Mediaboss Marketing

Hand-wringing about the plight of migrants crossing the Channel and Mediterranean by boat -and angry words about their treatment - will only go so far. What would liberal progressives actually like to see done?

Much of the world is on fire: Syria remains in the throes of a years-long civil war, Ethiopia is close to embarking on one, just months after its prime minister was awarded a Nobel prize, Afghanistan faces a new Taliban era, and famine, persecution and civil strife force millions of people across the globe to seek sanctuary elsewhere.

Many of those people entirely understandably look to the relative peace and stability of Europe and the UK for refuge. And despite the huge obstacles in their way the safe routes here have all been blocked are prepared to make the dangerous journey to our shores.

In both the UK and Europe, a fixation with the daily arrival of boats, across the Channel and the Med, excites the anger of many and the compassion of others. Neither response seems to be proving particularly helpful in finding a solution.

The reaction of many European countries has been to turn to populists and to try to further close their borders. That is the response of home secretary Priti Patel and the Conservative government of which she is part, too.

Despite us being on the western fringe of the European continent and getting just a trickle of asylum seekers relative to other countries, our government has been keen to use some of the worlds most vulnerable as an easy source of political credit, vowing to make it even harder to seek respite in the UK, despite asylum being a fundamental right recognised in international law.

Patel might be offering nothing in the way of insight or in compassion but all too often the liberal response to the issue of refugees is no better, warmer words aside.

It is easy to say we dont want asylum seekers drowning off our shores, or living in squalid and unsafe conditions in detention centres, and certainly that people should not be shipped to Australian-style prison islands.

But when it comes to saying what we actually want to happen, those of us of a socially democratic persuasion often have less to say and thats because the issue itself is often quite a difficult one. What is it we actually think we should do for the worlds refugees?

One thing we should stop doing is pretending that every refugee crisis in the world is the direct fault of the UK it is neither a true argument nor a politically winning one.

The UK clearly holds some responsibility for the rise of ISIS across Iraq and Syria, and should recognise that. Similarly, we have a broader colonial legacy that has done a lot of harm across much of the world. But equating that with the UK being the cause of the worlds miseries itself removes the agency from the people of the affected countries: when Bashar al-Assad murders his own civilians, he is the person who should be held accountable for that. We should not act as if those of us in liberal democracies are the only people on the planet with agency.

Leaving that point aside, we are left to the practicalities: in a world where millions of people are displaced by persecution, war, natural disasters or famines, what do we do? One step is to make sure we join up our thinking on different border crossings the UK does not exist in isolation versus the rest of the world.

Countries on the eastern and southern borders of the EU have closed many of the relatively safe (land-based) border crossings used by those who would seek asylum. The result is desperate people trying to cross the Mediterranean landing them in the same countries battling to keep them out.

Part of those border countries antagonism to refugees is the unwillingness of the EU to fully commit to fairly sharing the burden of hosting refugees. In theory. people accepted as legitimate asylum seekers should be distributed across EU nations, and there is financial support available to arrival countries from those further away.

In practice, such measures always come a day late and a dollar short, meaning that anti-asylum politicians all too often are propelled to political power in the affected countries. The result is a vicious cycle: the inflow of refugees becomes visible because people have to highlight the death and danger it involves.That keeps the issue high up the news agenda, which leads to calls for political action, and so on and so forth. Even if the current tactics cut the number of asylum seekers by 80%, their increased visibility produces a toxic political mix.

This Mediterranean crisis fuels, in turn, the crossings of the Channel with few options in Europe and hostile political environments in so many countries, the UK becomes an incredibly attractive option for those with the resources to reach it, not least because many more people speak English than other European languages, and want that head start towards integration.

As we, like the EU, have closed off most safe and legitimate routes to claiming asylum, boats become the option of last resort. And once again, the harsh approach fails on its own terms keeping the crossings in the headlines, with all the divisiveness that entails, while helping almost no-one.

The current approach fails on its own terms. Going harsher would do the same it would simply incentivise media coverage of the issue, both from right wing papers highlighting that even these new draconian measures got missed and people slipped through, and from activists trying to expose what would, from experience, surely be grim and dangerous conditions, if asylum seekers were kept offshore somewhere, for instance.

Some of us might think the right thing to do is to just drop restrictions or quotas altogether, and say that anyone found to be a genuine refugee always a tricky thing to define, but lets park that for today would be welcome to seek asylum in the UK. This would certainly feel morally admirable, but it may not prove either politically or practically sustainable.

The main problem is that the world is so chaotic and dangerous now that there are huge number of people seeking asylum almost all of them living in poorer countries. UN statistics suggest there are more than 25 million refugees around the world, alongside a further 50 million people displaced within their own country.

More than 80% of those people are in developing world countries richer nations do far, far less than their fair share here. Turkey alone, for example, has more than 3.6 million refugees despite having a population only slightly higher than the UKs.

A wave of several hundred thousand skilled immigrants from eastern Europe in the 2000s prompted a political backlash that created the Brexit movement. An influx of millions of refugees would risk political consequences even more dire assuming it ever got approved as a proposal in the first place. And that's not even to consider the damage it could do to countries suddenly denuded of much of their populations.

A sincere effort to do more as a good global citizen while also making asylum a smaller political issue would have to be a compromise. People do not spend thousands of pounds often all the money they have in the world and risk the lives of their children for fun or out of spite. They do it because they have no other choices. Giving people safer and better choices is the way to end the Mediterranean and Channel boat crises.

The government repeatedly says it wants people to take legitimate routes to seek asylum in the UK essentially asking people in camps in Turkey or elsewhere to apply for UK entry from there. This would be a safer and fairer option, if only it were a real one: an unfairness of entry by boat is that it is an option only open to relatively rich, middle-class asylum seekers. Poorer families cant even afford it.

The issue with the legitimate channels is people know their odds of success are astronomically low, because we take so few people from them. Instead of a trickle of a few thousand people, we should take hundreds of thousands. If we manage to make the terms fair, and let people work as they come, that could be increased over time if there was a lack of political backlash.

We pride ourselves often undeservedly on being a nation that believes in fair play, and yet as it stands we have set up a game for refugees where it is impossible to win without cheating, and then we condemn the cheaters who actually get here. Un-rigging the rules of the game might just be able to please everyone.

Finally, we have to remember to stand for what we believe, and to have and try to win the argument. If we have politicians that believe in the moral and ethical case for asylum, they should make that case, rather than dodging the issue or trying to deflect it.

Part of why we have ended up with a hostile environment is that almost no politicians challenged it. If we want to be a global Britain, and a good global citizen, we should help our neighbours when they are in need. We can hope otherwise, but one day we might need that help in turn, too we dont want to be forced to hope that other people are kinder than we managed to be.

Read the original post:
What is the liberal response to the migrant crisis? - The New European

Omar El Akkads new book, What Strange Paradise, is informed by his work as a journalist.

Nathan Howard/The Globe and Mail

Fiction has enormous power to impart truth. You can read fact after fact about current events, but a made-up story might be the thing that carries those events under your skin and into your soul. Omar El Akkads new novel, What Strange Paradise, does this kind of work.

Anyone who has read news articles about the migrant crisis will have absorbed many facts. They will know about the terrible conditions on the boats, the huge risks of a clandestine crossing in such a vessel, the deep desperation that leads people to take that life-and-death gamble. The many, many deaths.

El Akkads novel, like his first, American War, offers a different kind of perspective to even a well-informed reader. At the same time, it is very much informed by his work as a journalist at this newspaper, for the most part.

Story continues below advertisement

I think probably for the rest of my life the residual experiences and memories from my decade in journalism are going to worm their way into my fiction, says El Akkad, 39, from Portland, Ore., where he now lives.

Those 10 years at The Globe and Mail were my education. I had a front row seat to so much of history. Which is not to say that I got it right or that I have any right to continue writing fiction based on the things that I used to write non-fiction about, he says. But those experiences constituted a kind of writing education that otherwise I dont think I would have ever gotten. And Ill take that over any MFA in the world any day.

The novel tells of the shipwreck of a rickety boat, its passengers from Africa and the Middle East on a desperate, dangerous trip to the Greek Island of Kos and it tells of freedom.

The story is presented in alternating chapters marked Before and After. Before describes nine-year-old Amirs life as a Syrian refugee the family settles in Alexandria, Egypt and what happens on the doomed boat. After is set on the Greek island where the bodies of those on the boat wash up. Amir, apparently the only survivor, is helped by a local 15-year-old girl whose own grandparents, presumably Scandinavian, performed a different sort of migration to the island buying a property there in their retirement.

The opening paragraphs will bring something else to mind for many readers: the photograph of the body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose Syrian refugee family had also been heading for Kos, ultimately hoping for a better life in Canada.

The child lies on the shore, the novel begins. He is facedown, with his arms outstretched. From a distance it looks like he could be playing at flight.

The photo of Kurdi was seared in El Akkads mind as he wrote this book, he says, along with another photograph, of Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his not-quite-two-year-old daughter, Valeria, who drowned together in the Rio Grande trying to cross from Mexico into the United States in 2019.

Story continues below advertisement

It wasnt simply the images that motivated El Akkad, but what happened or didnt afterward.

They provoked immense outrage for what felt like a very short amount of time. And eventually people moved on to whatever it is they were going to be outraged about next. And more than almost anything, that sense and that privilege of temporary outrage and instantaneous forgetting is the thing that I was writing against, El Akkad says over the phone this week.

But that sense of how much of a privilege it is to be temporarily outraged by injustice and then immediately move on is the thing that drove the writing of this book.

El Akkad began writing the book in the early days of Donald Trumps presidency, and it is inspired as much by the refugee crisis at the southern U.S. border as it is about the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean.

It is also, as El Akkad describes it, a repurposed fable: Peter Pan reinterpreted as a contemporary child refugee.

Born in Cairo, El Akkad grew up in Qatar and moved to Canada with his family when he was 16, settling in Montreal. Ive been a guest on someone elses land since I was five years old, he says. And Ive always found that fiction, where you can alter the contours of your invented world to fit whatever reality is like, always felt more like home to me than any real place.

Story continues below advertisement

Theres something else about fiction. While El Akkad is aware of the power of journalism you change the world for the better simply by telling the truth; thats an incredible mission statement he believes that fiction also has the power to effect change.

Its one of the few things that I carried with me from my journalistic career into my fiction-writing career: this iron-clad belief that there must be a chance that the work youre doing is going to cause some kind of positive change in the world. I dont think its possible to do the work we do otherwise. You have to believe a fundamentally irrational thing: a kind of alchemy where by stepping away from reality and by altering reality you can somehow cause a change in that reality. At its core, its a fundamentally irrational thing to believe. But at times its the only load-bearing beam holding up a very flimsy house.

El Akkad, 39, says joining The Globe was the second-best decision he ever made. The best decision, he says, was knowing it was time to leave, to focus on being a novelist.

His first published novel, American War written on weekends and in the middle of the night while he was still a full-time journalist is a terrifying work of speculative fiction. Amid the brutal effects of climate change, a second American civil war breaks out in 2074. American War won awards, was an international bestseller and has been translated into 13 languages.

The manuscript was acquired by legendary Alfred A. Knopf publisher Sonny Mehta, to whom What Strange Paradise is dedicated. In an appreciation El Akkad wrote for The Globe after Mehtas death in late 2019, the novelist recalled his first conversation with Mehta about American War; within five minutes on the phone, El Akkad knew that Mehta understood exactly what he was trying to do. You think youre reading one thing, but youre really reading another, Mehta told El Akkad.

This sentence also applies to What Strange Paradise in a number of ways. It is so gripping a page-turner that its brutal message feels organic and never lecture-ish. Through wisdom imparted by various characters, the reader receives new perspectives; the privileged Western reader in particular is confronted with him- or herself in an uncomfortable way.

Story continues below advertisement

The hotel guests on the Greek Island who grumble that they cant use the beach because of the shipwreck. The disdain with which tourists in Alexandria treat a young boy hocking t-shirts. The canister of powdered milk in Amirs home: he could tell how high-quality the product was by how Western the people on the packaging looked. The explanation Amirs father gives him for the hellish situation in Syria: it did not start with bombs or bullets or revolutionary graffiti. It started with a drought. Dont call this a conflict, he tells his son. Theres no such thing as conflict. Theres only scarcity, theres only need.

The novel, published this week, is already receiving raves. The New York Times said it deserves to be an instant classic. The reviewer said she hadnt loved a book this much in a long time.

El Akkad jokes that its unclear what else the reviewer has been reading; perhaps a string of bad books. Theres more to this than El Akkads genuine-seeming humility. He feels uncomfortable celebrating anything to do with this book its launch, the rave.

I am by disposition drawn to writing about the things that make me angry in this world. And whether thats a good or bad thing or whether I have any right to write about the topics that I choose, I find the entire process difficult and it makes it difficult to talk about the resulting work in any kind of celebratory way, he says, before modestly referencing what he called a fairly decent New York Times review.

I cant celebrate these books. Its not how I think about them. I want to exist in a world where I didnt feel compelled to write about what I write about. So its a difficult place to inhabit as a writer and I dont know how long I can keep doing it, or if me doing it is valuable enough or is doing anything to change the things Im concerned about. Those are all open questions for me.

Expand your mind and build your reading list with the Books newsletter. Sign up today.

Visit link:
Omar El Akkads new novel What Strange Paradise is driven by outrage over the refugee crisis - The Globe and Mail

According to preliminary data of the State Border Guard Service of Lithuania, over the last day, the border guards have detained 171 migrants who illegally crossed the border from Belarus.

The total number of migrants illegally crossing the Belarusian-Lithuanian border in 2021 has exceeded 3 thousand, which is 35 times more than in the whole year of 2020.

All detainees introduced themselves as Iraqi citizens or had documents of Iraqi citizens. The detained foreigners will be tested for COVID-19, writes DELFI.LT. They will be isolated until the results are known.

Most of the migrants are trying to get through Lithuania to the countries of Western Europe.

Lithuania has accused the Belarusian border guards of ignoring the trespassers. The Lithuanians claim that their Belarusian colleagues do not contribute to their work. The neighboring country has strengthened the border security and even installed barbed wire along the 5 km section, while there are plans to install more than 20 km of barbed wire.

On July 27, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said that the state of emergency due to the influx of migrants into Lithuania could be imposed only as a last resort. Now, he sees no need for it. He called Lukashenkas regime responsible for the migrant crisis on the Belarusian-Lithuanian border.

Continue reading here:
Lithuanian border guards have detained a record number of migrants on the border with Belarus - Belsat

Issued on: 27/07/2021 - 20:18Modified: 27/07/2021 - 20:16

Athens (AFP)

The EU on Tuesday told Turkey to reverse plans to open up the Cypriot ghost town of Varosha, announced during a controversial visit by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the divided island.

The 27-nation bloc, which includes the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus, condemned "Turkeys unilateral steps and the unacceptable announcements".

Erdogan and Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar said last week they would open the former resort, abandoned since Ankara's 1974 invasion of the island.

A statement issued by the EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell criticised the plans as breaching a series of United Nations resolutions.

The EU would consider using "instruments and options at its disposal to defend its interests", it said.

In Athens, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis also condemned Erdogan's remarks.

"The new Turkish illegal actions in Cyprus must be condemned unequivocally," he said.

The latest declarations undermined UN resolutions and the efforts of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to resolve the longrunning dispute over the division of the island, he added.

Mitsotakis was speaking after talks with Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades.

Anastasiades said he had made it clear to Athens that they were ready to resume talks with Ankara under UN mediation, and on the basis of UN Security Council resolutions.

- UN condemnation -

Varosha -- once the playground of celebrities and dubbed a "Jewel of the Mediterranean" -- has for decades been a fenced-off ghost town, its former luxury hotels overgrown by weeds.

Erdogan vowed that "life will restart in Varosha" during his visit to mark 47 years since the invasion that split Cyprus.

The Turkish army restored public access to parts of the Varosha beachfront last year and since then a main thoroughfare, Demokratias Avenue, has also been cleared.

Erdogan, in a speech during his visit, also insisted on a two-state solution for the island -- an idea firmly rejected by both EU member the Republic of Cyprus and Brussels.

The UN Security Council on Friday also condemned Erdogan's call for two states in Cyprus and the push to reopen the resort town emptied of Greek Cypriots.

The latest moves on Cyprus by Turkey risk derailing efforts to improve ties between Ankara and the EU after a spike in tensions in the eastern Mediterranean.

The EU is dangling a string of enticements in front of Erdogan, including billions of euros to help with refugees from Syria, if he makes good on pledges to mend fraught ties with the bloc.

Turkish troops seized the northern third of Cyprus in 1974 in response to an aborted coup in Nicosia aimed at attaching the country to Greece.

The island has since been divided between the Greek Cypriot-run Republic of Cyprus and the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), which is recognised only by Turkey.

2021 AFP

See the original post:
EU warns Erdogan over push to open Cyprus ghost town - FRANCE 24

Diplomats the world over blinked in disbelief on Tuesday, July 13, when the news broke that the previous evening Turkeys president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had phoned Israels newly elected president, Isaac Herzog, to offer his congratulations.

The surprise was all the greater when it emerged that the call between the two presidents had lasted 40 minutes.

His ire was especially roused by Israels incursion into Gaza in 2008 in its effort to stop Hamas firing rockets indiscriminately into the country. It culminated in his venomous attack on then-president Shimon Peres at the Davos conference in January 2009.

The Mavi Marmara affair in 2010 categorized by Erdogan as an armed Israeli attack on a humanitarian convoy, but about which much remains to be explained soured relations between Turkey and Israel for six years.

cnxps.cmd.push(function () { cnxps({ playerId: '36af7c51-0caf-4741-9824-2c941fc6c17b' }).render('4c4d856e0e6f4e3d808bbc1715e132f6'); });

Diplomatic ties were restored only in 2016. Two years later, in 2018, when the US recognized Jerusalem as Israels capital and moved its embassy there from Tel Aviv, Turkey recalled its ambassador to Israel, and Israel followed suit.

The landmark Abraham Accords were perceived by Turkey as an overwhelmingly negative development. Erdogan condemned the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain for abandoning the Palestinian cause and threatened to suspend diplomatic ties, although he never quite got round to doing so.

Thirteen years of sour Turco-Israeli relations and yet trade between the two nations grew exponentially over the period, quite regardless of the political dissensions. In 2008 bilateral trade between Turkey and Israel stood at $3.4 billion. Year-on-year expansion followed, and by 2020 it had doubled to a record $6.8b.

Moreover the 13 lean years arose on the foundation of 50 years of friendship, cooperation and flourishing trade. In March 1949 Turkey was the first Muslim country to recognize the State of Israel. Cooperation grew between the two nations. Over the years trade and tourism boomed. Before the end of the century the Israel Air Force was practicing maneuvers in Turkish airspace, and Israeli technicians were modernizing Turkish combat jets. Projects involving collaboration in hi-tech and in water sharing were developed.

In May 2005 Erdogan, then prime minister, paid an official visit to Israel. In November 2007, four months after being elected president, Peres visited Turkey for three days and addressed its Grand National Assembly perhaps the high point in Turco-Israeli relations. They then unraveled pretty swiftly.

BY THE fall of 2020 Turkeys international standing was in the doldrums. The US presidential election was in full swing. US president Donald Trump may have turned a blind eye to Erdogans anti-Kurd land grab in northern Syria, but Joe Biden had expressed his sympathy for the Kurds. Even Trump had drawn the line at Turkey, a member of NATO, acquiring the USs state-of-the-art multipurpose F-35 fighter aircraft, while already purchasing the Russian S-400 antiaircraft system designed specifically to destroy aircraft like the F-35. Trump ejected him from the F-35 program and imposed sanctions. Biden, long opposed to Erdogans power-grabbing activities in Syria, would certainly not reverse that.

Neither Trump nor Biden favored Erdogans military interventions in Libya or in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, both pretty obviously designed to extend Turkish influence in the region.

Erdogan had also attracted the displeasure of the European Union by continuing to explore for gas in what is internationally recognized as Cypriot waters. After months of acrimonious exchanges, in December 2020 the EU actually imposed targeted sanctions on Turkey.

Turkeys relations with Egypt had been frozen solid ever since 2013, when Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, who was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, was ousted by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Erdogan, a lifelong adherent of the Brotherhood, expelled Egypts ambassador, and Sisi reciprocated.

Erdogan and his advisers must have realized that a reassessment of tactics was called for, if he was to achieve his strategic objective of extending and stabilizing Turkeys power base across the Middle East. Out of what must have been a root and branch analysis came a plan to address the problem Turkey would embark on a charm offensive, involving an apparent rebooting of relationships with onetime enemies, opponents or unfriendly states, including Israel.

On December 9, 2020, after a gap of two years, Turkey appointed an ambassador to Israel, albeit one with a track record of anti-Israel sentiment. Then, in a press conference on Christmas Day, Erdogan declared that Turkeys intelligence relations with Israel had not stopped; they continue, and that our heart desires that we can move our relations with them to a better point.

Israel treated the developments warily. The media reported that at a meeting held on December 30, then-foreign minister Gabi Ashkenazi decided to send quiet feelers to Ankara to assess how much weight to attach to them. It is difficult also to determine whether there is any truth in media rumors that the Turkish intelligence service had been holding secret talks with Israeli officials about normalizing relations.

Then came the Erdogan-Herzog phone conversation. It occurred, commented the Atlantic Council, against a backdrop of a notable decrease in Turkey of the anti-Israel rhetoric usually spouted by the states elites, feeding conspiracy theories and antisemitism. Additionally, the Atlantic Council has noted the recent appearance of many news articles supporting the need for reconciliation. These are important signs, it comments, that create a positive atmosphere, similar to the one that existed around the time of the 2016 normalization deal [following the Mavi Marmara affair].

Official accounts of the presidential conversation report the leaders agreeing on the importance of ties between Israel and Turkey, and the great potential for cooperation in many fields, in particular energy, tourism and technology. They agreed also to maintain contact and ongoing dialogue despite differences of opinion, with the goal of making positive steps toward a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which will also contribute to the improvement of Israeli-Turkish relations.

Is this the renewal of a beautiful Turco-Israeli friendship, or an astute move by Erdogan to further his political ambitions?

It could be both. To reap the potential benefits and sidestep the potential hazards, Israel will need to proceed with caution.

Continue reading here:
Turkey and Israel are we to be friends? - opinion - The Jerusalem Post