PRBH bans pic of Syrian boy

They say a picture says 1,000 words. Well, here is my 1000-word description of the picture banned by PRBH Admin.

The background in the picture is beautiful. It’s a scene you might expect to see on holiday – a lovely cove as the waves on what looks like a warm day lap onto the beach.

The waves are not particularly choppy, and in the background, there are some shrubs, rocks and a small stretch of sand. The picture was taken off Bodrum in Turkey.

But the image, while it contains scenery, is not a scenic picture or a holiday snap.

In the foreground lies the body of a young boy, dressed in a red T-shirt and blue trousers. One of the trouser-legs comes down just below the boy’s left knee. He is wearing blue and yellow trainers.

The boy is lying perpendicular to the water’s edge, face down, with his face angled slightly to the left. His nose and mouth look to be immersed in the shallow waters of a lapping wave. He has short, brown hair and white skin.

The boy’s T-shirt covers his shoulders and most of his upper body, leaving his upper hip area and midriff exposed. His feet are together, the soles of his shoes facing away from t inland.

Standing near him is an official of some kind. A Turkish official, who we see from the back. He has words in Turkish, in white lettering on a high-viz orange background. Some of them say “OLAY TERI INCLEME” (in capitals), which means Crime Scene Investigation.

He is slightly crouched, not moving towards the boy, but apparently writing something down on a clipboard. He is wearing a green beret with some kind of insignia on t.

He is wearing what look like pale brown military-style fatigue trousers, neatly wrapped inside large, black, military-style boots. On his left arm is a yellow symbol.

We cannot tell what he is feeling, because he has his back to us.

The photographer may have been as close as ten feet away from the boy, but in these days of photo-lenses, who really knows?

The boy was one of 11 Syrians who drowned off the coastal town of Bodrum, a popular seaside resort. We don’t know who else may have seen the body of the boy as it washed ashore, or what the exact circumstances of his death may have been.

What we do know is that many thousands of Syrians have been fleeing a horrible war in their country, and that this refugee crisis has been building for quite some time. Sometimes in these situations, a tired and weary Western public turn their backs on a situation that is genuinely confusing, and seems to present no immediate solution.

And sometimes in situations like these, one single image can change people’s perceptions. Such as the pic we all remember from the Vietnam War of the little girl fleeing a US air attack. Such as the pictures of the Ethiopian famine.

Whether the pictures are “tasteful” or not, they are accurate representations of real events. This boy will have died for nothing if his picture is censored or ignored because of Western high-minded ideas about what is or what is not “tasteful”.

The picture has been used widely in the media. This has not been done with the intention of upsetting his close relatives or to “entertain”. The effect has been to increase pressure on David Cameron to, for once, make an exception to a harsh immigration policy that has seen Britain take slightly more than 4,000 Syrian refugees in four years, while Germany has taken in excess of 50,000.

Details of the boy have emerged, thanks to the efforts of journalists. According to the Guardian: “Turkish media identified the boy as three-year-old Aylan Kurdi and reported that his five-year-old brother had also met a similar death. Both had reportedly hailed from the northern Syrian town of Kobani, the site of fierce fighting between Islamic state insurgents and Kurdish forces earlier this year.”

It has also been reported that Aylan’s family had been heading for Canada. His mother also drowned, but his father survived. Their dream of escape to a quiet, Western country where they could start again became real events in which three of the family died. The fact that the boys had an aunt in Vancouver demonstrates how interconnected the world is, and how many people are potentially affected by a disaster such as this.

Aylan and his mother and brother are among many to have died in the Mediterranean Sea in recent months. We know this. Sometimes, the public mood can change very quickly and this can lead to action which can prevent similar deaths happening in the future.

Action such as calls for David Cameron to let in more Syrians; action such as collecting food and clothes from Brighton & Hove, as I have seen recently, for the people in the camps in Calais.

When opinion changes like this, we should encourage it, rather than jumping in and saying that the picture that changed the mood is somehow the problem and then criticising anyone who acts on it.

In response to the picture, David Cameron has said he wants to tackle “the causes” of the problem, rather than letting more Syrians come to Britain. This is mealy-mouthed nonsense from a man who doesn’t care.

Let’s not be like him. Let those of us who object to such pictures take pause for thought, consider their effects and join in the campaigns and activities, locally and nationally. Let us recognise that pictures can help humanise those that are collectively often dismissed with mere words such as “migrant”, “Syrian” or even “refugee”.

On a trip to Auschwitz two years ago I entered a room full of human hair collected from people that died there under the Nazis. No one knows who’s the hair is, no one has sought to ban this, one of the most upsetting displays I have ever seen, and this is why it is wrong to ban the picture of the little boy, Aylan.