Sunday 8 May 2011

NATO leaves 61 migrants to die of thirst and starvation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/08/nato-ship-libyan-migrants


NATO has been accused ignoring distress calls from a boat filled with adrift migrants.

If this is true, NATO is in clear violation of international law, and this represents a shocking neglect of the sacred responsibility of upholding human life.

I fear that this isn't the worst of it. A tide of those who are left to flee the upheaval will soon be flooding through Europe, and Europeans will have to ask themselves some hard questions about whether or not they can deploy resources to aid these poor souls.

It's the beginning of what I can see as a pressing issue of the 21st century---namely, how developed nations will deal with the wave of people fleeing unlivable circumstances in the Third World. Tied into this is the First World's partial culpability for these circumstances (global warming, subsidies and supports to dictatorships etc.) but, sadly, the fact that many developed nations in this world do not have the political willpower or ability to deploy resources to help their own people, never-mind people that are considered "foreigners", has to weigh in the decision as well.

These hard questions, as we can see in this example, will entail the difference between life and death. It is a heavy responsibility to bear for the developed democracies of the West, but it is something that must be acknowledged, and debated, before it is too late to save any of the lives we could have saved.

I hope events like this spark the debate, and lead to people acknowledging the sanctity of HUMAN lives, rather than constantly dividing the world into meaningless subsections of Americans, Europeans, and Africans.

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