Opinion

Europe has a moral responsibility towards refugees

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

Refugees at Calais
Refugees at Calais Refugees at Calais

As UK citizens, it is surely our civic duty to advise our government in London on how to deal with the swarm of migrants which, according to David Cameron, is swarming around Calais in a disturbingly swarmy sort of way.

So what should we advise on those seeking to access England's green and pleasant land in which, John Major once claimed, old maids cycle to holy communion through the morning mist?

Should we place machine guns on Dover's cliffs, flood the Channel Tunnel, bomb Calais or even invade France? Certainly we need something more radical than the namby-pamby suggestion from TV presenter, our own Eamonn Holmes, for electric fences, riot police and water cannon.

So while the plucky British build coastal defences (probably using piles of the Daily Mail) perhaps we can add our insight, by explaining the origins of the problem and its associated humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean.

For six centuries Europeans stole from Africa (and Asia and America). It began with the Portuguese stealing gold and soon progressed to three centuries of others, mainly the British, stealing people for slavery.

The money amassed from Britain's slave trade was multiplied by compensating slave owners when slavery was abolished. Among those who benefited from compensation (equivalent to millions of pounds today) was David Cameron's ancestors.

Mr Cameron has declined to comment. (He is presumably in a bunker, planning his latest anti-swarming tactics. That's the great thing about white people - they never swarm, except maybe for some of the lower class Irish when they went to America.)

The compensation of 46,000 British slave owners was the largest bailout in history, until the banks' bailout in 2009. (Speaking of banks, Barclays, Barings and HSBC were established on money from slavery.)

Britain's industrial revolution was based in part on the slave trade. Colonies represented new sources of raw materials and created new markets. Exploitation was often disguised as exploration, a process whereby white people "discovered" what black people had known for hundreds of years.

In what became known as the Scramble for Africa, European powers agreed in 1885 to carve-up Africa. By1900, they controlled 90 per cent of the continent. In some cases, political control was granted to private companies. The British South Africa Company, for example, governed Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe until 1923.

Colonisation was brutal, resulting in the dislocation of families and communities through the forced movement of people. Now Britain is forcibly preventing the movement of their descendants.

In Upper Congo in 1904 Roger Casement found "Communities which I had formerly known as large and flourishing centres of population" entirely gone. He found examples of mutilation, torture, malnutrition, poverty and death, carried out by the Belgian authorities. (That was the same brave little Belgium, which so many Irish died fighting for in World War I.)

Part of the colonisation process involved bringing Christianity to Africa. Although many individual missionaries achieved significant good, was it ethical or even Christian to use colonialism as a vehicle for religious conversion?

England's Catholic Bishop for Migrants, Cork man Patrick Lynch, correctly pointed out this week that the causes of this mass migration are complex. He did not identify colonialism as one of them.

His closest reference was the "failure of some states to function." Their failure as states derives from colonial powers having drawn state borders which ignored issues such as language, political structures, cultural affinities or ethnic identity.

It also comes from Europeans usually ensuring that those who inherited power in post-colonial Africa allowed the continued foreign exploitation of natural resources, such as oil, copper and diamonds.

In addition, the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, the bedrock of farming here, allows Europe to dump subsidised food on Third World markets. This prevents these countries from investing in their own agricultural sectors. But who here is prepared to argue against the CAP, to allow the migrants to develop agriculture in their own countries?

Today thousands of Africans risk their lives to reach Europe, while some westerners pay $50,000 to go to Africa to shoot a lion. Calais is a product of global inequality.

Europe has significantly contributed to the problems in Africa and Western Asia. It has a moral responsibility, which goes beyond rescuing the pitiable occupants of flimsy Mediterranean boats.

Barbed wire and riot police have been used against these people's ancestors for generations. Proposing to do the same now is not an answer. It is time for the western powers to recognise that in causing much of Africa's problems, it now has a responsibility to help address them. History shows that they are unlikely to do so.

More barbed wire, anyone?