The tragic sinking of a fishing boat packed with over 700 migrants on June 14th off the coast of Greece, inside the boundaries of the European superstate, is an atrocity in capitalism’s war on humanity. The number of lives lost is an estimated 500.
It follows the deaths of around 100 people in Italy in February when another boat from Turkey sank off Cutro – then seen as the worst single migrant disaster. As one excess exceeds the other, countless smaller and often unnoticed examples are a weekly if not daily occurrence. Including the sending of refugees back out to sea as happened in Greece in May.
The acknowledged Mediterranean death toll alone so far this year is 1,800, already exceeding the annual average over the last decade that has cost more than 26.000 lives – that we know of.
Is this a war? Yes. The war of profit and greed that is tearing the planet to pieces, destroying its ecosystems through exploitation driven climate change and its social systems through its inevitable infliction of poverty, hunger and war.
According to the United Nations, the numbers of displaced from climate change and war is approaching the hundreds of millions. (UNHCR calculates 2,000,000 dead and 21,000,000 displaced annually through climate change; 110,000,000 through conflict (not counting the dead).
Madagascar is becoming a desert, island peoples are submerging, Pakistan briefly became a lake. 40,000 have just lost their homes to floods in Haiti as the earth’s lungs gasp in the Amazon.
The stolen treasure violently accrued over the last 300 years in the heartlands of capitalism’s hyper-wealth is tilting the globe, and the hungry dispossessed are sliding to where the grass still grows.
Refugees and migrants are increasingly numerous and desperate across most of the world. Climate change and exploitation accelerate as the ‘developed’ states pull up the drawbridge and carry on vilifying and blaming the victims.
How is this not genocide? Because the weasel words of international lawyers are designed to keep guilty hands clean.
The ICC (International Criminal Court) defines as genocide as: “…characterised by the specific intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group by killing its members or by other means: causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Capitalism’s ruthless plunder and destruction is not considered ‘deliberate’ enough to qualify as ‘intent’ despite every other characteristic being there.
There is a deliberate refusal of responsibility and the intent neither to redress nor repair but to carry on regardless. Despite the huge diversity of needs and contexts amongst migrating communities, they certainly have very specific characteristics. Most centre around them being from the global colonial looted world of 300 years of capitalist imperial expansion.
There is no solution that doesn’t involve the abolition of imperial legacy and capitalist global domination. Capitalism not just won’t solve it, it’s simply can’t. It’s not profitable. And in its attempt to preserve itself, it is the driver of this genocide by stealth.
AnarCom Network 