“I want to express … my endless grief at the dozens of deaths and the human tragedy playing out in our seas,” he told parliament. “The waves of the Aegean are not just washing up dead refugees, dead children, but (also) the very civilization of Europe.”
“What about the tens of thousands of living children, who are cramming the roads of migration?” he said.
Tsipras blamed the migrant flows on western military interventions in the Middle East, which he said furthered geopolitical interests rather than democracy.
“And now, those who sowed winds are reaping whirlwinds, but these mainly afflict reception countries,” he added.
“I feel ashamed of Europe’s inability to effectively address this human drama, and of the level of debate … where everyone tries to shift responsibility to someone else,” Tsipras said.
At least there is one European leader who “gets it” when it comes to explaining why hundreds of thousands of people who were living with a repressive regime for decades suddenly decided it was time to flee to Europe.
That is, it’s not like Syrians didn’t know their government had autocratic tendencies – a couple of hundred thousand people didn’t just wake up one day and say “hey, this guy might be a dictator, let’s leave and settle in Germany.” Rather, the West and its regional allies armed multiple Sunni extremist groups on the way to starting a civil war and now, Europe is discovering what happens when you foment sectarian violence in the Mid-East.
Of course it won’t matter. No one listens to Tsipras anymore thanks to the troika’s efforts to subvert democracy in Greece and discredit someone who might otherwise have become an important figure in the world of geopolitics. And so, the charade will continue: first blame the “brutal dictatorship,” then claim the Russians are making it worse.
