HUNDREDS of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean won’t deter thousands more from trying to escape war, terror and poverty in North Africa and the Middle East.

In the past two weeks more than 10,000 would-be migrants travelling via North Africa to Italy have been rescued at sea.

Bradford political researcher and author Richard North partly attributes the growing problem to Articles 18 and 19 in the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights governing the right to asylum and the prohibition of mass expulsions back to a place of life-threatening danger.

He said: “These two Articles constitute an effective guarantee that once would-be migrants have overcome the obstacles and reached any territory of any EU member states, they will be fed and housed and, for the most part, given the coveted EU citizenship that will enable them to start new lives in Europe.”

Professor Paul Rogers, of Bradford University’s Peace Studies Department, has been warning for the last two years or two of the consequences of the growing gap between the world’s wealth-iest nations and the poorest, exacerbated by climate change.

He thinks these are the domin-ant factors driving people to take terrible risks on unreliable boats and rafts, trying to cross to the southern coasts of Italy.

He said: “Displacement through internal conflicts in Syria and Iraq and the after-effect of Western policies in Libya have helped to create this problem.

“Libya doesn’t have any effective central government which makes it easy for people smug-glers to latch on to refugees for large fees. The system of gov-ernment may have been a very bad one but it held the country together.

“There seems to be a lack of political will to deal with this. Increasing naval patrols, trying to intervene to stop smugglers operating, won’t make it the issue go away.

“The fundamental thing is nobody is facing up to the widening divide between the wealthier and poorer parts of the world. People who know they are on the margins will try anything to improve their life chances. Climate change will only make matters worse if millions of people are unable to feed themselves.” The problem goes back at least 16 years – long before the consequences of invasions, extremist incursions and internal upheavals following 9/11, said Richard North.

“In 1999, Spain erected two parallel four-metre wire fences, topped with razor wire and monitored by security cameras and guards, off the North African enclave of Mellila.

“The safest routes for migrants have been closed down. in the main they are from Somalia and Eritrea. It is not poverty that drives them but fear of death in their own countries.

“The Greek and Bulgarian Governments have also erected fences with the acquiescence of the EU. Whereas in the past refugees tried to reach Europe overland, those who do not settle in Kenya and South Africa are forced to go through unstable Libya and across the sea to reach Europe."

“Building barriers and then affording free entry to those who can pay to surmount them, is not the humane, efficient way to manage our affairs.”

The world had a similar problem 35 years ago with the Vietnamese Boat People. Ragged sail boats full of people fleeing blood-letting in Indochina arrived from South Vietnam, Laos, Thai-land, Cambodia/Kampuchea.

Like the refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean now, they risked more dangerous journeys across shark-filled seas to escape wars and fundamentalist political regimes such as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

They were fundamentalist Maoists, a Marxist version of Islamic State, who tried to obliterate history and more than a million people by terrorising Cambodia into an imagined state of idealogical purity.

The number who made the journey has been put as high as 1.5m. The number who perished varies from 50,000 to 200,000, according to the Australian Immigration Ministry.

Death by drowning, attacks by pirates who killed them or sold them into slavery and prostitution, were commonplace. Refugees deliberately sank their boats offshore to prevent auth-orities towing them out to sea.

In the end, most of them were accepted for settlement. The USA took 823,000; Britain 19,000; France 96,000; Australia and Canada accepted 137,000 each.

The problem was resolved because these big countries came to an arrangement with Cambodia and Vietnam: they would accept a quota of refugees, in return refugees wishing to return would be accepted.

There are designated UN refugee camps in Turkey and Jordan. Richard North has long argued that Britain’s foreign aid budget of £12 billion would be better spent on targeting specific things, such as improving these camps and creating economic projects to give the people in them realistic hope for the future.

On Saturday, May 16, Paul Rogers will be giving a talk "The War on ISIS Explained" in the Richmond Building of Bradford University, from 12.30- 1.30pm.