Mediterranea on EU deportations: ‘We must do as they did in Minneapolis’ |
Mediterranea on EU deportations: ‘We must do as they did in Minneapolis’
European legal, civil, and political culture was born out of the rejection of deportation. Then mass pushbacks were introduced, nullifying the Geneva Convention; now, outright deportation.
“The European Union is implementing ‘remigration’,” Luca Casarini, one of the founders of Mediterranea Saving Humans, tells il manifesto from the sidelines of a meeting. “We must start getting organized to save people from deportation, we must do as they did in Minneapolis,” he says following the European Parliament’s final green light to the new asylum rules.
Accelerated procedures, agreements with third countries, a common European list [of “safe countries”]. The agreement also includes the outsourcing of asylum requests. Is Europe following Trump’s lead?
This measure is not an extraordinary development; it is part of a process that has its roots much further back, starting with the very serious error of the so-called progressive parties that deluded themselves into thinking they could do exactly what the global white supremacist right demands, but in a democratic form. The exceptions to the respect for human rights have paved a superhighway for these right wingers, in the United States just as in Europe. I believe we need to reckon with that.
What did they fail to understand?
That the European Union, by shifting to the right, has stained a historic achievement. European legal, civil, and political culture was born out of the rejection of deportation. Then mass pushbacks were introduced, nullifying the Geneva Convention; now, outright deportation. The list of safe countries will be used for the construction of detention camps – that is, concentration camps – around the Mediterranean. And this is being done on the basis of agreements with autocrats, dictators, countries that do not have even the slightest pretense of human rights. This is something monstrous, which must be denounced because it goes hand in hand with the thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean Sea, with the Libyan camps, with the deportations into the Tunisian desert.
There will also be hubs in third countries.
This is the Rwanda model, something highly dangerous founded on business interests. This mechanism looks very similar to the American one of deportations based on a network of private companies, multinational detention corporations. And this is already the case in the Italian pacts with Libya and Tunisia: economies propped up with millions in funding to detain human beings.
In recent years, the European far-right has united around the concept of remigration.
The EU is pursuing “remigration” in institutional terms, and this is a fact: we are facing a material act that will endanger the lives of thousands of human beings. By the time we realize it, it will be too late. This also gives an idea of the cultural and political hegemony that the Western supremacist right has over a Europe that is held together only by the Euro but lacks principles and values to act as glue.
Is the list of so-called “safe countries” a way to clear one’s conscience?
No country is safe for a deportee. Even worse if it is their own country; they might not make it out alive. Or they might be subjected to the violence of having their basic rights, enshrined in international conventions, stripped away. This is the destruction of the right to asylum because it allows for accelerated procedures based on geographic origin. Obviously, this is the latest piece in Europe’s strategy of pushing back people on the move. A regressive process is underway that aims to systematically destroy all rescue and reception mechanisms in order to push migrants into marginalization, into the shadows of illegality. This is a fundamental element of the right’s strategy because it stirs up a war among the poor.
Is this process of dehumanizing the poor and migrants irreversible?
I believe that the crux of the struggle lies precisely in the distinction between the human and the inhuman. But we need to organize to protect people, to help them escape the camps, to rescue them from capture whether at sea or on land. Because with red zones, security regulations and the need to have high numbers of repatriations to boast about, the roundups will begin. Care means a concrete form of struggle to save our brothers and sisters from capture and deportation.