It’s not just boats that are sinking. It’s PEOPLE. The fact that so many Africans are fleeing from their homes and drowning off the coast of Italy makes me think that, just like the Haitians who are still being punished for their slave revolt 200 years later, so Africans are being punished for their efforts to throw off various colonial yokes that keep being foisted upon them. Once it was European countries doing the colonizing; now it’s multinational foreign corporations taking up where nation-states have left off. Resources that should belong to the people of the land are being plundered, and private armies of mercenaries are ensuring that no pesky locals get in the way of that. Result: people paying extortionate sums of money, and even going into debt, to traffickers who abandon ship as they near the Italian coast, leaving the refugees to sink or swim…and since most can’t swim, they drown.
If you want to know what will REALLY end the seemingly endless influx of boat-people from Africa, the first thing you will need to do is kill off capitalism. Then, kill imperialism. And while you’re at it, also kill racism. Then, and only then, will you have begun to create a climate where it’s safe for them to go back home again.
If they still have a home left to go to, that is.
