Looking before leaping
by Tom Sullivan
Many refugees. Fewer solutions. Even fewer explanations.
Grim news from Austria:
A truck full of refugees discovered abandoned on an Austrian motorway on Thursday contained more than 70 bodies, the interior ministry said on Friday, announcing an updated death toll.
Austrian police had originally put the toll at up to 50 and are due to announce the exact number within hours. The vehicle had come to Austria from Hungary.
Dozens more perished in a sinking off the coast of Libya:
A boat reportedly packed with people from Africa and South Asia bound for Italy has sunk off the Libyan coast, raising fears that dozens have died.
A security official in Zuwarah, a town in the North African nation's west from where the overcrowded boat had set off, said on Thursday there were about 400 people on board.
While an official death toll has not been announced, sources told Al Jazeera that dozens of people died in the incident, with many reported to have been trapped in the cargo hold when the boat capsized.
In Vienna, just east of the truck filled with bodies, European leaders at a scheduled summit struggled with a response:
"Never before in history have so many people fled their homes to escape war, violence and persecution," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said. "And given the large number of unresolved conflicts in our neighborhood, the stream of refugees seeking protection in Europe will not abate in the foreseeable future."
The gruesome discovery of the truck brings the total of refugee deaths to more than 2,390 this year, according to the International Organization for Migration, compared to 2,081 on the same date in 2014. Many die aboard boats or rubber dinghies on the Mediterranean Sea, or while jumping onto trains as they try to reach the United Kingdom from France’s port city of Calais, where about 3,000 people live in squalid camps near the Eurotunnel entrance.
The BBC has this explainer on the source of the migrants and refugees. The Guardian attempts to dispel some of the misinformation: "Far from being propelled by economic migrants, this crisis is mostly about refugees." Nearly two-thirds are fleeing "countries torn apart by war, dictatorial oppression, and religious extremism."
What you won't find is much analysis about what precipitated the conflicts in Libya and Syria, and one of the largest refugee crises since the end of the Vietnam War, from which we apparently learned little about looking before leaping. Hullabaloo readers can probably fill in those blanks without much prompting. Then again, one London tabloid has an explanation to warm chickenhawks' hearts: We didn't intervene enough.
So it goes.