Anyone who says we are all born equal is in a dream
world. We are not. Poverty, grinding and soul-destroying, is all
around us. Walk through any city,
anywhere on the planet, with your eyes open and you will see it in all its
grubby obscenity. This is not new – it
has always been thus. Since time
immemorial there have been The Haves and The Have Nots. I see nothing to suggest it will ever change. It is human nature to aspire to more, to a
better life, but unfortunately it is also human nature to put oneself first,
above others. What is happening in the
central Mediterranean now, every day, is merely the latest manifestation of
this.
I see poverty everywhere I go.
In Cairo, every morning and evening in the taxi travelling
between my hotel (a luxurious complex a mile or so from the Pyramids) and the
office downtown we would be ensnared in the city’s appalling traffic, four or
five lines of cars and buses, motor cycles and donkey carts, squeezed onto a
road built for no more than three lanes.
Invariably, between the lines of almost stationary traffic, there would
be dozens of penniless and destitute people, suffocating on the heavy fumes in
the air from the traffic, their hands held out imploringly for a few coins. Some would be selling individual cigarettes
or matches. Others, always younger
women, would be carrying a crying baby on one hip as a further
encouragement. They were all risking
life and limb for a few crumbs of comfort, a few pence, to keep themselves and
their families going for another 24 hours.
In Sofia, there was a young guy, probably in his middle
twenties, no more, with crushed and twisted legs, pushing himself along on a
plywood cart on the sort of castors you see on office chairs. We saw him pretty much every day in the area
around our office, close to the bus and train stations. Whatever the weather – hot and sunny,
bitterly cold and snowy, or pouring with rain – he would be dressed in the same
filthy jacket and flannel trousers with no shoes or socks, his hand held out
for small change and scraps of food.
In Bucharest, across from my hotel, was a bridge across a river
that I crossed on my walk to work. It
was always crowded with old and penniless people, selling whatever they could
lay their hands on. One old guy had a
set of bathroom scales and was charging a few cents to weigh yourself. I never saw anyone take him up on the offer,
but he never gave up – he would be there when I left for work about 8 and still
there on my return in the evening, every day.
I have seen cardboard cities in London and Edinburgh, kids
scavenging trash cans in Manhattan and Almaty, and drunken derelicts slumped in
doorways everywhere.
The common factor is that none of them have any hope, no
prospect of improvement in their life.
Every day is simply a battle to survive.
I see wealth, too, everywhere I go.
In Cairo, the people in the bank all led comfortable family
lives in middle class suburbs – one guy actually lived in a penthouse flat
overlooking Tahrir Square and rushed home from work every evening to join the
throng there protesting for democracy. I
sometimes wonder what happened to him. In Sofia and Bucharest there were Range Rovers
with darkened windows cruising the streets day and night, probably carrying the
local Mafiosi and corrupt government officials between their luxury apartments
and night clubs and offices. Almaty was
awash with Toyota Land Cruisers and Hummers, guzzling the country’s cheap
petrol (a pint of milk cost several times as much as a gallon of unleaded). The streets were closed and cordoned off by
armed troops whenever the corrupt President sped through in his armour plated
Mercedes – I was threatened once by them as I returned to my apartment laden
with a Saturday grocery shop and happened to cross one of those roads (it was
the first time I became aware that this happened on a regular basis). London and Manhattan are among the wealthiest
places on earth, where property prices are unaffordable to the average Joe
Public, and whole swathes of the cities owned by Russian and Arab billionaires
(or in the case of Manhattan Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan executives).
Do they take any notice of the poverty around them? Do they
care?
Aspiring to get ahead, to move up the social scale, is a
natural ambition for anybody. I come,
proudly, from working class stock – my mother was in service, a chambermaid at
Chiddingstone Castle in Kent, between the First and Second parts of the World
War in the 1930s. There she met my
father, who was a gardener. After the
war and service in North Africa and Burma, he worked as a coal delivery man, a
removal man, a stoker in the local gasworks and a mill operator in a plastics
factory. My mother didn’t work at all
until I was 14, and then spent 20-odd years working in various cleaning and
shop assistant jobs. We lived all my
life in a low-rent council house (in the 50s and 60s they did not have the
reputation they do now). Money was
always tight, although I never realised it – I don’t think dad ever made more
than 20 or 30 pounds a week, mum even less – but I had a great childhood and
never wanted for anything. About the
only thing I can remember missing out on was the odd school trip, skiing in
Switzerland or exchange visits with French students, because the cost (even
though heavily subsidized) was simply beyond our means. It never bothered me.
When I got my first job, in the City working as a filing
clerk in a major stockbroker’s office, my parents were overjoyed – it just was not
the kind of thing they ever imagined could happen to a council house kid. For the first couple of years I thought
nothing of it, it was just a job that kept me in beer and cigarettes. Then, when I was 19, still a kid really, dad
died from cancer (all that dust inhaled during a lifetime of toil) at the young
age of 56, and left me the breadwinner.
It made me, once I had sobered up some months later, realise there was
more to life and I began to work hard and want to better myself. It’s been a struggle, with as many downs as
ups, but all in all I’ve done ok. And I
got roaring drunk the day I outlived my dad – it was a kind of belated
mourning.
So I understand the desire of the poor victims in the
Mediterranean, who mostly just want a better life and head to Europe to find
it. What I cannot understand, and will
never come close to understanding, is why they take the risks they do to
achieve it. Why they spend months
struggling to get to the southern Med coast, and then all their money to board
a leaky death-trap of a boat to make a sea crossing that even in the best
weather is dangerous. Their desperation
and determination is breathtaking, and that makes the tragic deaths of so many of
them the more terrible. Worse still are
the women and children, innocent victims, who perish with them for love and
loyalty to their spouses and fathers. There
is no doubt that people trafficking is an evil line of work……..
It’s also a line of work that has existed for thousands of
years. Entire civilizations have been
built by it. The Romans and Egyptians
and Mesopotamians, the Persian Empire, Incas and Vikings and Mongols all used
slave labour, typically the survivors of their defeated enemies, to build and
farm and serve them. More recently, in
their colonial heyday, European nations like the French and German, Spanish and
Portuguese, Dutch and British carved out global trade empires through the judicious
use of slavery (even after its official abolition in the mid-19th
century). When those trading Empires waned, as they inevitably
do, and the fading European powers left their African and Eastern colonies,
their former servants were left to fend for themselves, usually with little
support from their former “masters”, with no real experience of self-governance,
and always facing a power vacuum that was often filled by a brutal and corrupt
ex-military tyrant (think Idi Amin or Saddam Hussein) who continued to hold the
“lower” classes in servitude, while retaining a corrupt and fawning retinue of
old friends and supporters. The result
has been a succession of post-colonial struggles to modernise that has engulfed
the African continent, the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent and the Far
East that continues to this day.
It is these circumstances that have prompted the illegal
migrations that are continuing all over the world, often with such tragic
consequences, and provide the people traffickers, wherever they are, with such
rich pickings. That in the Mediterranean
is only one example, and the one most in the public eye right now, as it takes
place in the full glare of tv news networks and an insidious spread of
anti-immigrant rhetoric across the entire EU.
It’s all very well calling for action against the
traffickers. Blockading Libyan ports and
trying to stop the migrant vessels as soon as they leave territorial waters can
only go so far. If Libyan waters become
no-go areas the traffickers will simply up-sticks and move a few hundred miles
along the coast. There are plenty of
small, poor and unobtrusive fishing villages along the entire southern
Mediterranean coastline that will serve equally well. The number of vessels that EU navies will
need to station in the area to form an effective blockade, even with the most
sophisticated satellite technology, will be unsustainable, and the traffickers
need only be patient.
Other routes will be opened as well, overland through the
Levant, or by a longer road through an Iraq that is struggling with Western
democracy, through Afghanistan and the Caucasus region and the bandit country
that is eastern Ukraine and southern Russia, regions where there remain
sufficient numbers of organised criminals who will be quite happy to help out,
if the price is right. The trade is
simply too profitable to just close down because of a few EU patrol ships in
the Med. Besides, the traffickers are
not the root of the problem, they are merely the facilitators and profiteers.
The cause of all this tragedy remains the desperate poverty
that far too many millions of people across the world are trapped in. It remains the continuing catalogue of
conflict raging across Africa and the Middle East. Think of the slaughter that continues disgracefully
in Syria, where the butcher Assad uses the destruction of his own subjects to
cling to power while the major nations like the EU and the US and the
discredited UN allow it to happen.
Consider the anarchy in Libya, an oil rich state that has never recovered
from the turmoil of the Arab Spring and the fall of Gaddafi, now torn to shreds
by lawless competing militia and without a credible government. Look at an Iraq still struggling with post-Saddam
democracy, or Afghanistan trying to move forward against an allegedly defeated
but still strong Taliban – both countries abandoned by UK and US forces that helped
them to a kind of freedom but without a credible Plan B in place to sustain and
create law and order afterwards. In sub-Saharan
Africa, Boko Haram and IS jihadists continue to do much as they like in
Northern Nigeria, in South Sudan and the Horn of Africa with little to stop
them.
In Central America poverty forces thousands to try dangerous
overland routes to the riches of America, riding on top of freight trains for
days on end, or in the Far East migrants choose the dangerous sea-routes to Australia
in a fashion remarkably similar to the Mediterranean crossings – and with as
much tragedy (if less publicity, at least in my part of the world).
I don’t have the answers.
In fact, I’m not sure there are any answers. It seems to me that poverty and oppression
and the slaughter of the innocents are as much a part of this life on Earth as
are the seasons and the sun rising in the east.
The situation is merely (and that is probably the wrong word….) more
visible now because of the long reach of satellite tv news carriers and the
internet, bringing their awful pictures to your SmartTV or phone or mobile
device within hours – sometimes even minutes – of the tragedy actually
happening.
Human nature needs to change, dramatically, for the
situation to improve. There needs to be
a concerted effort to tackle those conflicts and that grinding poverty that
induce desperate people to take desperate measures to escape from their desperate
lives. I see nothing to suggest that is
likely to happen in the foreseeable future.
Which means that, no matter what actions the EU or the UN or
any other organisation or country is likely to take now or in the coming
months, it will be no more than a sticking plaster to solve a global problem
that needs drastic and probably impossible surgery to heal.
