The deaths of 71 people suffocated in a truck on an Austrian motorway last week were not, apparently, enough to awaken Europe to the urgency of the plight of those fleeing conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. The mass drowning of boatloads of people in the Mediterranean, sometimes in their hundreds, had similarly failed to elicit more than a fleeting emotional response from most of the European public. But the image of a little boy lying dead on a beach in Turkey this week has at last, it seems, shocked our continent into taking responsibility for what Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel has correctly described as the most serious crisis to face Europe since the end of the second World War.
Three year-old Aylan Kurdi drowned, along with his five year-old brother Galip and their mother Rehan, when the rubber dinghy that was meant to carry them from southwestern Turkey to the Greek island of Kos capsized a few miles off the Turkish coast. Aylan's father Abdullah, a barber from Damascus, had fled Syria with his family in June, hoping to settle in Canada, where his sister lives. "I don't want anything else from this world," Mr Kurdi said on Thursday. "Everything I was dreaming of is gone. I want to bury my children and sit beside them until I die."
It was Aylan's ordinariness, a toddler like any other, that made his death so eloquent, cutting through the bewildering scale of the migrant crisis and the bureaucratic language of quotas, pull factors and burden-sharing to illuminate the individual human grief at its heart. David Cameron, who last month described the migrants entering Europe as "a swarm", said that he had been moved "as a father" by Aylan's death. Yesterday, in a policy reversal, he said Britain would accept "thousands more" Syrian refugees.
A robust response
Minister for Justice
Frances Fitzgerald
signalled a similar policy adjustment here yesterday, announcing that the State would accept at least 1,800 refugees, three times the current commitment. The move is welcome and it almost certainly chimes with the strong public appetite for a more generous approach. These numbers recede into insignificance, however, in the face of the magnitude of the crisis.
Antonio Guterres
, the
United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees, said yesterday that Europe must accept 200,000 refugees as part of a “common strategy”.
This is twice the number European Council President Donald Tusk has proposed for the EU and five times the number originally suggested by the European Commission. But 200,000 represents only a fraction of those on the move from the Middle East and Africa. Germany expects to receive 800,000 asylum applications this year and much poorer countries, such as Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, have already accepted millions – two million in Turkey alone.
The EU must agree a robust, common approach to this crisis so that member-states share responsibility for accepting and resettling refugees under a fair and transparent system. The Dublin Convention, which says that asylum seekers must be registered at their first point of entry into the EU, is no longer fit for purpose – if indeed it ever was. More resources and organisation will be required but so too will a sense of common purpose that has often been lacking in the EU in recent years.
More broadly, the international community must act urgently to seek a diplomatic resolution to the conflict in Syria. A negotiated settlement with the murderous Bashar al-Assad would involve unpalatable compromises but achieving peace must be the priority. The nuclear agreement between Iran and the western powers ought to improve the chances of such an initiative, which remains the best hope for ending the bloodbath which has driven millions of desperate people into Europe.
A generous spirit
For a small country such as ours, which is already struggling with a housing shortage, accepting more migrants will require a commitment of scarce public resources, probably for a number of years. Irish people, perhaps on account of our long, often traumatic history of migration, have in the past received refugees with generosity and compassion, notably those from former Yugoslavia during the 1990s and from
Vietnam
in the 1970s. This spirit of generosity, solidarity and human kindness will be essential if we are to meet our responsibilities and voluntary action by citizens has shown itself elsewhere in Europe to be crucial in encouraging governments to adopt a more generous approach.
Dr Merkel has been rightly praised for showing leadership in recent weeks but she was prodded by an outpouring of compassion by German citizens, manifested in countless practical acts of solidarity, such as delivering food parcels and clothing to migrants and offering free language tuition. When Iceland said last month it would accept just 50 refugees from Syria, 10,000 citizens signed a petition within 24 hours offering to accept migrants in their own homes. Such initiatives here would be the best memorial to Aylan.