Many African refugees, including women and toddlers, drowned recently after their boat capsized in the vast Mediterranean Sea. They were attempting to migrate to Europe. At the same time, Italy became the first European Union (EU) country to pass fascist legislation where anyone who helps such African migrants and refugees from certain death at sea will face court, jail, and a huge fine.
I know that at this moment that Africans and their leaders are blissfully more concerned about the Africa Cup of Nations (AfCON) football than the lives of our brothers and sisters but I would like to call on the EU and USA to put an end to their vicious and heartless hate policies against immigrants.
Compared to the physical wall U.S. President Donald Trump is building on the US-Mexico border, the EU has built an invisible but far more vicious wall of torture, slavery and blood in the deserts of North Africa and in the Mediterranean Sea.
I call on these nations to lead in showing respect for human dignity rather than love for cruelty and barbaric mistreatment of migrants and refugees. You cannot preach respect for humanity and applaud Uganda’s open door policy for refugees when you are busy seeing that migrants and refugees fleeing persecution and biting poverty are killed.
The EU is reportedly funding slave camps in Libya and all over North Africa where migrants and refugees are bundled, mistreated, denied safe sanctuary, tortured and/or even murdered on their behalf simply because of growing western xenophobia against immigrants.
It also turns out that today’s African leaders; including the entire African Union itself, all are colluding to persecute African political and economic refugees fleeing to Europe through North Africa. And these African leaders are doing so on behalf of the EU. That is how meticulous Europe is in organising and concealing the killings and vicious human rights abuse that they instigate against migrants. But why?
Well, extreme selfishness is one reason. They are willing to have Africans killed and/or tortured so that African refugees and economic migrants do not travel to Europe.
Yet for centuries, Europeans have travelled the world, lived anywhere they wished, worked there, exploited the countries and even ruled the foreign indigenous nations while plundering their human and mineral resources in the name of conquest and empire.
Now as we have been increasingly seeing for the last half century, they cannot stand foreigners (especially people from Africa) coming to live and work in Europe. With the revival of purported European nationalism in recent years (since the so-called 2015 migrant crisis that was largely created by Europeans and Americans bombing Middle Eastern nations to rubble and thereby forcing millions of innocent civilians to flee for their lives), there has since emerged a rise in political populism in Europe and America that sees hatred against migrants and refugees as the quick way to leadership.
This is the same path taken by Adolf Hitler in 1930s Germany, with the consequences that we all know; especially for minority groups like black people, gypsies and Jews.
Since 2016, the EU has stepped up measures to stop African migrants of all categories from entering Europe altogether. Compared to Trump’s physical wall on the US-Mexican border, the EU has built an invisible but far more vicious wall of torture, slavery and blood in the deserts of North Africa.
In the last couple of years I have been asserting to whoever cared to listen that it is the EU (and their draconian anti-immigration policies) which is knowingly fuelling the disturbing slave trade in Libya. It is a deliberate attempt to discourage and prevent Africans from heading to Europe.
However, it is sad to see that not a single African leader, nor our 21st century neo-panafricanists or human rights activists have stood up to condemn the barbarity displayed in the actions of the Europeans against migrants and refugees. The same antiimmigration hate policies that are also now being practiced in Israel, Australia. In New Zealand the bigotry resulted in a radical extremist anti-immigration terrorist attack in Christ Church where over 50 innocent worshippers were brutally murdered by terrorist Brenton Tarrant, the heinous monster who killed them all live on social media simply because of their faith and their ethnic origins.
By | Hussein Lumumba Amin | The Independent, Uganda
