February 02, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - "Dissident Voice" - Artificial mass migration as imperial policy has a long history. To illustrate this, we will cite a few historical examples. According to Bulgarian historian A, Eminov, civil wars in the Balkans in the 13th and 14th centuries led to significant population decline, which greatly facilitated colonisation of the Balkans by the Ottoman Empire. The deportation of nomads and organised transportation of Muslim refugees by the Ottoman Empire played a significant role in the colonisation of this region.

Though Turks comprise over 8 percent of the Bulgarian population today, Turkey’s neo-Ottomanism has sparked accusations from Bulgaria’s nationalist party Attack that Turkey has plans to re-colonise the country. Bulgaria has the highest number of mosques in Europe per capita.

Given the fact that Turkey is supporting the Islamic State in Syria, while harbouring neo-colonial plans for the Balkans, the decision by the Bulgarian government to erect a fence along the border with Turkey is the right one. Opposition politicians in Bulgaria have described the subservience of their government to the EU and NATO as treachery and tantamount to genocide against ethnic Bulgarians, whose population has been declining drastically since the fall of communism.

In the 19th century the British Empire organised the mass migration of Bengali Muslims to Burma to work plantations in the predominantly Buddhist Rakhine State. The purpose of the migration was to create an artificial ruling class that would depend on the protection of the British Empire. The result was more than a century of tension with the indigenous Buddhist inhabitants and the Muslim settlers, a tension that has led to the ethnic cleansing of today, whereby Takfiri fanatics, financed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are committing genocide against local Buddhist peasants with the full complicity of ‘human rights’ organizations and the mass media as part of a US/Israeli geostrategic initiative to kossovise the Rakhine State by separating it from Myanmar, thereby securing a foothold for Western neo-colonial interests in the highly strategic Bay of Bengal. The so-called ‘Rohingya crisis’ attests to a new phase in imperialist policy; namely, the ruthless weaponization of the refugee.

In the nineteenth century, Imperial Belgium imported hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsi workers to the Congo to staff their work colonies. This artificial migration policy of Belgian imperialism has played a major role in the context fueling the current ethnic cleansing and ongoing neo-colonial proxy wars being carried out by the US/Israeli and European powers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the US /Israeli Tutsi puppet regime of Paul Kagame is murdering and pillaging on behalf of Western corporations. The Wall Street Journal has ironically described Kagame’s Zionist puppet regime ‘The Israel of Africa’.

Here Hutu refugees fleeing Kagame’s genocidal regime have been systematically bombed and slaughtered by the Zionist backed Rwandan military. Refugees fleeing war have been used by the aggressors as a pretext to wage further war and conquest. The US and EU have been destabilizing Burundi since April 2015. Now, terrorists are attacking the country from refugee camps in Rwanda, with full backing by Western powers.

A population explosion in London in the 16th and 17th centuries provided much of the impetus behind the colonisation of America. Over two-thirds of the first settlers in North America were indentured servants, 75 percent of whom were young men under the age of 25. The youth were needed to expand the labour capacity of the Empire’s colonies. The settler culture, imbued with religious fanaticism and a complex of superiority, did not take long to decimate the native American population. One of the reasons for the population decline of the Powatan native peoples was their tolerance and kindness towards the settler culture.

Comparing the mass migration of people from the Global South to Europe today to the European colonisation of the United States might appear strained and inappropriate but there are important similarities, nonetheless. Like the 16th and 17th centuries, the world is experiencing a recrudescence of religious war, while population explosions and war in the developing world are driving mass migration. This time, however, as the world has already been divided through centuries of European colonisation, people of the Global South are now moving North. The potential for conflict between a declining native population and an assertive, Muslim-dominated settler culture is great, particularly when this serves the interests of Europe’s ruling elite who are in cahoots with the Wahhabi sheiks of the Middle East. Whilst the people of the Global South are fleeing the consequences of European imperialism, the indoctrination of Wahhabi Islam among Muslim immigrants constitutes a serious impediment to an awakening of class consciousness necessary for the unification with non-Muslim natives against their internationalist bourgeois oppressors.

In seventeenth century Ireland the British government settled lands in the northern province of Ulster with Protestant and Presbyterian settlers who lived in fear of the Catholic neighbours they had displaced. It was an imperial policy of divide and rule which lasted for centuries. In the nineteenth century, famine and mass emigration from Ireland to America were caused by the British state’s refusal to allow Irish peasants the right to eat the fruit of their labour. The mass migrations benefited the emerging ruling class of the United States who required cheap labour as well as the British government who wanted to reduce the population of Ireland. In other words, mass migration enabled the trans-Atlantic Anglo Saxon financial elite to turn the very social and economic problems they had created to their own advantage. The loss for Ireland was irreparable. Western Europe’s oldest literary vernacular language was reduced to minority status, while the loss in youthful resourcefulness worked in favour of the status quo, ensuring Ireland’s subjugation to the British imperial elite, both before and after formal independence.

A more recent example of migration used as a tool of imperialism is Eritrea. Since the country’s independence from Ethiopia in 1993, Eritrea has chartered a unique independent path to national liberation and socio-economic development. The results have been astounding, with economic growth rates surpassing most other developing countries. However, the socially-oriented policies of the Eritrean government have brought it into conflict with neo-colonial interests. As a consequence, sanctions were imposed by the United States in 2009 on the only country in the Horn of Africa that has never failed to feed, clothe and educate its children.

Meanwhile, millions flee hunger and poverty in the US client state of Ethiopia, which is currently occupying part of Eritrea since the US backed Ethiopian invasion of that country in 1998. US geostrategy against Eritrea involves smuggling Eritreans into Europe in a vast, logistical operation involving officials in the United Nations and ‘human rights’ NGOs such as Watch the Met.

This neo-colonial outfit is heavily involved in the smuggling of Middle Eastern and Central Asian refugees from Turkey.

Watch the Med is a cogent example of how petty bourgeois European prejudice against developing nations is harnessed by elites to further their globalisation agenda. The NGO, which claims to oppose the EU ‘militarization’ of the Mediterranean and fortress Europe’ slammed Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya for its alleged ‘abuse of migrants’ rights’, in spite of the fact that Gaddafi’s Libya was praised by the UN for its respect for human rights and was integrating thousands of sub-Saharen migrants in the Libyan Jamahirya, where they were able to work and benefit from free health care, education and accommodation.

A key figure in this criminal operation is a Nobel Prize candidate who goes by the name of “Father” Mussie Zerai, a phony Catholic priest who has been coordinating the smuggling of East Africans to Europe from war-torn Libya, earning him lots of cash, kudos and the epithet ‘Archangel of Refugees’.  Zerai collaborates closely with Watch the Med.

It is impossible to tell if Watch the Med is receiving funding from captains of globalisation such as George Soros, but these European do-gooders would certainly deserve decent salaries from the Jewish oligarch.

As part of the destabilisation of Eritrea, the EU is giving preferential treatment to refugees if they register as Eritreans. Eritrean researchers have shown that most of the migrants from East Africa are from Ethiopia and Somalia. Yet, they register upon arrival in the EU as Eritreans. The migrants are often lost at sea. Al Jazeera recently did an interview with a trafficker from Ethiopia who confirmed that thousands of citizens from that country are being smuggled into Europe. Yet Eurostat figures for 2013-14 show no Ethniopian citizens whatsoever while Eritreans are astonishingly high.

In a Market Watch article entitled “Here’s my plan to solve the asylum chaos”, George Soros slams Victor Orbans’ policies stating that they threaten to ‘divide and destroy the EU’. Soros strongly advocates the creation of ‘NGOs’ to facilitate the mass migration into Europe.

Orban has pointed out that those welcoming the refugees/migrants into Europe are playing into the hands of Soros and global financial oligarchs.

The Eritrean government has proof of the CIA’s role in smuggling desperate people from the Horn of Africa. They also have proof of Amnesty International’s attempt to foment political unrest and violence in the country.

The phony ‘Eritrean’ refugee crisis is being cynically used by the corporate media to slander Africa’s only free and truly democratic, post-colonial nation, hampering its development while filling the coffers of the heinous ‘human rights’ murder machine, all in the service of empire. This again attests to the weaponization of the refugee.  The current escalation of the refugee crisis in Europe should be analyzed in this context.

So what is the purpose of weaponizing refugees?

In the book Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion and Foreign Policy, Kelly M. Greenhill, US foreign policy consultant, argues that coercive engineered migration is a strategy which has been used by governments to gain concessions from other governments. In other words, governments often use refugees as weapons in order to exert pressure on other governments for political ends. Greenhill documents over 59 examples of refugees being used as weapons since the Second World War.

While there are undoubtedly many women and children and innocent victims of NATO/Zionist fomented war among the flux of people migrating to Europe who deserve all the help they can get, it is deeply reactionary and dishonest to ignore the obvious instrumentalisation of migration by imperialism. Rational and honest analysis of this complex phenomenon tends to prevail in developing countries such as Russia and Iran, whose press agencies have provided extensive evidence of this problem. However, spurious political correctness often stifles constructive debate in Western countries with some analysts such as this author being slandered on social media as ‘fascists’ and ‘racists’ by soi-disant ‘leftists’ for discussing these facts. George Soros and company would certainly agree with them.

Gearóid Ó Colmáin is a journalist and political analyst based in Paris. His work focuses on globalization, geopolitics and class struggle. He is a regular contributor to Dissident Voice, Global Research, Russia Today International, Press TV, Sputnik Radio France, Sputnik English, Al Etijah TV, Sahar TV, and has also appeared on Al Jazeera and Al Mayadeen. He writes in English, Gaelic, and French