I started writing this blogpost about a year ago. I know that, because it was just after 39 people were found, suffocated to death, in the back of a refrigerated lorry in Essex. Despite several attempts, it never got beyond the bullet point stage. As the anniversary and the trial has meant that particular tragedy has hit the headlines again recently, I thought it was time I tried again to extract it from my drafts folder.
One of the things which I intended to include was a link to a short film on Youtube, "Oksijan", about another near-tragedy in the back of a lorry. It is not an easy watch. I highly recommend it.
In the early hours of the story breaking, the victims were given the wrong nationality, let alone any hope that their individual names and stories would be known. I think that was one of the first things that really struck me about this story. I thought of families who would perhaps never know the whereabouts of their loved ones who had left so full of hope for a better life. Of stories which would never be known, let alone heard. The names did start to be found, the nationality corrected, the stories uncovered; but between occasional glimpses at their individual humanity, in most of the articles on the subject they are just "39 migrants".
I know so many people who could have counted among those 39. So many who felt they had no choice but to risk hiding in the back of a lorry. So many who knew they might die but believed the alternative was worse.
Those 39 people, and countless others who have died en route to and through "Fortress Europe" will never have the chance to tell their story. But some stories, of those who survived, can be told. And they need to be heard. I guess this all links to my deep passion about sharing the stories of my very dear friends who made it out of the back of a lorry (literally, in many cases; or metaphorically). Not just sharing their stories for them, but more importantly, finding ways to give them the space and the opportunity to do so for themselves.
It is about honouring their lives, as individuals, as human beings. Perhaps it is also, in some way, about also honouring those who didn't make it to the end of the journey to find the safety and freedom they dreamed of.
Trafficking and smuggling (two different, but often confused, things) are complicated evils. I am sure far too much money changes hand from treating people as commodities and from exploiting vulnerability and hope. But, to my mind, there is a far deeper sin which underlies that one. It is the sin which allows countless victims, unnamed and unknown to die on the borders of Europe; it is the sin which leads to building higher walls and more complicated procedures to lock people out and send then searching for more and more desperate routes to safety; it is the sin which allows British politicians to question whether the rule of law needs to be applied to "these people".
It is the sin of believing, explicitly or subconsciously, that some people, by virtue simply of an accident of birth, are somehow more valuable, more worthy than others. It is a sin the outworking of which, as a British citizen, I admit to being sadly complicit but one against which I also seek to strive with every part of my being.
Maybe it's a sin which is so much easier to commit when they are just "39 migrants" or victims of yet another ship wreck of the Libyan coast that barely even hits the headlines anymore, or those whose desperation is dismissed in media headlines and party conference speeches about small boats on the channel. Maybe it is a sin which shifts, almost imperceptibly, when they instead become individuals with stories to tell, when they become those with whom we have shared good food and conversation, those with whom we have shared laughter and tears: those who we encounter, those who are friends.
I will keep helping people to tell stories. Because it matters.
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