Tragic travel

 

Let me start by saying that I can imagine little worse than saying good bye to my parents or children or friends off an on innocent beach holiday and then being confronted not just with their cruel and apparently arbitrary death, but with my grief, and their suffering, being in the full glare of publicity.

There is nonetheless an uncomfortable, semi-symmetry between those travelling north across the Mediterranean to their deaths, and those travelling south. On the one hand, those escaping oppressive regimes across Africa and the Middle East drown in their thousands in leaking vessels run by human sharks, as they flee terror. On the other hand, northern Europeans seeking sun and a holiday break get gunned down by the very terror that is sending people to their deaths in the opposite direction.

It's hard to know which is worse. But I am sure that historians in two hundred years time will look on the geopolitics of the 21st century as in many ways incomprehensibly mad.

How was it, they will ask, that Europe went on trying to police its un-policeable and porous borders, when disparities of safety and stability, let alone economic prosperity, meant the pressures were unsustainable? You can send out marine missions as often as you like, but if desperate people know there is a better life here -- then all you can do to solve the problem long term is to think about solving those underlying disparities, rather than by blowing up already leaky vessels. (OK I know it's easier said than done, but you know what I mean.)

And how was it, they will ask, that northern Europeans came to take it for granted that they could go and soak up the sun on the beaches of poorer southern European and north African countries? I am not pointing the finger at anyone here. I take it for granted, as much as anyone else does, and I make for the Mediterranean for a summer break if I am lucky enough to have one. But when exactly was it that most of us started to think that 'time off' meant sunbathing on the shoreline of some relatively poorer country. And when was it that those relatively poorer countries started to stake their most of their economy on tourists like us, staying largely in foreign-built hotels (rather than, for example, actually making something), and so to make us and them vulnerable to exactly what tragically happened in Tunisia.

Hard questions, but just what we will be asking.