Once again, human lives were lost in the Aegean Sea under dramatic conditions: tragic people, who in their despair give everything they have to become the victims of traffickers who abandon them without protection in the middle of the sea. The lucky ones end up alive on Greek soil. The more unlucky ones are lost at sea.
This tragic event sparked that tired old – and often politicking – discussion about responsibilities over which the Greek parties want to argue about. That is a shame, since the responsibilities lie elsewhere. They lie entirely in Brussels: that is where everyone should be focusing their rage and not amongst ourselves.
It is not just that the despicable Dublin II Convention that has demonstrably trapped hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who wanted to head to other EU countries in Greece, turning the country into what has accurately been described as a “storage room of souls”; it is also the fact that the proverbial European hypocrisy regarding EU border protection prevails.
Whenever it suits them, such as when it comes to measures imposed from Brussels and Berlin, we are some sort of an informal federation and we must pay what we are told. Whenever it doesn’t suit them, you will be hard-pressed to find them: for over a decade Greece has been left alone to deal to guard the EU’s eastern border. Even today, the provided assistance is seriously lacking. The nonsense about “more Europe” is far from true, even though it necessary more than ever.
The end result of all of this is that since Greece is a part of the otherwise absent Europe, it has to pay the cost for a problem that it is not in the possible to tackle because it has neither the resources, nor the right to exercise national policies that could improve the situation.
In other words, the country is once more all tied up: it cannot do anything other than watch on, as the human and national drama unfolds every day and people are lost over a lie…
In that respect, we must be cherish this sort of Europe and wish for more…
Giorgos P. Malouchos
