News:
Almost 1,200 migrants including women, children and babies – some crammed onto overcrowded inflatable dinghies – have been picked up by Greek authorities in the eastern Aegean Sea in the past two days. Packed boats were being towed on to the shores of Kos yesterday, with refugees dropping to their knees to pray after completing the perilous journey.
After Italy, financially crippled Greece is the main destination for refugees, mostly from war-ravaged Syria plus economic migrants seeking a better life in the EU. About 30,000 have already arrived this year. Despite being under Greek control, most of the Aegean Islands are closer to Turkey, with Kos just two miles from Bodrum. Journeys from the port take as little as 20 minutes, with migrants paying smugglers up to 800 euros (£565) each for a place on a boat. So far this year, some 1,770 migrants have died on the hazardous journey to Europe, according to the International Organisation for Migration, a 30-fold increase on the same period in 2014. (Source: Dailymail)
Comment:
EU leaders held a summit in April in a bid to prevent the number of people illegally travelling to Europe from Africa and the Middle East on unsafe boats. Additionally the European Commission is set to propose next week that 40,000 asylum seekers who have arrived by boat in Italy and Greece should be relocated across the continent in response to what it considers an emergency situation in both countries. Meanwhile the Interior Ministers of Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece have signed a joint protocol in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia on 25th of May in order to combat a surge in illegal migration through setting up a common border police and customs centre.
When staying in the homeland (Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan etc.) becomes more dangerous, and the chance of death, torture and humiliation is higher than surviving than it is clear that people risk anything to flee the hell they are locked in. However; when Muslims who reach the ‘safe grounds’ of a Muslim land like Turkey, still risk their lives to reach the non-Muslim Europe, than there are some serious questions that should be asked. In short; it is the intolerable and at the same time futile living conditions that push people out of Turkey, while the propagated freedoms and opportunities ostensibly offered by Europe promise better lives. So it is the world’s ambidexterity in not solving the root causes firstly in the homelands and secondly in the refuge countries that causes people to risk their lives.
This Ummah is used to witnessing that world powers are simply window dressing when talking about humanitarian aids. In fact having a look at what has been planned as actions by EU and USA, UN and other states and organisations especially over the last few months and what they did over the last years, it is all about catching traffickers and talks about financial burden for those countries who have to rescue and host refugees. This still is more profitable for the Western powers, both financially and politically than ending the oppressive circumstances in the homelands of refugees.
But what this Ummah is and will never be get used to, is the inability of the leaders in the Muslim lands to reject the commands and orders of their Western masters and to set true actions to remove the oppression in their homelands. Imagine what power they would generate if they would reunite under one rule and command their joined armies under one leader… This is what the Ummah is already demanding for a very long time and her calls across the world get louder and louder. This is the only way to end wars, exploitation and humiliation and then to revive prosperity and peace in the Muslim lands again. However, this requires to change what is within our Muslim lands, namely the corrupt systems and rules and dependencies on the Western secular masters desires.
إِنَّ اللّهَ لاَ يُغَيِّرُ مَا بِقَوْمٍ حَتَّى يُغَيِّرُواْ مَا بِأَنْفُسِهِمْ
“Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves.”
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Zehra Malik