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It's partly about timing, circumstance and the exceptional power of last September's photos of Aylan Kurdi. But it's also because sensitivities are growing dull. Boats arrive on Europe's shores daily, or sink on the way - like the one that capsized off Turkey's coast on Saturday, killing at least 37 people including babies and other young children. Images from the latest tragedy, including the bodies of children, failed to generate the same level of shock.
Fears - that refugees will stage extremist attacks or molest women - threaten to displace compassion. And Europe has yet to find the magic solution to its migrant dilemma. "The public seems to be kind of immunized. They don't want to see it anymore," said Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Some are rebelling against the numbness. Greek soccer players held a sit-in solidarity protest after the latest refugee drownings. Artist Ai Weiwei, wanting kinder migrant policies, re-enacted Aylan's death.
The lifeless body of a migrant boy lies on the beach near the Aegean town of Ayvacik, Canakkale, Turkey. Have we hardened so much, so fast? Five months ago, a 3-year-old Syrian boy’s corpse on a Turkish beach galvanized public action. Now, strikingly similar images are generating little more than a collective shrug.
The photos of Aylan weren't the first or last to document the fatal risk that families take to flee Syria's war for something better in Europe. But his lifeless, tidily-dressed body - first face-down on the sand, later in the arms of a police officer - captured the collective imagination like no other. In an era when images are ubiquitous and fleeting, it stood out. Unusually, he was quickly identified and found to have relatives in Canada, which helped his story go global. "People react very strongly to individual stories," Fleming said. "It was a single boy on the beach, looking like my son, my little brother, in a sleeping position." The image became shorthand for the refugee crisis and government inaction. It triggered soul-searching on a global and personal level, and volunteers from Britain to Greece showed up to feed and shelter new arrivals.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said refugees from Middle Eastern conflict zones will go back home after the wars in their respective countries have concluded. The comments came during a meeting with colleagues in her Christian Democratic Union in the German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Saturday. "We need ... to say to people that this is a temporary residential status and we expect that, once there is peace in Syria again, once [the Islamic State] has been defeated in Iraq, that you go back to your home country with the knowledge that you have gained," Germany's state-run Deutsche Welle news quoted Merkel as saying.
Merkel and her allies have faced strong criticism from opposition conservatives in recent days over Germany's "open-door" policy, which does not place caps on the number of refugees entering the country. More than 1 million asylum seekers entered Germany last year, and German officials say an average of 2,000 entered the country each day in January. Tensions have been high following a wave of sexual assaults on New Year's Eve by men of North African and Middle Eastern origin in Cologne in other cities.
Merkel argued on Saturday that 70 percent of refugees from the former Yugoslavia who arrived in Germany in the 1990s returned home once it was deemed safe to do so. She also said a collapse of the European Union's passport-free Schengen zone would have a negative impact on all member states. Merkel's comments follow threats by Horst Seehofer, leader of the CDU's sister party, the Christian Social Union, to take Merkel's government to court in order to stop the flow of incoming refugees. They also follow calls by Frauke Petry, head of the right-wing, isolationist Alternativ fuer Deutschland party, for police to shoot migrants attempting to enter Germany illegally.
Merkel says refugees will return home after war is over
