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Europeans are no longer shocked by pictures of drowned children

Europeans are no longer shocked by pictures of drowned migrants and refugees children.Their pictures no longer make it to headlines. The urgency Europe felt following the death of  3-year-old refugee boy Kurdi washed ashore a Turkish shore in 2015 appears to have dissipated.

Just look at the direction in which EU migration and refugee policy is going.

Efforts to reform the Europe’s asylum policy — the so-called Dublin regulation, which stipulates that an asylum seeker must be processed in his or her country of first arrival — have faltered.

Europe, it seems, has tired of the crisis and accepted to abandon its empathy and humanity.

Italy’s new policies have led to an increase in the mortality rate, but they have failed to provoke moral outrage in public opinion.

Below excerpt from the wonderful feature  “Europe’s Forgotten dead”  published on Politico:

INTERNATIONAL WATERS NORTH OF LIBYA — When the boy’s naked body was lifted onto the rescue ship, he had seemed alive. A doctor on board certified he died only a short time before we had arrived.

For the crew onboard the Open Arms, some 80 miles off the coast of Libya, that was what was so devastating: how close we had come to reaching him in time.

Not a single front page of a major European newspaper mentioned his passing.

We’ve come a long way from September 2015, when a photograph shocked Europe out of its complacency.

The image of the lifeless body of a young Syrian boy — Alan Kurdi — washed up on the beach of Bodrum, in Turkey, became a powerful symbol of the exodus of thousands of Syrians fleeing the civil war and underlined the urgency of a European response.

Three-year-old Kurdi, with his blue shorts and red T-shirt, carried the front pages of every major European newspaper. The arresting image prompted European leaders to come to an agreement later that month to relocate 160,000 asylum seekers from Italy and Greece, countries that were buckling under the strain of caring for the high number of arrivals.

It led to rescue operations in Mediterranean by European military vessels — and by independent NGOs. The Open Arms rescue mission was launched by the Spanish businessman Òscar Camps three years ago, after he saw the photo of Alan Kurdi.

Almost three years later, a young child has died in the same way. And yet the images of his attempted rescue had little effect across the Continent. They flickered across social media and some news sites, and then they were gone.

The four-year-old toddler, who died of hypothermia in the Mediterranean Sea alongside a woman presumed to be his mother, has remained anonymous. He has become just another number in reports tracking those who die along one of the world’s most dangerous migratory routes.

In June, one person died for every seven who crossed the Mediterranean Sea from Libya, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency. It’s an especially alarming number considering that departures have dropped by 80 percent since June 2017.

The urgency Europe felt following Kurdi’s death appears to have dissipated….

Full Story via POLITICO

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