Picture: African refugees including women and toddlers fighting for their lives before drowning to death recently after their boat capsized in the middle of the vast Mediterranean sea. Even with a few migrants climbing on to the underbelly of the overturned boat, there is little hope for anyone to survive in such harrowing incidents once the vessel sinks. Italy is the first EU country to pass fascist legislation where anyone who helps such African migrants and refugees from certain death will face court, jail and a huge fine.
I know that at this moment Africans and their leaders are blissfully more concerned about AfCON Football than the lives of our brothers and sisters but I would like to call on the European Union and the United States to put an end to their vicious and heartless hate policies against immigrants.
Compared to Trump's physical wall on the US-Mexican border, the EU has built an invisible but far more vicious wall of torture, slavery and blood in the deserts of North Africa and in the Mediterranean sea.
I call on these nations to lead in showing respect for human dignity rather than love for cruelty and barbaric mistreatment of migrants and refugees. You cannot preach respect for humanity and applaud Uganda's open door policy for refugees when you are busy seeing that migrants and refugees fleeing persecution and biting poverty are killed. The EU is reportedly funding slave camps in Libya and all over North Africa where migrants and refugees are bangled, mistreated, denied safe sanctuary, tortured and/or even murdered on their behalf simply because of growing western xenophobia against immigrants.
It also turns out that todays African leaders, including the entire African Union itself, all are colluding to persecute African political and economic refugees fleeing to Europe through North Africa. And these African leaders are doing so on behalf of the EU. That is how meticulous Europe is in organizing and concealing the killings and vicious human rights abuse that they instigate against migrants. But why?
Well extreme selfishness is one reason. They are willing to have Africans killed and/or tortured so that African refugees and economic migrants don't travel to Europe.
Yet for centuries Europeans have travelled the world, lived anywhere they wished, worked there, exploited the countries and even ruled the foreign indeginous nations while plundering their human and mineral resources in the name of conquest and empire.
Now as we have been increasingly seeing for the last half century, they can't stand foreigners (especially people from Africa) coming to live and work in Europe. With the revival of purported European nationalism in recent years (since the so-called 2015 migrant crisis that was largely created by Europeans and Americans bombing Middle Eastern nations to rubble and thereby forcing millions of innocent civilians to flee for their lives), there has since emerged a rise in political populism in Europe and America that sees hatred against migrants and refugees as the quick way to leadership.
The same path taken by Adolf Hitler in 1930's Germany with the consequences that we all know especially for minority groups like black people, gipsies and Jews.
Since 2016, the EU has stepped up measures to stop African migrants of all categories from entering Europe altogether. Compared to Trump's physical wall on the US-Mexican border, the EU has built an invisible but far more vicious wall of torture, slavery and blood in the deserts of North Africa.
In the last couple of years I have been asserting to whoever cared to listen that it is the EU (and their draconian anti-immigration policies) which is knowingly fuelling the disturbing slave trade in Libya. A deliberate attempt to discourage and prevent Africans from heading to Europe (see link below).
However it is sad to see that not a single African leader, nor our 21st century neo-panafricanists or human rights activists have stood up to condemn the barbarity displayed in the actions of the Europeans against migrants and refugees. The same anti-immigration hate policies that are also now being practiced in Israel, Australia and even New Zealand where the bigotry resulted in a radical extremist anti-immigration terrorist attack in Christ Church where over 50 innocent worshippers where brutally murdered by terrorist Brenton Tarrant, the heinous monster who killed them all live on social media simply because of their faith and their ethnic origins.
Today's African leaders are all most-likely under the shackles of mental slavery, having been individually silenced by the billions of Euro's that pour annually into state coffers as Foreign aid. Not even the African Union and the Pan-African parliament have uttered any condemnation.
Yet the despicable anti-immigration behaviour keeps growing before our very eyes. Their silence is possibly because these African institutions budgets and salaries are funded by the European Union and the US.
Now instead of African leaders and the continents institutions, it is a group of international lawyers in Europe who have finally filed a case for investigation against the EU at the International Criminal Court. The same court which just recently was despotically obstructed by the current White House administration from investigating probable American war criminals in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The international lawyers lawsuit filed at the ICC says that EU anti-immigration policies have resulted in:
(i) the deaths by drowning of thousands of migrants,
ii) the refoulement of tens of thousands of refugees attempting to flee the Libyan conflict, and
iii) the EU is complicit in the subsequent crimes of deportation, murder, imprisonment, enslavement, torture, rape, persecution and other inhumane acts taking place in Libyan detention camps and torture houses."
Personally, and as far as I know, all this is part of the European wall against immigration. And the African Union itself is an accomplice to the barbarity happening against African migrants. The AU receives funding from Europe to implement this brutal EU anti-immigration policy against Africans. Some of it is disguised as anti-terrorism activities in North Africa and the Sahel but is quietly designed to catch migrants before they make it to the Mediterranean sea. This is going on behind the backs of the African populations who are never told the full scale of what is being plotted with the EU in the corridors of the African Union headquarters. Today's African elites are in the same ideological bankruptcy/mental slavery when it comes to facing European Union, US and others.
Meanwhile US asylum officers are complaining against their own regime, saying that the current immigration policies of the White House are "fundamentally contrary to the moral fabric of our nation and our international and domestic legal obligations".
I have searched in vain for one single African, Arab or Asian leader who has stood up on any international forum, be it the UN or elsewhere, to condemn the horrendous slave trade still taking place in Libya and in other EU detention centers across North Africa, plus the shocking anti-immigration policies being pursued across Europe, the US, Australia, Israel, New Zealand and elsewhere. As if all western countries are suddenly coordinating anti-immigration hatred and bigotry as national policy.
Meanwhile our African leaders all seem to be acting like political slaves against our own people, and wouldn't dare say or do anything against their foreign masters wishes. In fact they have become the enforcers of the tyrrany against African migrants
Isn't that exactly what is happening in North Africa, the Sahel countries and a few others in West Africa?
Documents from the international lawyers case at the ICC go on to say that the EU's crimes against humanity "were consciously perpetrated by EU member states in the belief that sacrificing migrant lives at sea would deter African refugees from making the voyage across the Mediterranean".
How inhumane and barbaric can one get against migrants and refugees?
Now it would be quite interesting to here what public position African leaders take in this case. Our media is not asking them the tough questions. It would also be interesting to hear the response of the EU if any.
Remember that in recent months the ICC came under attack by the US for investigating potential US war criminals and their unlawful killings in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not a single African leader commented when the Trump administration slapped sanctions on the court, including visa ban against the Chief Prosecutor herself Mme Fatou Bensouda, for doing their mandated job. An action that ostensibly amounted to blatant obstruction of international justice.
After African countries complaining of ICC racism for a whole decade, we kept quiet when the court was prevented from investigating western war criminals.
Now here we have the European Union facing serious accusations of modern day slave trade, torture and mass murder of Africans on land and at sea with impunity in broad daylight and under a policy code-named Operation Sophia.
By Hussein Lumumba Amin
Kampala Uganda
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By JUSTUS WANGA
By VINCENT ACHUKA
