The terrible fate of the passengers of the Aquarius is a scandal that it will take the European countries – and through them, a European Union reduced to the state of powerless hostage – a long time to get over (see EUROPE 12038). When this French vessel was banned from port, another European ideal sank to the seabed, leaving some 500 million European citizens shipwrecked from a project that was scuppered by the very people who, in the capitals of the member states, were supposed to be in charge of it.
Jean Daniel, heavyweight journalist and legendary editor of the Nouvel Observateur during its glory days, is now dipping his pen into the ink of bitterness: “in the early 21st century, the spectre of the 20th century is coming back out of the closet. They are admittedly not goose-stepping this time. But they are in government” (http://www.nouvelobs.com , 7 June; our translation). He’s quite right, and Matteo Salvini is currently confirming that Bertolt Brecht was right to warn, in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, that “the womb [Hitler] crawled from is still going strong”...
At the moment, all across Europe, democratic wombs in the form of ballot boxes are giving birth to extremist and nationalistic sorcerers’ apprentices who are rebuilding national walls upon the foundations of European hopes that have been left fallow for too long by ‘senior’ politicians who will not allow the EU one day to take from them their power and all of the advantages that go with it. It should not come as a surprise that the Italian minister for home affairs is now using to his advantage the inconsistency that has resulted from this for too long.
The brutality of Matteo Salvini’s decision to prohibit Italian ports from allowing the Aquarius is repellent, but at the same time, it went down well with many Italians, who now finally feel that there is somebody stepping up to the plate to challenge the errors of Europe’s ways over migration. The Lega is already benefiting from this in elections and in opinion polls. Political realism should therefore prompt these ‘senior’ European politicians to understand why a nation that, not long ago, was the most pro-European out of the whole EU can accommodate the excesses of a far-right sorcerer’s apprentice.
Let us not make a pact with the devil: Matteo Salvini is a perverse politician who conducted the ‘closed ports’ operation with breathtaking cynicism. There is every evidence that on his orders, the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre in Rome made the Aquarius an instrument of scandalous political manipulation by ensuring that the people who had been fished out of the water by a commercial vessel and, worse still, by three Italian coastguard ships, would be transferred in the French vessel, which would soon be refused permission to berth. For political and ideological reasons, the Italian minister has shown that he is prepared to put human lives at risk to make a point. This is disgraceful and unacceptable.
Even so, this sinister individual had no trouble showing the world, and his European ‘partners’ first and foremost, that he will stop at nothing to prevent Italy from becoming the “refugee camp of Europe”. Some Italians are grateful to him for this, because the intolerable selfishness that the other leaders of the other member states of the EU have shown in the context of this unprecedented migration crisis was equally intolerable to them, and rightly so.
The humanitarian gesture made by the new Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has finally saved Spain’s honour. But apart from the fact that it does not resolve the problem, as the 700 nautical miles between the Aquarius and Valencia will be unreasonably taxing for the 629 people who have been welcomed on board, it also dramatically amplifies the deafening silence from all the others. Even though Corsica would have been much closer, Emmanuel Macron’s France remains obstinately silent and does not appear to have any attention of allowing a... French ship into a French port!
So let us not reserve our opprobrium for Matteo Salvini alone: all of those holding their peace today, all of those who opposed the principle of a fair distribution of the burden of refugees, all of those who do not wish to reinforce the Dublin regulation, all of those, too, who are encouraging article 3 of the European Human Rights Convention to be treated as optional and, finally, all of those who are dreaming of creating camps outside the EU for all the people who have been expelled from it have to bear their share of the blame, their share of the disgrace.
This will be set in stone at the highest level on 28 and 29 June if the members of the European Council bow to the unacceptable. George Soros recently dared to say that “the disintegration of Europe is no longer a figure of speech: it is a harsh reality” (The Guardian, 5 June). Unfortunately, the financier turned philanthropist is unquestionably speaking the truth, as the Commission, the European Parliament and the genuine bodies that are really and truly European are not capable of stopping the national capitals from sinking more ideals to the bottom of the sea.
Jean Daniel says that what hurts the most is that “this is the twilight of Europe, in other words one of the most magnificent constructions of man since man succeeded in building associations of peoples and, more specifically, civilisations” (our translation). This legend of journalism is right; what we should fear today is the “repudiation of Europe”, betrayed by irresponsible national political figures!
Michel Theys