Earlier this week, the horrific find of 39 dead bodies in a lorry trailer in Purfleet in Essex shocked the world. The 31 men and eight women were Chinese nationals, one a teenager, and the process of identifying them and informing their loved ones of the tragedy is ongoing.
The trailer had travelled from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge. This is reminiscent of a similarly horrifying event in 2000, when two Chinese people survived a journey that 58 people died in, also in a refrigerated truck from Zeebrugge.
In this week’s case, the 25-year-old lorry driver from Northern Ireland who had picked up the trailer in Essex has been arrested on suspicion of murder. Nobody has yet been charged.
The most haunting aspect of this disaster, for me, is the thought of being one of the people in the trailer who saw their compatriots die, one by one, knowing that unless help came, they would soon submit to the same fate. These were people who had travelled the world to come here, to seek something better for themselves. Instead, they died in a refrigerated lorry with dozens of others.
It is heartbreaking. It is painful. It is shameful.
This sense of shame should affect everybody who has worked to tighten borders. Who have helped to make it harder for people to enter a country. Anyone who has fought to close down access… these are the people who forced 39 people into a cramped, freezing container to be shipped to their deaths.
Without such obscene border controls, the organised crime gangs who traffic people from country to country, who take money and assault their charges then send them off to the next place, the next gang, the next abuse, would have no way to make money. The gangs who perhaps work with a lorry driver somewhere in the system to turn a blind eye to the scores of people they were going to carry from one place to the next would have nothing to do if those people could catch a ferry or catch a plane and walk in with dignity and humanity and be welcomed.
Matthew Carter from the Red Cross told Channel 4 News that “it’s hard to overstate the desperation that people must feel to put themselves in the danger of getting in the back of a lorry like this […] Over the last few years, we’ve seen migration getting harder and harder to achieve and the legal routes for migrants to come to places like the UK and claim their legal right to asylum shrinking. We’ve been calling on the UK government to open up some safer legal routes for people to come here and not rely on smuggling, which can end in tragedy”.
It is thought that those who need to travel are now aware that busy ports and routes, like Dover to Calais, are now using advanced technology to scan cargo and even detect heartbeats. With smaller ports and routes like Zeebrugge to Purfleet, there are fewer checks and perhaps more opportunities to exploit the journey. This disaster may be the impetus for this to change.
But no amount of checks can outsmart the most determined and the most desperate. If your life is threatened where you are coming from, you may risk your life to get away. We should not add such implicit danger to the journeys of those who have no other hope.
If we allowed people to simply walk into the country, these 39 people would not be dead. If we welcomed them at airports and sea ports instead of making it as hard as possible for them to sneak in, they would not get into a refrigerated lorry and hope simply to survive. They would not die in that refrigerated lorry.
Nor would others in their situation try to cross the Mediterranean in an inadequate boat. Nor would they try to swim the Channel. Nor would they send their children across the ocean in a dinghy.
The entire Western world is failing migrants and asylum seekers by putting them in a position where they have to risk their lives simply to try, ironically, to survive the world that has already treated them so cruelly.
Image credit: Jeanne Menjoulet