THE New York Times recently carried an article on a man who died unsung. He led a common life, did nothing special and left no mark behind him. Just passing through his three score and twenty and being special only because he wasn’t.
Far too often you are not given the choice to make that impression in the snow and are carried away by the arbitrary drifts from fate. Take the 40 sub-Saharan African refugees who were washed ashore at Tripoli on Sunday, as they tried to escape from their country to anywhere that would take them and make their children safe.
Another 30 are missing, not that anybody is or can keep count of the flotsam and jetsam of human misery that simply through repetition becomes a blur of a headline and moves us so inadequately. It is only numbers and guesswork to their nationality. They are real men, women and children and, for some misbegotten reason, the plight of Africa passes us by without realisation that civil war in many of its entities rages on without stoppage.
Against this backdrop what price the chances of the thousands of refugees (you cannot call them migrants)trekking their way to Europe and facing a barbed wire embargo in Hungary,a possible police blockade on the Turkish-Greek border and a great deal of hot air as the 28-member EU Council fails to come on to the same page.
The talks on Monday in Brussels between Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia were held with two non-members, Macedonia and Serbia invited because they were in the path of the 670,000 refugees who have tramped across a continent and the 250,000 still in merciless transit.
The draft plan is prickly at best because it calls for the Balkan states that come first not to allow the stream of humanity to flow past it into Germany and the Scandinavian bloc without prior permission. Ergo, leave them stranded in the east zone and between a rock and a hard place. If one keeps in mind that the harsh European winter is knocking on the door the EU risks freezing out thousands in the most literal fashion.
Rather like a bizarre game of bagatelle, this human ball is deflected arbitrarily like the 11,500 Syrians who crossed into Croatia after discovering they could not pass through to Hungary or cut into the wire barrier.
At the same time there is a growing uncertainty in the local populace in many EU nations and the anti-immigration platform has also become a viable political issue. Opposition members voice their resistance to the traffic but do not offer anything concrete about handling the humanitarian issue.
With another 4 million more asylum seekers likely Europe does face a major problem. And unless the escalating difference of opinion between Russia and the US the flow from Syria could turn into a torrent.
