Lukashenko is a handy villain to mask the cruelty of Fortress Europe
JVL Introduction
Kenan Malik writing in the Observer lays bare the reality of the crisis on the Belarus- Poland border and puts it in wider perspective.
He condemns the Belarus government of Lukashenko, for its odious policies. And the Polish government for its cruelty in enforcing illegal, violent expulsions of those trying to cross.
But the real villain of the piece is the European Union and its Fortress Europe policy.
To maintain it, says Malik, “the EU has funded a huge kidnap and detention industry right across Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, from the Mediterranean to beyond the Sahara.”
It uses aid as a weapon to enforce its migration policies paying states to detain anyone they believe is heading for the EU. And it removes aid from those who refuse to accept deportees…
This article was originally published by the Observer on Sun 14 Nov 2021. Read the original here.
Lukashenko is a handy villain to mask the cruelty of Fortress Europe
European Union policies have turned migrants into a resource to be exploited
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At the time of the UK’s EU referendum in 2016, I was in favour of leaving. In the years since, as I learned more about the Union’s pro-corporate laws, its utterly undemocratic structures, its lack of transparency and its horrifyingly brutal attitude to the migrating poor, I had no choice but to reject it as the late socialist Tony Benn did. My conversations with leftist Remainers are revealing for the lack of knowledge about the Union they display. None seems even to have heard of Frontex, the EU’s anti-migrant enforcement agency, with the same meaning for enforcement as the Mafia does. This applies equally to the recent furore over the Tory regime’s cut to overseas development aid, much of which is used in ways that benefit the wealthy, not the poor: ignorance rules. Thank you for this incisive and enlightening piece.
Readers who want to stay informed of the EU’s anti-migration actions and policies should subscribe to the University of Oxford Law Faculty’s Border Criminologies blog at https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies
Scrap borders, que pasa?
Fine as far as the article and comments go, but they have not observed that the EU is actually becoming a directly colonial power in Libya, Bosnia (see Diana Johnstone’s FOOLS’ CRUSADE on how EU-Badinter wrecked Yugoslavia) and arguably in NE Europe too – over and above the ACP foreign policy. And JS (above) should not be forgiven for dreaming that Brexit can improve UK or Europe from the EU ills he notes and the UK ones he doesn’t.
And both I and Kenan Malik forgot to mention that the EU is at least ‘peacefully’ presiding over, if not actively directing and in some ways profiting from, an active chattel-slave trade in those Libyan concentration-camps it sponsors.