Amid a climate heavily overshadowed by the attacks of the last 24 months, a fear has been skillfully maintained for several months by the right and its extreme: that of the “hordes” of migrants invading France. What are we really facing?
In politics, when no perspective of human and social progress is offered, nothing is easier than to resort to demagoguery and lies to play on fears and “gather” part of the opinion against a scapegoat. The practice is not new.
The sinister Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels even theorized these propaganda techniques in 1933 following the Reichstag fire: “The bigger the lie, the more it passes. The more often it is repeated, the more the people believe it…”
The phenomenon we are witnessing around the Mediterranean is primarily linked to wars and persecutions. We are currently facing a massive displacement of refugees fleeing conflict zones as they expand. There’s Syria, Libya, Iraq or Yemen but also “low-intensity” or less publicized wars like in Sudan and Eritrea or Afghanistan, not to mention, of course, Palestine.
A strategic area where numerous geopolitical stakes intersect, starting with control of oil, the situation in this part of the world has continued to deteriorate progressively with military interventions and the destruction of states.
Each intervention, direct or through proxy forces, in Iraq, Libya, and Syria has only promoted chaos and the emergence of Daech. In this field of ruins, in the absence of a political solution, the conflicts drag on, and the people have no choice, to try to survive, but to flee. Often within the same country, but sometimes outside it.
To take just one example, that of Syria, out of a population of over 20 million in 2012, there are more than 7 million refugees internally and nearly 5 million who have left the country, mostly to neighboring countries. Thus, Turkey hosts more than 2.5 million refugees, Lebanon 1 million, and Jordan nearly 700,000.
In this context, France, since the beginning of the conflict, has welcomed 10,000 Syrians. That is less than 0.20% of the total number of Syrians who have taken refuge outside. We are far from the image of France welcoming all the misery of the world.
In the past, France has received refugees in much larger proportions. 500,000 Spaniards in 1939, 130,000 Vietnamese in 1973, or nearly a million repatriates from Algeria in 1962.
The use of the term “migrants” by the right and the far-right aims to dismiss the reality of the phenomenon we are facing. It seeks to erase its dramatic reality and, by doing so, to overshadow our responsibility. Our responsibility in these conflicts and the absence of political solutions. There’s the Libyan affair, but also France’s negative role in the initial attempts to try to pull Syria out of conflict.
Today, the instrumentalization of the refugee tragedy mirrors a political debate tainted by far-right ideas. It is not the least of the paradoxes of the period that those who claim to represent Christian civilization, the likes of Le Pen and others like Sarkosy, Ciotti, Estrosi, forget the message of the Pope, who declared just last Saturday: “Refugees are men and women, young people and children who are no different from the members of our families and friends.” “Each of them has a name, a face, and a story, as well as the inalienable right to live in peace and to aspire to a better future for their children.”
Robert Injey
