Migrants have rights too
(republishing, copying, no restrictions)
By: Father Shay Cullen
Whenever I see those images of boat people, starving migrants struggling to reach the land of plenty like Malta, the Canary Islands or anywhere my heart goes out to them. Hundreds die at sea, others in containers and many more at the hands of unscrupulous traffickers who leave them to die in deserts and drainage ditches. They come to the rich world from Mexico and Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.
They take to leaking boats or the top of trains, they risk death in containers and in trucks. No hardships is to much for them and their desperation to escape poverty and find a good paying job. The luxuries they aspire to are hard dirty work with fair pay that no one else wants to do and two or three decent meals a day. They are the people that western society does need to do the dirty work but without fair pay and benefits or justice and equality.
We can hardly blame them for risking all for a better life than the misery they left behind. Can we blame them for wanting to follow their colonial masters to their homes of sumptuous luxury and become willing servants again? Their desire is to leave behind the nauseating bowl of gruel and poverty, the stench of a refugee camp and the fear of torture and death.
Well off people cringe with inhospitable loathing and want to slam shut the doors to these wretched of humanity, the downtrodden and forgotten of the world. When the graphic images are all too close to the truth on the TV many will want to turn it off. When they see the groups of stragglers being arrested and hauled off to migrant detention centers many applaud.
I am an unrealistic sucker for sympathy and lost causes critics will say of me for taking the side of migrants and asylum seekers and defending their right to abode, decency, compassion, and Christian charity and above all justice and equality in this world is what we all need more of.
When I see the truth staring me in the face from places like the Congo, Darfur, Southern Sudan and Iraq where people by the hundreds of thousands are killed and no one hardly weeps, I think there is no love of humanity anymore. They are rejected because they are poor, blamed for their poverty and branded inferior, non-people almost by many of us who would prefer they disappeared and I would stop writing about them.
Yet I can't stop telling the truth and pointing to the wastelands filled with wailing people waiting and wanting. They are waiting to live another few days or waiting to die. Violent attacks by the Sudanese death squads are frequent and most don't have the physical strength to run any more. The wealthy world has hardly cared about them. Now there is a slim historical opportunity to stop the genocide and the war in Darfur when the International UN peace keeping force goes in to protect the people.
It can't be too soon, the fearsome militias are being rearmed by the Sudan government to make more attacks. Recent photographs released by a human rights agency show a Sudanese plane and helicopters delivering weapons and ammunition to the murdering militias.
Behind all this human suffering that is driving people out of Africa and Iraq and elsewhere is the greed of power hungry nations that are gouging the earth for oil and gas. These are the fuels that drive the economic and political wheels of power these days. The powerful wealthy nations want more of it and human rights and suffering never got in the way of power hungry corporations and shareholders greedy for profit.
In the Philippines it is no different. A beautiful scenic nation blessed with natural beauty, wonderful, friendly, intelligent people and an abundance of natural resources, oil, gas and minerals is mired in poverty. The nation's resources are controlled and exploited by the insatiable appetite of a greedy elite of dynastic ruling families in cahoots with multinational corporations. Despite all the natural wealth the majority remain poor as a land of beauty is pillaged and exploited for the benefit of the few causing the suffering of the many. That's what drives migrants to migrate. -End-
