Tribune. Throughout the ages, the Kurds have been a people of migrants. From every part of our land, our daughters and sons have fled war and persecution, plague – and even genocide. The Kurds have never been hesitant or blind in the face of hardship.
Over the past month, the flight of Kurdish migrants to Europe and the desperate situations they have faced in the frozen forests of Belarus and on the shores of the English Channel have been horrific. In recent days, the tragedy in La Mancha has shocked us. The deaths of 27 people – mostly from the Kurdistan region of Iraq – drowned in freezing water should never have happened.
We have a lot of information about the journey of many victims, and we are in the process of learning more. But what I can say at this point is that those who died have been deceived and betrayed. They have been pawns in a political power game, whose architects pay no attention to their suffering and no value to their lives.
We are awaiting answers from our British friends to know if the ship which sank was in their territorial waters when the first distress calls were launched. We also hope for full cooperation from our partners in France. This must never happen again.
The smuggling networks behind the atrocity aim to flood the eurozone with migrants in order to put pressure on political leaders in a conflict between Belarus and Brussels. They seized the opportunity to use our people and take some of its members hostage, in a barely disguised cynical pantomime, remaining indifferent to the humanity of those they have misled.
The origins of this crisis are political and criminal
We have taken firm action to prevent our people from embarking on journeys facilitated by political leaders in complicity with human traffickers and criminal gangs. Travel agents who assisted with the migration have been arrested and will be prosecuted. The automatic granting of visas has been stopped, and we will help anyone who wants to return to Iraqi Kurdistan. So far nearly 2,000 of our citizens have returned, many of them carrying the message that what was sold to them as a promise of a better life was more of a death trap – and that no one should try to follow them.
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