Kathy Sheridan: Days of searing images and a biblical flow of humanity

It was a week when all the worries and squabbles of normal western life faded to puny.

A week mercilessly punctuated by searing images of what happens when a desperate, biblical flow of humanity fleeing torture, violation, despair and death, tackles fierce seas in dinghies and rotting vessels, negotiates vast tracts of hostile terrain, crawls through fences of barbed wire designed to pierce their bodies and finally finds the security of the European Union.

Tricked in Budapest into boarding a train they believed to be bound for Austria or Germany, they saw it stop in the town of Bicske, where they were herded towards an overcrowded camp.

Footage from the distressing, chaotic scenes included a distraught man pulling his wife and tiny infant on to the tracks rather than go to the camp. He was led away in handcuffs.

All this is has been taking place on the wealthiest continent on Earth.

All filmed and reported by state-of-the-art, 24-hour news media – until Hungarian police forced reporters from the scene, in a country whose government spokesman described the 71 refugees found suffocated to death in a meat truck, as “migrants [who] had brought this tragedy on themselves”.

Europe is feeling frightened and overwhelmed. People wonder what Syria’s neighbours are doing to help.

The answer is that a question mark hangs over the contribution of the rich Gulf states but that Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey are hosting an astounding four million Syrian refugees.

Conditions in many camps have become unbearable.

These are the people “whom geography condemns to war”, in the words of the poet James Fenton.

Or as a Guardian editorial put it yesterday, “the fearful dispossessed are rattling at Europe’s gates”.

For a long time, it was left to Italy and poor, struggling Greece to handle the flow of humanity into Europe.

Sure someone would sort it out, we assumed. Should we have done more than assume? Perhaps. But are we not entitled to assume that among the many highly-paid cadres of the EU, there are whole bureaux of bright, driven, principled people and crack security chiefs combining their talents to anticipate and prepare for such occurrences?

Yet among this week’s many jaw-dropping news items was Sunday’s announcement that EU interior and justice ministers were to meet in a fortnight – in a fortnight – to deal with what German, French and British ministers called “the challenge of the migrant influx”.

Increasingly desperate

This is the scandal. This is not a sudden humanitarian crisis that has been foisted on Europe.

First, there were the rescue vessels on the Mediterranean, withdrawn then only reinstated when the mass drownings became unignorable.

Then there was Calais – “the Jungle” – providing the terrifying nightly images of people becoming increasingly and openly desperate, counterpointed by miles of traffic tailbacks on the British side of the channel tunnel.

Then, inevitably, the sudden shift to a new route, placing Hungary at the sharp edge of EU’s conscience and containment policy.

More than 156,000 new arrivals had crossed its borders by Wednesday.

At a time when language and nuance are critical, when politics as the art of compromise was never more necessary, a group of EU ministers package the worst humanitarian crisis since the second World War as a “migrant influx”.

Is there a charitable adjective for the person who drafted that press release?

The needs of refugees fleeing armed conflict or persecution, are immediate and irrefutable.

Language matters

German chancellor Angela Merkel recognised this by agreeing to accept 800,000 Syrians into Germany.

Migrants, the embodiment of human history, are also deserving of dignity and respect, but even the most humane observers concede that Europe cannot accept an unlimited, unregulated flow of people seeking a better life.

The terms are not interchangeable. Language matters when people are fleeing from a war zone.

Blurred lines pave the way for tweets like this from the account of Peter Bucklitsch, a former Ukip candidate, in relation to Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old whose body was found on a Turkish beach this week.

“The little Syrian boy was well clothed and well fed. He died because his parents were greedy for the good life in Europe. Queue-jumping costs.”

Bucklitsch is not unique. An extraordinary image circulating yesterday evening of Syrians walking from Budapest to Austria attracted the comment: “Trekking for welfare, the new global initiative”.

No one claims there are simple solutions. Some hark back to possible causes – to the crimes of colonialism, to the cynical execution of the Iraq war, to the exploitation of religious differences in the Middle East.

They would be right to one degree or another. But at the immediate heart of this calamity are the Assad regime and Islamic State, the swaggering, murderous, twisted rapists and barbarians who have reduced 10 million of their own people to this terrible fate and seem to be able to continue with impunity.

This is the truly incomprehensible part of the story for many, that in the modern age a relatively small number can wreak such horror on so many, triggering seismic shifts in populations along with death and destruction.

Is this one of those times when the civilised world unites at last under the United Nations banner of a just war and puts a million boots on the ground and on the perpetrators’s throats?

Compassion

If there is a bright thread through the European response, it lies mainly with the ordinary people such as the Hungarians who – unlike their government – offer compassion to refugees trapped in Budapest; and those Austrians and French people who have done likewise.

Ordinary British people have also begun to mobilise, challenging the strident language of some media. In Ireland, many talked about offering homes and support of a very practical kind.

Last weekend, there was the inspiring spectacle of the German football fans who flew enormous banners declaring “Refugees welcome” at home matches and the volunteers taking clothes, nappies and toys to arriving refugees along with language lessons and babysitting.

This is not without a price for Germany. By last weekend, 336 assaults had been recorded on German refugee shelters in 2015, 100 more than in the whole of 2014.

Merkel has proved her mettle. It’s time for other European and world leaders to prove theirs.