Aylan Kurdi, R.I.P.
September 7, 2015
Welcome back. We hope that your August brought a bit of rest and good cheer. And to our readers in the United States: happy Labor Day, that unofficial marker of summer’s close.
We two Matts had drafted a welcome-back missive about how the August turmoil in global equity markets may be presaging trouble in the real economies of China and others. And then we saw the pictures of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, and we ripped up that draft.
Pictures of little Aylan swept around the world on Wednesday: of his lifeless body face-down on the shores of a Turkish beach, and of him being cradled by a Good Samaritan police officer. Aylan, his five-year-old brother Galip, and his 27-year-old mother—three of the estimated over 11 million Syrians displaced by that country’s hellish civil war—drowned when their 15-foot boat attempting to smuggle them and others into Greece capsized.
We acknowledge that such tragedies befall the world every day and are largely ignored by the world media. Yet sometimes the anthropomorphizing abstractions we numbingly apply to these tragedies (civil wars that rage, pandemic viruses that spread, and so forth) need to be punctuated by stark examples. There’s not much sharper than a photograph of a three-year-old who, God love him, you would think is napping if you did not know the brutal truth. Who can look upon the lifeless, innocent Aylan and not anguish at the inability of world leaders to stop the chaos that killed him?
We digress from our usual topics to underscore the deep Slaughter & Rees theme that leadership really, really matters to people’s lives. When we talk about leaders and their choices, we speak not just of markets and policies and revenues and costs. What we ultimately speak about is people: the workers and their children and their communities that are supposed to be the focus of leaders’ efforts. Leadership should not be about the leaders: their egos and their poll numbers and their aspirations to burnish their legacies. It should ultimately be about aspiring to better the human condition—most of all the human condition of the world’s most needy and most vulnerable. Of the Aylans.
Yes, EU leaders grapple with the Greek crisis, examining macroeconomic aggregates like debt-to-GDP ratios. But their dithering indecision has hurt the poor and the elderly in Greece in so many ways, such as hospitals unable to care for the sick. Yes, U.S. leaders devote time and energy to reforming economic policies like taxation of multinational companies, investment in crumbling infrastructure, and abstruse trade acronyms like TPP and TTIP. But when non-partisan reform continues to fail to appear because of partisan bickering, the victims are the millions of workers across America, worried paycheck to paycheck about why better jobs and a brighter feature keep receding into tomorrow.
And then there is Syria. Yes, world leaders intone about red lines not to be crossed, about shrapnel bombs and chemical weapons and collateral damage. Yet the cowardly tyrant Bashar al-Assad remains in power, responsible for the death of at least 250,000 people, for the displacement of 11 million, and for the world’s most pressing humanitarian crisis.
We don’t claim to have an easy fix to Syria’s civil war. We do agree with those arguing that for both moral and economic reasons, the EU should open its doors to many more Syrian refugees. We do ask that as you return from summer holiday to whatever your leadership role might be, remember that why you lead should ultimately be not for you but for others.
And please find a moment today to hold a respectful thought for Aylan and for all those people every day whom leaders let down. Thank you.
Articles © 2015 Matthew Slaughter and Matthew Rees. All rights reserved.
Publication © 2015 Trustees of Dartmouth College. All rights reserved.