UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said he is ‘shocked’ after Hungarian police fired tear gas and water cannon to force refugees – men, women, children and babies – back from its border.
Ban said such treatment of asylum seekers was ‘unacceptable’. Hundreds of refugees were involved in clashes at the Hungary-Serbia border on Wednesday, trying to fight their way through a razor-wire fence.
Hungary closed its entire border with Serbia on Tuesday after making it illegal to enter the country or damage the border fence. The country’s courts have even started fast-track trials of arrested refugees! Hungary defended its action. A spokesman accused the migrants of being like terrorists, using children as ‘human shields’.
With Hungary’s border now firmly shut, more and more refugees are getting onto buses or marching towards Croatia. So many are now arriving there that a special train service was also started late on Wednesday night.
However, Croatian Interior Minister Ranko Ostojic yesterday told national TV that the police were currently in control of the situation but if refugees continued to arrive in large numbers the authorities would have to think about taking a different approach, i.e. adopt Hungarian measures!
Slovenia’s prime minister has announced he’s tightening all its borders until there’s a common European solution to this crisis. He will be waiting in vain for a long time. Bulgaria is sending extra troops to its border with Turkey in case of a further influx of refugees, its defence minister says.
Refugee Amir Hassan, from Iraq, summed up the feelings of hundreds of thousands of people when he commented, ‘We fled wars and violence and did not expect such brutality and inhumane treatment in Europe.’ Capitalism and imperialism have created a massive crisis that they are completely incapable of resolving and it can only deepen!
The ‘refugee crisis’ is only a part of the worldwide economic and political crisis that capitalism and imperialism have created. The current crisis began in the 1990s when the US and UK resolved that they were going to starve Iraq into submission, to steal its oil, and imposed massive sanctions creating a situation where hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died from lack of food and medicines.
The then-US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, was undaunted by the slaughter of the children, and said that the deaths of Iraqi children were a price worth paying to bring down the regime of Saddam Hussein. However, this was not done till 2003 when over 100,000 Iraqis were murdered in the US-UK invasion, based on the lie that Iraq had wmds and was desperate to use them.
This invasion destroyed Iraq, created millions of refugees and also the basis for both Al-Qaeda and ISIS in Iraq. The US-UK axis then intervened in Libya in 2011, organised Islamists to overthrow and murder Colonel Gadaffi and smashed up a modern oil-rich country which now has three competing governments and daily dispatches masses of refugees to their deaths in the Med.
The imperialists were elated with their Libyan success, and resolved to transport Islamist militias to Syria to do the same there. Syria has proven to be a tougher nut to crack. Nevertheless, the country has been destroyed and millions of its people are now refugees and flocking towards Europe. Cameron and Obama’s ‘solution’ to this crisis is to turn the refugees away, and to invade and bomb Syria, to remove Assad, killing even more people and creating many more refugees in the process.
There is only one force that can resolve the refugee crisis and the crisis of imperialism.
This is the working class of the world in alliance with the peoples of the oppressed nations. Only the victory of the world socialist revolution and the creation of a world socialist republic, without borders, where production is organised to satisfy people’s needs, can create a better world and a better life for all people.
Forward to the victory of the world socialist revolution!
