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People show love while nations bicker

THE THOUSANDS showing their solidarity today at the Refugees Welcome Here demonstration organised by Stand Up to Racism in central London are delivering a very important message.

As you read this desperate men, women and children are being turned back at borders, suspended in legal limbo in makeshift camps and intercepted by boat to be removed from European waters.

Europe’s politicians have spent the week engaged in an unseemly row over what to do about the thousands of refugees now trapped in Greece, unable to move on as the borders slam shut across eastern Europe.

The unsavoury deal being cooked up with Turkey for mass deportation back to that country is not even legal, according to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. It is certainly not moral.

We would have a non-negotiable duty to extend protection to those fleeing genocide and war even if the wars in question were nothing to do with us.

But that is not the case. The war-torn maelstroms of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are messes of our governments’ making.

The frenetic aggression of the Nato powers has dismembered countries and steeped the whole Middle East in blood. The growing instability and soaring inequality that disfigure our world is not an accident, but a consequence of a rapacious global economic system maintained and policed by a handful of imperialist powers led by the United States and the European Union.

The repeated catastrophes inflicted on the Middle East are now coming back to haunt us in the form of the refugee crisis.

This is an international problem and that’s reflected in this pullout, another collaboration of the Morning Star with our European partner papers Junge Welt, Arbejderen and Zeitung vum Letzebuerger Vollek.

We look at what’s gone wrong and at some of the ways ordinary people have repeatedly defied governments to show the humanity and solidarity that our politicians lack.

I hope it sheds some light on the causes of this crisis, but above all that it inspires us to do something about it.

  • Ben Chacko is editor of the Morning Star.

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