The distressing photograph of the body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on a beach in Turkey has raised a very difficult question for European nations: Can compassion and humanitarian ideals dictate national policyIJ
The question may appear heartless in view of scenes of desperate migrants trying somehow or the other to enter a European country, most preferably Germany. It may even remind people of the tale of SS Exodus, a ship carrying 4,515 Jewish refugees from war-ravaged Europe — even concentration camp survivors — to Palestine in the summer of 1947. Despite global outrage, the ship was prevented from docking by the British authorities and sent back to France. The photograph of a mother and child being dragged off the railway track in Hungary may also raise interesting questions of what could have happened had India decided to somehow prevent refugees, fleeing Pakistan Army persecution, from entering West Bengal, Assam and Tripura in 1971. At the height of the crisis that finally broke Pakistan, some 10 million refugees had crossed over into India.
Compared to that humanitarian crisis or even the 1.6 million UN registered Afghan refugees in Pakistan, the latest refugee crisis has only just begun to be viewed with concern internationally, and that too after the problem began to be physically manifested in Europe. Indeed, the West must take a fair share of the blame for triggering the civil war in Syria. Overcome by its visceral hatred of President Assad — particularly his imperious swagger —the Western democracies bankrolled the opposition to the Baathist regime, quite unmindful that a bigger transnational threat was looming.
It is still too soon to locate the fledgling Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the larger history of the “political Islam” that was initiated by two near-simultaneous convulsions: the Iranian Revolution headed by Ayatollah Khomeini and the US and Pakistan-backed Afghan opposition to the Soviet Union's invasion in 1980. The unsettling of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq following the US invasion added another dimension to the problem and gave rise to a phenomenon that can, at best, be called the Islamist version of the Khmer Rouge. Today, the ISIS has acquired international notoriety for its televised beheading of prisoners and its determined destruction of all traces of pre-Islamic civilisation in the places under its control. The destruction of Palmyra must certainly count as among the worst examples of modern-day vandalism, comparable to the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Curiously, this spectacular show of barbarism and philistinism has made it an attractive cause for deracinated Muslim youth from immigrant families in the West.
As of now some 4.5 million people affected by the civil war in Iraq and Syria have voted with their feet and become refugees. Most are languishing in refugee camps in Turkey (1.7 million), lebanon (1.2 million), Jordan (0.7 million), Iraq (0.2 million) and Egypt (0.1 million) but a small minority have become desperate and taken their chances with human smugglers in the hope of reaching Europe and securing at least a temporary right to stay on humanitarian grounds.
On paper — judging by UNHCR statistics — only six per cent of those who fled Syria in fear of ISIS have applied for asylum in a European country. This may seem insignificant but the numbers are regionally skewed. Nearly 100,000 of the Syrian asylum seekers want to stay in Germany, followed by some 65,000 who prefer Sweden and 50,000 who are content with Serbia (and Kosovo).
But this doesn't tell the whole story. There is a parallel crisis in North Africa that has led to many tens of thousands of libyans trying to enter Italy and Greece illegally. An organised racket has also brought loads of Afghans, Pakistanis and citizens of scattered African countries trying to enter Britain through the Channel Tunnel. For the entire European Union the situation is becoming quite unmanageable. The first casualty will, of course, be the principle of seamless borders inside continental Europe but it won't end at that.
Sooner rather than later Western Europe will be confronted with precisely the same options that India faced in 1971. First, it can either hope for an internal settlement in the affected region that will allow refugees to return home. Alternatively, it can force the pace of change — as India did in 1971 — and install a regime that is able to both confront ISIS and bring in order and stability.
At present both these options seem unworkable — a reason why the EU has been paralysed into inaction. The domestic resistance to ISIS by the Assad Government has been very feeble and there is no Western inclination to shore up the Baathist regime either militarily or politically. Moreover, there are huge domestic misgivings inside the EU over a military intervention in Syria-Iraq. This is hardly surprising considering that earlier interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq by the US-led forces only served to make things even more complicated. In any case, it is evident that a large section of asylum seekers to Europe, particularly Kurds, want to get the hell out of the region and don't see any prospects of normalcy under any Islamic government.
What has further complicated matters in Europe is the fact that the existing indulgence shown towards political asylum seekers is fast losing popular support and even eroding faith in the EU. While there has been an outpouring of sympathy for the asylum seekers and a human appreciation of their desperation, it is offset by a fear that the presence of a large body of cultural aliens will create domestic tensions and even propel a wave of anti-immigrant xenophobia.
For the past two years, the EU had worked itself into a frenzy over a possible threat posed by President Vladimir Putin of Russia. That replay of old Cold War rhetoric now seems laughable in the context of a new threat posed by events over which Europe has no control. Nor does it have the willpower or capacity to shape events in the old Mesopotamia. For Islamist, radicals out to reshape the world, the confusion in Europe provides a big window of opportunity. India has reason to be concerned.