West historically owes people of Mideast: Pundit

Press TV has conducted an interview with Ken Fero, a filmmaker and lecturer at Coventry University in London, to discuss the situation of desperate refugees in Europe.

 What follows is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Of course some of the scenes that we are seeing, just the one we just saw, the scene of the Syrian child washed ashore in Lebanon, are very heartbreaking. Looking at the European countries, were they to share the burden of these refugees as a Band-Aid solution to a really severe problem here?

Fero: I think we have to look at it historically. I mean historically Britain and America and the West has invaded, shot, bombed people in the Middle East, and so I think that history of a hundred years at least of intervention and destabilization cannot be covered with a Band- Aid. These are historical problems and I think the West owes the people of Syria, Iraq and many other countries not just across the Middle East but Africa as well, it owes them a debt and the first thing that Britain should do to pay that debt is to welcome the refugees that are trying to come into Europe today.

Press TV: Some of these policies still continue; it is as if this warmongering is not ending any time soon, and of course I am referring to Middle East and North Africa. Why isn’t there more of a push by some of these countries, like the US, to try to at least help with the problem?

Fero: I think you have to separate the governments in the West and the people of the West. Many people in the West disapprove of the warmongering of our governments. Many people in the West disapprove of the way that refugees are being treated and there are many, many people who have taken to the streets and will take to the streets over the coming weeks to protest against what they have seen.

Unfortunately, the images that we have seen are not unique. These just happen to be the ones that are filtering through now because of social media but again we can go back over the past hundred years and see many of these images.

Remember Britain in the early 20s invented carpet bombing of villages in Iraq when they were destabilizing that region. They went on to use that method of carpet bombing in the Second World War, and again it continues to bomb innocent civilians. So I think we have to bear that legacy and history in mind in the West when we start talking about taking very, very small numbers of very, very desperate people.

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