BLOOD ON THE HANDS OF THE EU

It is a pity that a number of European Union Commissioners and top Eurocrats were not at the harbour on the Italian island of Lampedusa in the early hours of Monday morning when one of the apparently endless stream of people-trafficking boats carrying illegal immigrants docked there.

It would have brought them face to face with the horrific results of their liberal asylum policies which are killing hundreds and hundreds of people.  After 271 half-starved passengers had stumbled ashore, Italian coastguards prised open the deck hatch of the boat’s engine room. They were met with the stench of the decomposing bodies of 25 more Ghanaians, Somalis and Nigerians who had died of asphyxiation two days earlier.

The people traffickers had crammed them down into the engine room, which was only accessible through a two foot wide trap door from the deck. Then they piled over 200 more immigrants onto the boat. When the air ran out in the engine room a day into the three-day voyage and it filled with deadly fumes, those inside could not open the trapdoor to get out because others packed aboard were standing on the deck on top of it. So they died horrifically, choking to death slowly and in agony.

These poor souls were lured to an appalling death by the European Union’s asylum policy. They knew if they could only set a foot on EU territory, they would be allowed to stay, shipped to mainland Italy, and thence, so they believed, to find a life of wealth and ease paid for by European taxpayers.

So the people-smugglers were able to take from them all the wealth they had saved in their lives, and pack them aboard unseaworthy death ships.

It is estimated that one in ten of those who set sail every day never make it to Lampedusa. Some of the ships have sunk en route with terrible loss of life. In other cases those who die of thirst and disease on board are simply slung overboard, as apparently also happened to others who weren’t in the engine room on the death ship that arrived on Monday.

The blood of these unfortunates is on the hands of the European Union. Instead of encouraging North Africans to come to Europe and claim asylum, they should be making it crystal clear that there is no point getting to Lampedusa or anywhere else in Europe because they will simply be loaded on board a vessel of the relevant Navy and returned to where they came from.

Wed, 03/08/2011 – 11:50 |  Martin Wingfield