Photos from the ‘Refugees Welcome’ Rally in Trafalgar Square, Mar. 19, 2016

See my photos on Flickr here!

On March 19, 2016, the organisation Stand Up to Racism held a national demonstration, ‘Refugees Welcome’, to send out a hugely important message to the British government and to other EU governments that refugees are welcome in the UK and across Europe. I wasn’t able to make it to the march, which began at Portland Place, although I was determined to show my face, and made it to Trafalgar Square for the rally, where I took the photo set that I’ve just published on Flickr.

I understand that there were around 15,000 people on the march, which is commendable, of course, but I must mention, as I now do every time I discuss protests, that people opposed to the cruelty and indifference of the Tory government need to get out on the streets and make some noise to show their opposition, as there is no indication that sitting back and waiting until the next General Election in 2020 is a plausible course of action to take on a government that is in power despite securing just 24.9% of registered voters, who are also intent on redrawing electoral boundaries to keep them in power forever.

The timing for the demonstration could hardly have been more fortuitous, as the EU has just reached an agreement with Turkey, described by the Guardian as follows: “Refugees and migrants arriving in Europe will be sent back across the Aegean sea under the terms of a deal between the EU and Turkey that has been criticised by aid agencies as inhumane.”

The agreement followed the emergence of a huge refugee camp in Idomeni, a train stop on the Greek-Macedonian border, which, as the Guardian also explained, in an article on March 17, “has become Europe’s biggest favela: an embarrassment to the values the continent holds so dear.”

The Guardian‘s article continued:

Its tents, clinics and cabins lie on mud-soaked land. Its fields, once fertile, are toxic dumps. Its air is acrid and damp. Children dart this way and that, exhausted, hungry, unwashed. Waterlogged tents surround them – women sitting inside, men sitting in front, attempting vainly to stoke fires on rain-sodden wood.

Everywhere there are lines: of bedraggled refugees queuing for food, of scowling teenage boys waiting for medics, of teenage girls holding babies, of older men and women staring into the distance in disbelief. And everywhere there are piles: of sodden clothes, soaked blankets, muddy shoes, tents, wood, rubbish – the detritus of despair but also desperation of people who never thought that this was where they would end up.

Taking in the camp’s chaotic scenes on Tuesday, the EU’s top immigration official Dimitris Avramopoulos, momentarily struggled to find the words. “These are images that offend us all,” he said, young boys breaking into a fight as they scavenged for wood behind him. “The situation is tragic, an insult to our values and civilisation.”

Idomeni was never meant to happen. It is a bottleneck that abruptly occurred when Macedonia – following other eastern European and Balkan states – arbitrarily decided to seal its frontier. At its most intense, 14,000 people – mainly Syrians and Iraqis but also Afghans, Iranians, Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians – have converged on this boggy plain, all bound by a common dream to continue their journey into central Europe.

Like the death of Aylan Kurdi last September, and the shame of “The Jungle” in Calais, Europe’s refugee crisis ought to make Europeans respond with generosity to the greatest humanitarian crisis in most people’s lifetimes, and yet, throughout Europe, the barriers are going up physically, and the emotional shutters too. People who were in most cases brought up in a religious context are shunning the care for those less fortunate than ourselves that all religions demand, and we are, above all, demonstrating a lack of compassion and empathy that I find disgraceful.

Across Europe, people living in some of the richest countries on earth — many living in large houses with generous pensions — are claiming that we have no room to support those whose need is absolute and undeniable.

The perceptions of, and indifference or hostility towards the refugee crisis have, of course, followed on from the general anti-immigrant sentiment that has grown uncontrollably in recent years, in large part through the cynical manoeuvring of politicians and their cheerleaders in the right-wing media, which, in the UK at least, exert a powerful form of control over far too many people.

Once, not too long ago, racism and xenophobia were generally not sentiments to be publicly aired, but that has changed, and open hostility is now, shockingly, commonplace. Part of the problem, I understand, is that immigration has grown throughout Europe over the last few decades, but this is something affecting every country, not just the UK (see the map above for details), and the reason, in large part, is that we in Europe are amongst the richest countries on earth, with the most jobs, while those seeking work and refuge in the UK and the rest of Europe are growing up with few if any opportunities for work, in part because of the predatory policies of our own countries, our cynical deals with dictators, and, of course, our unjust wars — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

A link to the photos is also posted below:

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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