The dead babies off the Libyan coast
Do not look closely at the photographs (not given with the article due to policy issues). Do not look at them at all. They will, in an instant, inspire pity, revulsion, anger and calls to "do something…now!"
How else might one react to photographs of toddlers washing up in the waves that lap the Libyan shore? Or for that matter the tangle of bodies, as twisted and tortured as those piled into the mass graves of Nazi death camps, crammed instead into the back of a truck in Austria to die, and not of Zyklon B, but of suffocation? There are many children among them as well, but indistinguishable in the mass of rotting flesh.
The people at Migrant Report, the Malta-based nongovernmental organization that published the snapshots of dead infants under the headline "The Pictures That Need to Be Seen" clearly wanted to provoke a reaction.
The dead babies are, according to Migrant Report, the victims of the latest tragedies off the shores of Zuwara, a town on the Libyan coast about 40 miles west of Tripoli. A boat sank over the weekend with more than 430 people aboard. Only 180 survived; only 111 cadavers were found; among those were the five little kids in the photographs.
What's needed to stop this grim tide is not more warships in the Mediterranean interdicting smugglers' boats, not more water cannons at the borders of the Balkans. In the medium term the solution lies in managing migration from Africa and the Middle East into Europe by providing legal avenues for asylum seekers in transit countries.
The only medium- and long-term solution for this horrific global problem is to build peace in the war zones of Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia, —the three countries that account for more than half of the world's refugees; impose order on the chaos of Libya; deliver some modicum of freedom and prosperity in West and East Africa; and greater social and economic justice in Latin America.
To do that requires reliable long-term policies to promote development and good governance there.
There is little in our experience in the last 50 years that suggests that such policies will materialize.
So, do not look at these pictures. Things could be done to avoid such tragedies in the future, but those things won't be done. We will build walls, we will deploy fleets, and we will turn away when the lifeless children wash up on those distant shores.
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