The chicken has come home to roost. Policies of the European powers to tacitly let, if not outright orchestrate, bloodshed continue in Middle East has finally led to beginning of disintegration of European Union (EU) with Brexit, or departure of the UK from the EU through Friday s referendum, setting off a wave of dejected reactions from European capitals. A conditioned regret message also came from the US.
It is against this backcloth that German Chancellor Angela Merkel stood up to the occasion. She duly equated it to a “watershed” but qualified her statement with the assertion that the decision was for the Brits to make. Speaking in Berlin, she then reminded everyone that the objective of the EU was “peace”.
And it is she who took the bull of migration by horns announcing the open-door policy based on assessment of the situation in which no other workable option was available. Her opponents may invoke, whatever reference to nationalism, it remains a fact that the solutions they proposed were no more than boxing themselves into their houses or sinking their heads into the sand.
What UK referendum shows is the worse than either. True, terrorists and religious extremists are mixed in crowds of migrants which the UK is afraid of. But it also remains a reality that the UK is just like a home away from home for these elements. After hacking of prominent bloggers and publishers, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed categorically said militants from the UK are behind these terror acts to stop which the UK needs to do more.
For years, Hizabut Tahrir operated its network in Pakistan from the UK and British citizens of Pakistani origin have been caught in many terrorist activities. Islamic State (IS) replenished its drying manpower from young boys and girls, blonds and blacks, from the UK. Friends of OBL, firebrands like Anjum Chaudhry and an army of extremists breathed fire into our societies from the UK, all in the name of peace.
Not so hidden is the fact that a considerable amount of petro dollars is channeled to Pakistan via the UK. This money goes into building ideological and militaristic breeding grounds for extremists. Even the pirs do not lag behind anyone. They collect voluminous nazranas from the UK and pull big crowds there.
Like the UK, other EU members are also staggering under the burden of millions of refugees, most of them milling out from war ravaged Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and its surrounding African areas. The EU members have been putting up a united stand on almost all major international issues for 60 years until boatloads of migrants started being beached at European shores in Italy and Greece.
This migrant crisis has ripped through the veneer of humanitarianism from the faces of the member states as none of them is willing to take the refugee and asylum seekers. However, they take them in as a token of their social and cultural values and as an EU obligation.
Nonetheless, the UK has done the unusual adopting a better-than-thou approach making face at the migrants and leaving the course when it was a time to stay. This is a blessing in disguise as a visa regime after Brexit would help contain movement of extremists from the UK onward to the EU states. Merkel will not spare any opportunity to prove her metal in this scenario so that the EU makes future choices in a realistic manner shedding its hyper reactive approach.