The video images and photographs of waves of syrian and other refugees moving through europe, and of those who are abandoned, beaten, raped, arrested and/or killed, that pass across the screens and fill the pages of “news” media re-enact horrors on the continent that many europeans thought were the privilege of the uncivilised. Memories are short, such that we forget even recent european refugee crises (e.g. Yugoslavia) and perception and understanding are weak enough that no connection is made between the current crisis and the policies and actions of european states/the european union outside europe. Sentimentalism abounds in the media reports, hypocrisy and xenophobia lose all shame in the speeches of politicians, and the passivity of false innocence finds comfort behind borders and walls.
A war against autonomy: Turkey
“Yesterday Kobane, today Cizre” could be read among the slogans carried in a solidarity protest with the kurdish cause in Paris last Thursday, September 10. As in other european cities, the protest was called to denounce the the ongoing military siege and intervention in the largely kurdish city of Cizre, in turkey.
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