Opinion: Raise the drawbridge! EU refugee policy [View all]

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http://www.dw.com/en/opinion-raise-the-drawbridge-eu-refugee-policy/a-19129452

Refugees from Syria will soon no longer be able to reach the European Union. An inhumane success for the bloc, writes Bernd Riegert.

Opinion: Raise the drawbridge! EU refugee policy
Bernd Riegert
19.03.2016

Fortress Europe is secured. Beginning at midnight on Saturday, refugees arriving in Greece are to be sent back to Turkey after a legally dubious fast-track procedure. Overnight, Turkey has been elevated to the status of a safe third country, something that had previously been unimaginable. With this tactic of deterrence and closure, the European Union is blatantly contravening both the spirit and the letter of the UN Refugee Convention and the much-cited European values. If the plan succeeds, the number of refugees and migrants coming over the Aegean is meant to sink to zero. Because the land border of the EU to Turkey has already also been closed to refugees and migrants for years, it is now de facto impossible to reach the EU via this route at all. The right to asylum still exists on paper, but there is no way anymore of applying for it.

The advocates of the fortress mentality have mercilessly asserted themselves over the past few months. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has followed them by executing a radical turnaround in her refugee policy. The EU has agreed only on defending itself against refugees, not on taking them in and distributing them. The former is the only true "European solution" that Merkel has achieved. Because the EU itself was incapable of resolving the crisis, a dubious pact with Turkey had to be made. The fate of the refugees and migrants is the last thing to matter here. The German chancellor and her European colleagues should stop trying to disguise their ice-cold calculation as a humanitarian gesture. That is pure hypocrisy.

A last, even more dangerous route remains

There were not and are not any legal ways for refugees and asylum-seekers to travel into the EU anyway. The last "irregular" route is now the dangerous one via North Africa to Italy, which had lost some of its importance over the past year. Despite all attempts to make it impossible to use this route by deploying EU naval task forces off the Libyan coast, however, some 10,000 people still arrived in Italy this way in the first months of this year alone. The EU strategists would all too gladly declare Libya a safe third country as well so that an expulsion model along the lines of the one with Turkey could be established. But at the moment, this is not possible owing to the fact that Libya has no government with which to negotiate. In the view of the fortress keepers in the EU, many things were better while Libya was still being ruled by the dictator Gaddafi. Gaddafi used to detain refugees in return for EU money, and prohibited the journey over the Mediterranean.

Incidentally, Spain has been practicing this perfidious method to "success" in conjunction with Morocco, Western Sahara and Senegal for years. Refugees and migrants from North Africa that are picked up by joint coastal patrols are taken directly back to the North African coast. Currently, only a few hundred people per year manage to make their way to Spain via this route. As an advance preventive measure, Bulgaria would already like to be given permission to also send back refugees who will now perhaps land on its shores after coming directly over the Black Sea from Turkey.