Hotel in Paris

In the middle of a Europe gone hysterical with refugee’s issues, we should be able to take a better look at ourselves, and be ashamed. And I am not talking only on the current disparaged electoral campaign of conservative -and racist- english politicians “do you think what we think?”, or some other populist and “spontaneous” declaration of a dutch right winger, staple of today political debate. What I am talking now is about the cold decision of allocate asylum seekers in a hotel, converted overnight in a deadly furnace.

I should go back to my forays in european tourism. It is hard to forget a week expend in a cheap room of Paris, walking each day back and forth to the Louvre, to finally see with own eyes pieces that I stare at (along the previous twenty five years) in book plates and posters. Paris still remains as the repository of treasures that allow me to be proud of my humanity. The rather basic sleeping quarter was irrelevant, I was with money enough in my pockets to roam the galleries during the day, and still walk the streets at night.

Politicians, and a rather relevant group of our citizens today, are threatened by the illegal immigration, by the refugee. Or so they shout untiringly in the media. And so different governments are in the struggle for different solutions. At one extreme we have the dutch government trying to kick out 26000 asylum seekers that are waiting for a decision more than five years already. At the other extreme we have the Spanish government, with her policy of legalizing workers that lack official documents. And somewhere in between we had the French, willing to put money of the city council for renting hotels of Paris, Paris of all places! to temporarily allocate the asylum seekers. Policy apparently illuminated and humanitarian. It was easy to think that the asylum seekers would then enjoy the resources of one of the most important cities of the world, one that still today holds high our culture.

But to my shame, that was far away from reality. The hotel in the center of the city resulted to be a new oven, were already twenty persons burned to death. The hotel thought as a temporary house resulted in a place with only an emergency exit, with un-existent fire fighting resources. A wrecking hell as departure from this world, for persons that already escaped from the hell of their own countries. Waiting for the permission to live in a better world, they died in fire.

I wonder if this tragedy, perfect mirror of our immeasurable egoism at making from the asylum seekers a political question (instead of the humanitarian need that it is) will be able to put again in context not only the severity of the problem, but also the cruelty of the solutions that are today offered. Sadly I believe that the scorched remains of the asylum seekers will not weight heavily in the conscience of the nowadays European, nor politician nor citizen. And it should. If Europe desires any credibility in the Brussels declarations of “being a social and humanitarian force in the world” Europe should be deeply ashamed of the people that looking for a better future in that project found death in fire.