EU killing African immigrants

Today’s African leaders are all mostlikely 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 U.S.

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 antiimmigration 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, U.S. 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 U.S., 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 would not dare say or do anything against their foreign masters’ wishes. In fact they have become the enforcers of the tyranny 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 hear 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 U.S. for investigating potential U.S. 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 EU 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.

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Hussein Lumumba Amin is social-political commentator based in Kampala