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Russian diplomat: West’s ignoring traditional values triggers humanitarian catastrophes

The diplomat says the European Union leaders have proved to be helpless "in the face of the migration problem"

WARSWA, September 19. /TASS/. The current migration crisis in the European Union and its adverse impacts are rooted in the West’s practice of imposing superficial assets of democracy and ignoring traditional values, a Russian foreign ministry official said on Monday.

"The United States and the European Union should finally realize that reduction of superficial assets of democracy to absurdity and ignoring traditional values entail a humanitarian catastrophe which deprives millions of people of the right to housing, water, meals, education, medical services and even the most essential right - the right to life," Anatoly Viktorov, director of the ministry’s humanitarian cooperation and human rights department, said at the opening of the annual OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting.

He said the European Union leaders have proved to be helpless "in the face of the migration problem stemming from the pernicious course of a number of Western countries towards coercive rearrangement of the world order, first of all in the Middle East and North African countries."

"The situation is aggravated by the absence of a clear and common position of the European Union. Some of its members are ignoring the opinion of their own nations boasting liberal attitudes towards refugees and thus giving them false expectations," he said. "Other states are seeking to fence themselves off migrants by means of walls and toughened migration laws. As a result, people in despair, with children, women and the elder among them, who are seeking to escape from wars and conflicts, have to face new trials, inhumane treatment and often violence, instead of promised comfort and safe life."

"Some of our colleagues, absorbed in fanning anti-Russian hysteria, have overlooked that they have discredited the very idea of advocacy of human rights and freedoms they are so deeply concerned with," Viktorov said.

"It is necessary to admit that the OSCE is demonstrating apparent imbalance between the three baskets stemming from the biasedness of the Western states. On the backdrop of outsized attention to the human dimension, constructive cooperation in the two other areas - military political and economic - has been immolated and it is having a negative impact on the authority of the organization in general," the Russian diplomat stressed.