generalspeaking

Desperately Fleeing Islamism

"It's hard to cross the border [English Chanel, France to Britain] and there are too many people in Calais."
"It's better here. They give us food and a doctor comes around every two days. Many people here have come back from Calais."
Bashir Suleiman, 36, from Sudan's Nuba Mountains

^{Migrants gather at a charity feeding station just outside central Calais (Geoff Pugh)}

"We would like to go to Britain. There are many Nuba people there. We can do any job. Any job at all."
"I was at home in our village with my wife and children when we heard the planes. We knew they would drop bombs so we ran. Our house was hit. Many people were killed and there were flames everywhere."
"We went to the house of our relatives in a village near ours. Then I heard the army thought I was a rebel fighter. I knew they would come for me."
"I have tried to phone them [his family back in Sudan] but the line has been closed. If I go back, I am sure 100 percent they will kill me."
Henry John, 45, Sudanese, from Nuba Mountains

Paris, Charles de Gaulle bridge

 The world was made aware of the Sudanese military conducting horrific airborne raids in Darfur, sending helicopter gunships to fire on Darfurian villagers, slaughtering men, women and children, gang-raping women and girls, trapping children in their classrooms, raping and killing them. Darfurians fled from their villages into forests nearby, seeking safety. The Government of Sudan sent Arab Jajaweed mounted militias after them.

The crimes committed by the government of Sudan and by its president, Omar al-Bashir and his generals were cited by the International Criminal Court as genocidal, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Up to two hundred thousand people in Darfur were held to have been slaughtered, tens of thousands of women raped, and two and a half million Darfurians displaced. The ICC issued a warrant for the arrest of the country's president, which the Arab League simply dismissed, honouring al-Bashir when he appeared in the Middle East.

Darfurians still in refugee camps continue to be threatened, women raped. The international community does nothing, the United Nations issues condemnations, other Muslim countries are disinterested in the plight of the Sudanese non-Arab populations, many of whom are Christians or animists. And so, Sudanese, for fear of their lives, like Henry John, make their escape, and hope to be able to migrate to countries which will give them haven. In the process they overwhelm the capacity of those countries in Europe to absorb their large, desperate numbers.

Italy, Greece and Malta are facing the full-head-on brunt of desperate migrants attempting to risk Mediterranean ocean voyages to find haven in Europe. Europe has more than enough such refugees whose resettlement is costly, and raising concerns that among the thousands that flood into Italy, requiring rescue on the high seas all too often, crammed by human smugglers onto unseaworthy ships, that among the migrants may be infiltrators who are members of Islamic State, making good their promise of arriving in Europe to spread their threats of slaughter abroad.



Both Bashir Suleiman and Henry John were farmers in Sudan. Now they live in tents in the middle of Paris, under the Charles de Gaulle Bridge. Henry John left his wife and three young children, paying human traffickers $1,800 to take him to Libya. Left off in the Sahara, he walked for 13 hours to reach the coast. He left the Libyan coast in a small boat holding about 300 migrants. "It was very cramped. If you stood up, they beat you and threatened to throw you into the water."

Migrants from the Middle East, from Africa, who have suffered deprivation and conflict, desperate to escape from their home countries where Islam rules and Muslims prey on the vulnerable and the hapless, demonstrate daily how impossibly miserable life is for them under the aegis of a religion whom its billion-plus faithful declare a 'religion of peace'. A religion of peace that breeds violence on a scale difficult to comprehend. But which cannot, under threat of increasingly vicious violence, be criticized.

Even the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Palestinians, the Eritreans, the Sudanese and others who flee the misery and threats, hoping to find new lives elsewhere than in their countries of origin, do not recognize that the desperation of their refugee state bears on the near universality of Islamist dysfunction.

Labels: Africa, Crisis Management, Europe, Islamism, Middle East

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, May 03, 2015