An Army of
Dead Children. We Ignore Them at Our Peril
One year on, has the world learned the lesson of the
three-year-old boy washed up on a Turkish beach?
By Robert Fisk
September 02,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Independent
"
-
The body of
Aylan Kurdi has gone beyond the ‘iconic’. Being
small and dressed like a little European boy, and
being white rather than brown-skinned, his very name
posthumously and subtly shifting to the homely
English ‘Alan’, the son of the Kurdish refugee
family fleeing across the Mediterranean from Turkey
to Europe became ‘our’ child. The moment his tiny
body washed up on the beach near Bodrum and appeared
on front pages around the world, the closet racism
of our politicians was briefly stilled. What stone
heart could condemn this little boy as part of a
‘swarm’, a word used about the occupants of the
Calais camp by a former British prime minister?
But the
image of Alan Kurdi obscured a host of lessons which
we ignored – and continue to disregard – at our
peril. Firstly, of course, he was a mere
representative of the thousands of other Alans whose
remains lie today on the sea bed of the
Mediterranean, forever unrecorded and unfilmed. Alan
was a symbol, perhaps even a representative of this
army of dead children. But he also became a
sacrificial three-year-old, thrown up by the waves
as a ‘martyr’ rather than a victim of political
violence and betrayal, while the Turkish police
officer in rubber gloves gently taking his body from
the sand became a kind of male version of the
‘pieta’. But if grief was depicted thus by
Michaelangelo half a millennium ago, it was
nonetheless odd that we regarded the Syrian Kurdish
child as the victim of a frightening new phenomenon.
The
refugee, the fearful emigrant – soon to become, for
us, the threatening immigrant – was portrayed as a
uniquely 21st, or at least 20th century burden. We
could look back to the millions of ‘displaced
persons’ of post-war 1945 Europe, even to the
Armenian refugee survivors of the 1915 genocide or
the victims of the Bolshevik revolution, but there
history dribbled away. Being a college classicist –
in Latin, not Greek – I was struck this week, after
the Italians rescued those 10,000 migrants from the
sea, by how very central the story of Alan Kurdi’s
family and a million others really is in the history
and culture of the Mediterranean.
We can
read, for example, the epic story of a refugee
family launching its equally unstable boat into the
Mediterranean only a few hundred miles from the very
same Anatolian coast from which the Kurdi family set
sail so tragically last year. A son records how he
and his father “took to the open sea, borne outward
into exile with my people” leaving behind only
corpses and a burned landscape. And, having left
what is now Turkey, they arrived at last, after a
final treacherous crossing of the Mediterranean from
what is now Tunisia – how the parallels shout at us
across the ages – in the sanctuary of Italy.
Only in this ancient text, the refugee
is no ‘migrant’ to burden the EU’s
social services – and conscience – but
the first hero of Rome, son of Anchises
and relative of King Priam, ancestor of
Romulus and Remus. Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ –
and I was quoting from Robert
Fitzgerald’s glorious translation – does
not refer to Aeneas as a migrant. He is
in the original Latin an ‘exsul’ – an
exile, a banished person – or ‘fato
profugus’, a ‘fugitive by destiny’ or by
‘fate’. Today, we might call Aeneas and
his father ‘self-exiles’. The Latin for
refugee would have been ‘fugitivus’, but
this would have implied a criminal on
the run from justice – which may be how
Donald Trump regards Mexicans, but
scarcely applies to Trojans or Syrian
Kurds.
What both also have in common is the war
which drove them from Anatolian shores.
For burning Troy, read burning Aleppo.
For the destruction of the ancient city
of King Priam, think of the
pulverisation of the Great Mosque and
the soukhs of Syria’s largest city, and
the slaughter of its peoples. Fire and
the sword, shell and the barrel bombs.
The Trojans and the peoples of the
Middle East today were and are fleeing
for their lives. And so we come to the
flip side of this tragedy. Not the
history of the past, but the history of
the future. In the age of the internet,
we have stopped thinking about this. The
question is rarely ‘how did this come to
pass?’ but ‘what should we do NOW?’
Don’t ask why 19 men who claimed they
were Muslims committed the international
crimes against humanity of 9/11. Invade
Afghanistan! Don’t question how Saddam
achieved power in Iraq. Invade Iraq!
Whether or not the Trojan wars were a
Greek (and later Roman) myth or the husk
of a real 12th century BC conflict, the
story – whether it be of Homer’s
Odysseus or Virgil’s Aenias – is as
contemporary as the present Arab tragedy
in the Middle East. Muslims and
Christians leave their mosques and
churches behind. Along with his father
and friends, Aeneas could take with him
only his household gods, his ‘penates’.
All were fleeing the folly of kings and
warlords, militia leaders and dictators.
Which brings us to the next, even vaster
fleets of refugees who will trek from
their homelands in the decades to come,
victims of the ferocious Saddam-like
autocrats and satraps whom we currently
support in a different part of the
Muslim world. I’m talking here of the
little emperors – complete with
praetorian guards, statues and
president-for-life status – in the
‘Stans’ that lie between Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Russia and Iran.
Daniel McLaughlin, among the best
correspondents in central and eastern
Europe, has drawn attention to the
dangers inherent in the Muslim Asian
states which emerged from the ruins of
the Soviet Union a quarter of a century
ago. In a region of oil and gas wealth
and strategic importance, their leaders,
courted by both Moscow and Washington,
are guilty of appalling human rights
crimes, massacres and torture of their
own people in their war – you guessed it
– against Isis and the Taliban.
For just as the brutality and corruption
of the Arab dictators whom we largely
armed and financed, spawned the Islamic
cult ‘caliphates’ of the Middle East –
the Trojan Horse of our own time – so
Islam Karimov, Nursultan Nazarbayev,
Imomali Rakhmon and the rest are all
fighting the same nebulous black and
purist enemy in the ‘Stans’. In
Uzbekistan, the brutal Karimov, whose
cops specialise in torture – boiling
victims alive is a favourite which out
Saddam’s Saddam – has suffered a stroke.
Some say he is dead, which will be good
news for the Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan, ally of both Isis and the
Taliban.
In
Tajikistan, where a civil war in the
1990s claimed – with statistics as wild
as Syria’s – up to 100,000 dead, a
thousand of Rakhmon’s citizens have
joined Isis, along with Gulmurud
Khalimov, the former Tajik police
commander. Khalimov, I should add, was
trained in the US. The Americans
maintained post-9/11 air bases in
Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The ghastly
Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, a creature
whose torture chambers and abuse of
civil rights are close to Karimov’s
standards, pays millions to his
hard-working adviser and would be
scourge of dictators, Tony Blair. You
get the point.
And when these vicious Ruritanias
explode, the refugees will come again,
the ‘exiles by fate’ and the ‘fugitives
of destiny’; Uzbekistan’s 30 million
population is almost a third larger than
Syria’s. And they will drift across
their frontiers and many will come to
us, mixed up with more Afghans, Syrians
and Arabs. And then we will ask not
‘why?’, not ‘how did we come to this?’,
but ‘what do we do NOW?’. And it will be
too late again. What was the name of
that little chap on the beach, we’ll ask
ourselves then? Aylan, wasn’t it? Or
Alan? And behind those refugees will be
the burning cities of the ancient Silk
Road, as surely as Aleppo burns today,
and Troy long ago.
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