I have a mixed relationship with Vice. I still associate it with a lackadaisically sensationalist hipster style of reportage – an over-easy ‘whoa, cool’ attitude to the darkest dramas unfolding across our planet.
But it’s also giving us some of the most compelling foreign news coverage on the net, and for all my prejudices I find myself turning to it increasingly often.
I watched its trailer for Europe or Die – Libya’s Migrant Jails through the gaps between my fingers.
Some of the imagery is so casually awful, I hesitate to share it. The clip is suffused with the visual tropes of a horror movie; the below sea view of the boat, the lingering shots of drowned bodies, set to an atonal dread-filled soundtrack.
Is this really the way?
And yet, and yet. Europeans surely need something to wake us up from our casual ignorance of the mass grave lapping against our shores.
More than 3000 migrants died in the Mediterranean Sea last year, many of them fleeing the war in Syria, and growing insecurity in Libya. The stories of those who survived is the stuff of nightmares. Pope Francis last year issued a global appeal for solidarity to stop the vast cemetery on our doorstep. Aid agencies are deploying cutting edge story-telling tools to sound the alarm. Horrifying incidents are reported by newspapers with numbing regularity.
But to no avail.
The major European programme to rescue migrants at sea – Mare Nostrum – has been discontinued, replaced with Operation Triton, which is more interested in keeping people out than saving them. There are already indications that this year will see more drownings than the last.
I remember learning as a child of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’. Their plight became one of the iconic images of that era, a reference point shared across the world, and I still have memories of those reports.
By contrast, it feels like the crisis of the Mediterranean boat people, if the term is appropriate, is causing barely a ripple, tutted over briefly and then forgotten.
For all its Hollywood thriller sensibilities, maybe Vice has the right approach. At the very least, it’s trying.
How else to give this horror the attention it deserves?
aidinsider 