Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A long tradition of complicity in crime This article is available in four languages An indispensable’ partner in the  EU ’s strategy in the Middle East and the Mediterranean 

People as a number  The terrorist Mediterranean Sea killed up to 150 migrants in order to protect fortress Europe  

" There is a striking discrepancy between the lack of feeling aroused by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty." — Stathis Kouvelakis Europe's Iron Curtain

Hundreds of migrants dead? the BBC. Well, Let them Drown

Just another news item "As the rescuers approached, they found overloaded wooden vessels and rafts that evoked scenes of the slave trade."

A Brief History of Fortress Europe

[Upon] closer scrutiny, the operation of retrieving, commemorating and mourning proves to be deeply problematic and hypocritical. For this tragic loss of life was not an unfortunate “accident” but the result of political decisions taken, amongst others, by the very state actors who are now claiming a high moral ground by recovering and mourning the dead. The forgotten 22,000 First of all, the 18th of April shipwreck is only one among many more incidents that have led to more than 22,000 documented deaths at sea over the last 25 years. These have been the structural product of EU migration policies that have denied legal access to EU territory to the impoverished citizens of the global South since the end of the 1980s. The militarization of border controls and their externalization to North African states has forced migrants wishing to reach EU territory to resort to smugglers and to take longer and ever more dangerous routes. Italy, as a “frontline” state of the EU, has for many