Cause and effect

One of the questions of our age is why do desperate refugees risk their lives to cross the English Channel. Similarly, why are so many young men willing to be political pawns lured to the Belarus border with Poland by cheap flights from the Middle East? One of the many tragic facts that have emerged from the nasty game Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko is playing to goad the West is that more than half of the people he has shipped to his borders are from Iraqi Kurdistan. Our report from the embryonic Kurdish state on Page 26 goes some way to explain why so many are willing to risk so much to gain access to Europe either by being encouraged in seemingly futile attempts to cross into Poland or to pay exorbitant amounts to risk all on inflatable boats. The sheer hopelessness of those trapped in refugee camps for years on end, the lack of opportunities created by a sclerotic and corrupt political system thwarting the ambition of a generation, and the violence and despair, all result in an exodus that is going to be hard to stop. What is clear from Anna Pozzi’s powerful report is the shared sense among those dispossessed refugees is that they have been forgotten and that the world’s focus has moved on. As we concentrate on what is happening on our borders and how to deal with the few who manage to reach them, we seem to have tired of the difficult process of sorting out the problems driving such desperate measures and have failed in dealing with the root causes. Sadly Iraqi Kurdistan is just one of those problems - there are many more around the world.