The family of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy whose body washed up on a Turkish beach during the 2015 refugee crisis, marked the fifth anniversary of his death to call for more help for people fleeing war and suffering.
The boy’s aunt, Tima Kurdi, on Tuesday urged the world not to continue to ignore the plight of refugees.
“We cannot close our eyes and turn our back and walk away from them,” she told reporters in Germany. “People all over the world continue to suffer and it's getting worse, not any better. And they are asking for help.”
Three-year-old Alan Kurdi was found on a beach near the Turkish resort of Bodrum along with his brother, Ghalib, five, and mother, Rehana, on September 2, 2015.
They died after their inflatable boat sank as they tried to reach the Greek island of Kos. Only the boys’ father, Abdullah, survived the journey.
Alan Kurdi was one of an estimated 20,000 people who have died trying to cross the Mediterranean since 2014 but the image of his lifeless body prompted world leaders to promise action.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that “humanity has drowned in the Mediterranean Sea” while the French government called for a Europe-wide mobilisation.
Rights groups say that governments have failed to live up to their promises.
The German rescue organisation Sea-Eye renamed its main ship after Alan Kurdi and plans to buy and refit a second boat named after Ghalib before the end of the year.
Sea-Eye said that it had been increasingly tied up in technical and legal disputes with Italian authorities since November last year.
It has been seeking a bigger ship to address the problems and is preparing to buy one backed by funds from the Catholic Church.
"We want to save people from drowning. The only way to do this is to send our ships to sea. That is why we need the Ghalib Kurdi," Gorden Isler, the chairman of Sea-Eye, said.
The recent large-scale wave of illegal immigration to Europe began in 2011, the year that the war in Syria started, but reached a peak in 2015. More than one million migrants arrived that year, with more than half of them from Syria.
The crisis left the EU divided with some countries, mainly in Eastern Europe, keeping their borders closed while Germany offered safety.
The dispute remains unresolved but the closure of borders owing to the coronavirus pandemic has limited opportunities for migrants to cross into Europe and led to an increase in attempted crossings by small boats.
Ms Kurdi said: “In the last five years, many people in Germany have committed themselves to helping refugees. Europe must now work to end the war in my home country. Europe must return to a human rights-based course and create humanitarian corridors.”
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Farage on Muslim Brotherhood
Nigel Farage told Reform's annual conference that the party will proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood if he becomes Prime Minister.
"We will stop dangerous organisations with links to terrorism operating in our country," he said. "Quite why we've been so gutless about this – both Labour and Conservative – I don't know.
“All across the Middle East, countries have banned and proscribed the Muslim Brotherhood as a dangerous organisation. We will do the very same.”
It is 10 years since a ground-breaking report into the Muslim Brotherhood by Sir John Jenkins.
Among the former diplomat's findings was an assessment that “the use of extreme violence in the pursuit of the perfect Islamic society” has “never been institutionally disowned” by the movement.
The prime minister at the time, David Cameron, who commissioned the report, said membership or association with the Muslim Brotherhood was a "possible indicator of extremism" but it would not be banned.
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Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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