The death of Alan Kurdi, the little Syrian boy whose corpse was photographed on a Turkish beach earlier this week, brings to mind Edmund Burke’s troubling observation that evil comes into the world when good men do nothing. Three-year-old Alan drowned, along with his mother, Rehenna, and his 5-year-old brother Ghalib, off the coast of Turkey during the family’s last-ditch effort to enter “fortress Europe.”
On Tuesday, even though neither the mother nor children could swim, the family boarded a 16-foot inflatable dinghy which smugglers launched from Turkey’s Aegean coast, hoping it would take them to the Greek island of Kos. When the vessel capsized Alan’s father desperately tried to save them but was barely able to survive himself. Shortly afterwards, as photographs of Alan’s tiny body lying face down on the sand (or being carried by a Turkish policeman) caused disbelief and outrage around the world, his aunt Tima, a hairdresser in British Columbia, Canada, appealed for greater compassion towards the thousands of other families fleeing from Syria in similar circumstances. Six months ago, Ms Kurdi sought refuge for her brother and his family – through a direct written appeal to the minister responsible for immigration. But nothing was done.
The family’s efforts to avoid the war – frantically moving between Damascus, Aleppo and Kobani – offer a glimpse of the terrible uncertainty produced by Syria’s unravelling. And yet, although the horrors of the war are well-known in many other countries – and have been for several years – there has never been a shortage of plausible explanations as to why humanitarian intervention, or the fast-tracking of refugee applications are not practical solutions. Western politicians continue to offer these prevarications with straight faces even though their half-baked military strategy has yet to produce anything that would be more significant, or useful.
Canada is embarrassed by its government failure to help the Kurdi family, but Europe’s recent record with refugee claimants is far from distinguished. While economic and immigration problems may take centre stage when Greece threatens to leave the Union, or a sufficient number of migrants wash up on tourist beaches, or suffocate in airless vans, Europe has not met either crisis with the sympathy and foresight that could have averted the present, potentially catastrophic state of affairs. Instead, pusillanimous bureaucrats have patched together one ad-hoc solution after another, hoping that the problem might sort itself out elsewhere. Now, as it faces up to policy decisions which ought to have been made years ago, the EU must deal with at least 300,000 new migrants, in addition to the many thousands of others who remain within its administrative limbo, or waiting anxiously in the Middle East or North Africa, desperately hoping that they might succeed where so many others have failed.
We live in a bureaucratic age, one in which the people who govern our societies are increasingly remote from the circumstances that force people like the Kurdis to seek foreign sanctuaries even at the risk of life and limb. CS Lewis once wrote that the greatest evil of our times isn’t perpetrated by traditional criminals or even in labour or concentration camps, it is “conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men in white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.” There could hardly be a better description of the officials who have deliberately ignored mounting crises in Libya, Eritrea and Syria in order to spare their own countries the complications of mass migration.
Living in a region made up almost entirely of migrants, West Indians will recall that a few decades ago the Middle Eastern migrants – often referred to as “Syrians” even though most were Lebanese – moved to this part of the world. Many arrived penniless, unfamiliar with the society, barely able to speak the language. Today their track record of successful businesses (especially in Trinidad and Jamaica), and their involvement with and assimilation into the wider society is so complete that names like Matalon, Sabga, Aboud and Elias are as authentically local as any others. So while it is true that Alan Kurdi ought to have been starting school in Canada instead of risking his life in a dinghy off the coast of Turkey, there are also no good reasons why he and his family couldn’t have been travelling here instead, towards a better life in the Caribbean.
