimensions to the problem. The first touches on what is taking place in the Mediterranean. The 27 men on the Maltese fishing net had the luck to be fished out by an Italian ship. The 18 other Africans brought in Sunday by the frigate La Motte Picquet weren't so lucky: their decomposing corpses were discovered by French sailors about 200 nautical miles south of Malta.

Was it unavoidable? Sunday, the European Commission addressed a warning to the Maltese authorities, asking them to promise never to abandon illegal immigrants that they find at sea. "The obligation to save lives at sea proceeds from an international tradition that no other country has ever violated so obviously," declared Franco Frattini, European Commissioner in charge of immigration issues in the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica. The human rights commissioner for the Council of Europe made the same reproach when he addressed a warning to European countries, pointing a finger specifically at Malta.

But the other aspect of the problem touches the reality that pushes these men to flee their continent and risk their skins to seek a better life in Europe. One need only cast a glance at the thematic maps of the world we published this weekend [see below] to understand the degree to which Africa has been the big loser in the economic transformation of the last twenty years.

And unless we help the black continent to recover hope, we will continue to fish African cadavers out of the water and to shed crocodile tears over them. It's easier to talk than to do, obviously, but given the present international cynicism (the Paul Wolfowitz episode at the World Bank, for example), the worst is, alas, often certain