Single image brings home reality of migrant crisis

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

There are times where a single image out-trumps everything else that has been said and seen – the millions of words; the thousands of hours of footage; the interminable ‘conversations’ on-line.

The Syrian civil war has been raging for most of this decade. The death toll has long ago reached six figures, millions of people have been displaced, and hordes of desperate refugees and their children continue fleeing from their war-ravaged home – you can only imagine the tortuous and dangerous journeys they undertake in the hope of finding safety and stability.

Yet for almost all of that time the civil war and its awful consequences have been downplayed.

Not ignored – but not at the centre of public discourse or debate. Even when hundreds and thousands of desperate refugees drowned while trying to cross the Mediterranean in rickety and unseaworthy boats, it just did not play into everybody’s hearts and minds as it should have.

It took that single image, that haunting and overwhelming picture of the body of a three-year-old boy Aylan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish shore.

The photography of that small, compact body with the red top and crop of dark hair lying face down on a beach struck a chord with our deepest human instinct.

It brought home the scale of the problem, both in terms of the desperate lengths people were going to, as well as a low-level indifference to their plights.

In terms of impact, that single image has pricked the conscience and could be compared to those of the jet striking the twin towers in 9-11 or those awful searing images of children running naked and terrified during the Vietnam war.

The level of awareness has risen; about the stories of those awful journeys that have taken people from Syria (and further afield from Eritrea) across the Mediterranean to Greek islands, or overland through Bulgaria then Macedonia then Kosovo then Serbia and then Hungary, meeting resistance at every turn.

There are lots of equivalents from the past. The nearest I can think of are those vast movements that happened during the Depression in the US in the 1930s when people tried to move from poverty-stricken States like Utah to California.

That experience was best described in John Steinbeck’s amazing novel, the Grapes of Wrath.

The then-promised land was California. For this generation of migrants, the promised lands are Sweden and Germany, which are far more accommodating of immigrants than many central European States, which have tightened their immigration laws in recent years in direct response to the rise of right-wing and xenophobic parties.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.