by Nick Thorpe
The plan mentioned two grounds for the inadmissibility of a claim for asylum in Greece. If a person had already been recognised as a refugee in Turkey or enjoyed what was described as ‘sufficient protection’ there. (The first country of asylum principle, Article 35 of the Asylum Procedures Directive of 2013). Or if the person had not yet been granted protection by Turkey, but Turkey was judged able to guarantee effective access to protection (the safe third country principle – Article 38 of the Asylum Procedures Directive).
Several other riders were added to the agreement. Belonging to a vulnerable category of refugee, or having relatives already in Europe who pleaded for family reunification, would be possible grounds for acceptance after all, and avoiding the boat trip back to Turkey. All rejections could be appealed. Migrants judged inadmissible, still waiting for a ruling on their appeals, would be held in closed reception centres on the Greek islands, while asylum seekers whose cases had not yet been decided would be held in open camps on the same islands.
In order to carry out the return plan, Frontex would provide eight ships with a capacity of 300–400 passengers each. In order to process all the applications, 200 Greek asylum case workers would be supplemented with 400 asylum experts sent by other EU states. And 1,500 police officers from around the EU would be provided, paid for and organised by Frontex. Containers capable of accommodating 20,000 people, more than tripling the existing 6,000 places, would be set up on the Greek islands. Over the next six months, Greece would also receive €280 million in EU funds to help implement the agreement. This added up to a huge turnaround of the Greek immigration machine. The ‘hotspots’ on the islands would no longer focus on the registration and screening of new arrivals, ahead of their swift transfer to the mainland, as they had until now. Instead, the new focus would be on implementing returns to Turkey.
The Action Plan got off to a shaky start. On the day it was agreed, there were around 7,000 asylum seekers on the Greek islands, and 36,000 on the mainland. The Turkish government made clear that they would not accept any of these people back, and interpreted the agreement to refer to all future arrivals in Greece from Turkey.19 In future, the Turkish EU minister Volkan Bozkir told the Anadolu News Agency, ‘tens of thousands’ of refugees would be returned to Turkey, ‘but not millions’.
Bulgarian prime minister Boyko Borisov immediately raised the spectre of hundreds of thousands of migrants storming his country’s incomplete fence on the border with Turkey if they could no longer take the sea route. He appealed for Bulgaria to be added to the agreement. As Bulgaria is an EU country bordering on Turkey, Borisov also opposed rapid visa liberalisation with Turkey. Cyprus, an EU member since 2004, also objected to any speeding up of EU accession talks for Turkey until the dispute over the 1974 invasion by Turkish forces and subsequent partition of the island, was resolved. Bulgaria and Cyprus were just two of the five countries to raise serious objections to the plan.20
The Hungarian government said it would accept the deal with Turkey only if there were no more relocations. ‘Relocations’ was the word which referred to EU plans to relocate asylum seekers currently in Greece and Italy to other EU countries under the EU quotas system. The word ‘resettlement’ referred to the resettling of people from outside the EU, to EU countries. The Hungarian approach drew the wrath of the Italian government of Matteo Renzi. Under the September 2015 Emergency Relocation Plan of the EU, Hungary was asked to accept 1,294 people from Italy and Greece.
France and Spain expressed their fears that the human rights of migrants would be harmed by the Action Plan. ‘We interpret it as contrary to the international law, to the Geneva Convention and to the European treaties,’ said Spanish foreign minister José Manuel García-Margallo. Many countries expressed the view that the EU was, at best, bribing Turkey to keep refugees on its own territory or, at worst, giving Turkey a ‘refugee gun’ which it could at any time use against the EU. ‘I expect we can make a deal with Turkey, but I have always said we can’t put ourselves at the mercy of Turkey,’ said Austrian foreign minister Sebastian Kurz.
Human rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch bitterly attacked the deal. ‘How could refugees be sent back to a country, Turkey, which did not fully respect the Geneva Convention?’ they asked. In their view, a cornerstone of the plan, that Turkey could already be regarded as a ‘safe third country’, was fundamentally flawed.21
The European Commission struggled to defend the plan, largely by adding more background explanations. According to a commentary drawn up by Donald Tusk’s office, the proposal to resettle one Syrian refugee for each refugee returned to Turkey was ‘temporary and extraordinary’, and migrants returned to Turkey would be ‘protected in accordance with international standards’. In other words, the EU was expecting most asylum seekers to actually stay in Turkey.
In response to this storm of criticism, Turkish officials remained surprisingly cheerful. The Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu played the good guy. His face beamed with happiness in every media photograph. Turkey’s all-powerful president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan barked from Ankara.22 Unlike certain EU governments, he said, Turkey would not behave hypocritically by closing its borders when faced with a humanitarian catastrophe. That comment did not bode well for Hungarian-Turkish relations. ‘We have to accept the people escaping bombs with an open-door policy from now on,’ Erdoğan said.
There were two other complications. On 13 March, a car-bomb exploded in Ankara, killing many people, most of them policemen. Also on 13 March, Angela Merkel’s governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU)-led coalition suffered serious setbacks in three regional elections, in votes which were interpreted by many as a referendum on her pro-refugee policy. The former CDU stronghold of Baden-Württemberg was won by the Greens (also a pro-migrant party), with the CDU reduced to second place. The right-wing populist, anti-refugee AfD stole the most votes from the CDU there, winning 15 per cent to displace the SPD as the third biggest party. ‘We have a very clear position on the refugee issue: we do not want to take in any,’ said Alexander Gauland, deputy leader of the AfD.
In Saxony-Anhalt in eastern Germany the CDU hung onto power, but the AfD came second with nearly 25 per cent.23 In the Rhineland-Palatinate, the AfD also did well, but the CDU and the SPD were well ahead. All in all, the elections left Merkel wounded but not defeated, and as determined as ever not to impose a cap on migrant numbers, which even many in her own party, and the CSU sister party in Bavaria, had long demanded. A cap on numbers would be a ‘short-term pseudo-solution’, she said. Only a ‘concerted European approach’ would bring down the numbers, and now the Action Plan offered her what looked like a concerted approach. The AfD, she said, was a ‘party that . . . offers no appropriate solutions to problems, but only stokes prejudice and divisions’.
Over the coming months, the success of the EU–Turkey deal would lie not so much in the details – few asylum seekers were actually sent back to Turkey – but rather in its overall deterrent effect, especially on refugees from Syria. To survive, Merkel badly needed the numbers of asylum seekers arriving in her country to drop. Germany needed to be seen to reimpose control. If she refused to introduce a cap herself, if other European states failed to agree to Germany’s cautious policy, at least she could count on Turkey.
What began as the ESI plan, and what became the German–Turkish–Dutch plan, pipped the Orbán plan at the post. ‘We won the race, but we did not win the narrative battle,’ Gerald Knaus told me years later. ‘Many people across Europe to this day believe the legend that Angela Merkel could have closed the German border.’24
Angela Merkel is widely seen as part of the problem, when in fact she was an important part of the solution.
CHAPTER TEN
THE STREET OF THE FOUR WINDS
Yes, Europe has Christian roots and it is Christianity’s responsibility to water those roots. But this must be done in a spirit of service, as in the washing of the feet.
Pope Franci
s1
Just as the deal with Turkey was being announced in Brussels on 18 March, 5 kilometres away across the clustered streets of the Belgian capital, police captured twenty-six-year-old Salah Abdeslam in the rue des Quatre-Vents, the Street of the Four Winds. The place could hardly have been better named. The EU in the spring of 2016 was buffeted by the four winds of climate change, migration, terrorism and populism. For the first time since its foundation, serious voices were doubting its capacity to survive the challenges it now faced from all directions.
Abdeslam was given away by an unusually large order of pizzas and a fingerprint on a glass found at a flat in the Forest district of Brussels three days earlier. Wearing a white hoodie, limping from a bullet wound in the leg, he was dragged from the house by heavily armed policemen, the only one of the ten attackers in Paris the previous November caught alive. His survival, both of the attacks and of the police attempts to arrest him, may not have been accidental, according to a report in the London Independent.2
The first IS communiqué, claiming responsibility for the Paris attacks, also mentioned an explosion in the 18th arrondissement of the French capital. But there was no terror-related incident there at all. A French police source told John Litchfield of the Independent that that was the district from which Abdeslam rang two friends in Brussels, to come and rescue him from the French capital, after dropping off his older brother Ibrahim. Ibrahim detonated his suicide vest outside the Comptoir Voltaire Café, causing only one other injury. According to that report, Abdeslam may have been just as worried about IS killing him in revenge for not carrying out his part in the atrocity as he was about Belgian police catching him. A Belgian website reported him telling a friend four days after the 13 November attacks that they had gone ‘too far’ and that he regretted taking part in them.
For four months he was the most wanted man in Europe. Until a few weeks before the Paris attacks, he used to enjoy a drink and a smoke in the bar in the rue Etiennes in the Molenbeek district of Brussels he ran with Ibrahim. Hardly the usual profiles of religious fundamentalists.
The big fear in Italy about the Turkey–EU agreement was that the island of Lampedusa and the rugged coast of Sicily would become the main point of entry for migrants to Europe, as the Aegean became too difficult. The fear was realised in so far as this ‘central Mediterranean’ route did become the most crowded. But the crowds were different. It was not as if a Syrian, fearing for his life in Damascus, would have chosen to travel through Turkey and Greece in 2015, but Libya and Italy in 2016. People fled whichever way they could, and with whichever smugglers they thought they could trust.
The refugees heading across the sea from North Africa to Italy came from the Horn of Africa, especially Eritrea. After them came those from sub-Saharan countries including Mali, Niger, Senegal and Nigeria.
The Africans reaching Libya were taking the dangerous route across the Sahara desert. Large numbers perished on the way.3 When they reached Libya they were handed on to equally ruthless smugglers in a country torn apart by armed gangs since the removal of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Then they faced the storms of the Mediterranean in poorly built or maintained ships, or large rubber dinghies with up to 150 men, women and children on each. The shortest sea distance between the Libyan coastal town of Sabratha, where most set out from, and the shore of Lampedusa, is 190 kilometres. It was a measure of their despair that, well aware of the dangers, they set out from home in the first place.
On 15 April 2016, the International Organization for Migration released figures which showed that in just three days, 6,000 migrants had crossed from Libya to Italy, compared to only 174 from the Turkish coast to the Greek islands. In the first three weeks after the EU–Turkey deal was signed, 325 migrants were returned from the islands to Turkey, including 10 Syrians, while 79 Syrians from Turkey were resettled in Western Europe. Migrants sent back to Turkey were temporarily housed in a new camp set up under the deal in the town of Kilis.
The Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, was quick to reassure his people that the growing number reaching their shores was a temporary, not a permanent, phenomenon.4 ‘There is a problem that concerns our country, but this is not an invasion,’ he said. ‘The number of boats is barely a few higher compared to last year.’ He knew the numbers: that year, 24,000 had crossed the sea to Italy by mid-April, compared to 19,000 for the same period the previous year. On the other hand, in the same period, 154,000 had crossed the Aegean from Turkey before the EU–Turkey deal was signed.
‘We have clear ideas about how to deal with it,’ said Renzi. The clear idea was to strike deals with North African and sub-Saharan countries to try to keep people at home in the first place. Also to step up naval patrols off Libya, just as NATO ships were to take part in policing Turkish coastal waters. Libyan coastguards were also to be better trained and equipped. That was easier in the Turkish case, as Turkey is a member of NATO. The anarchy in Libya meant that there was no effective government there to strike a deal with, on the Turkish model. There were an estimated 1 million non-Libyan nationals in Libya, according to the International Organization for Migration, some of them migrants, others foreigners working there. If the security situation became even worse, large numbers might try to cross to Italy. In the meantime, the Italian government instructed local authorities to find 15,000 extra beds to deal with the current spike in numbers.5
Italians were not just worried about the view to the south. Clouds were gathering along their northern border with Austria too. The increasingly anti-migrant government in Vienna was threatening to close the Brenner pass, the main route into Austria from Italy.
1 Afghan boys by the roadside near Ásotthalom, June 2015. The eyes of the Afghans lit up as I unpacked the big fruit. Do you have a knife? One of the boys asked. No? He shrugged, lifted the fat green cylindrical melon into the air, and let it crash onto the tarmac at his feet (p. 56).
2 Eric Özeme, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, at our first meeting on the roadside near Ásotthalom, June 2015. What did you know about Hungary before you came? What did you expect? I asked. ‘C’est la paix, quoi’ – it’s a country at peace! – he replied, and that was quite enough (p. 53).
3 Refugees queue for the buses at the Röszke cornfield that will take them to a registration centre, September 2015. Each morning I drove down to the cornfield at Röszke to do my early reports for the BBC beside the railway track as the sun came up, and long lines of asylum seekers appeared from the fields of maize and sunflowers (p. 63).
4 A field of tents at Röszke, September 2015. Most of the refugees carried a single rucksack with as many things as they could squeeze into it, but some carried two or three tied together, helping weaker members of their group. There were still just two or three mobile toilets in the police collecting point in the cornfield at Röszke (p. 73).
5 A Syrian boy holds up his new design for the flag of his country, East Station, Budapest, September 2015. It was a horizontal tricolour, with blue at the top, white in the middle, green at the bottom. In the middle of the white band were three hearts, each filled with tears (p. 99).
6 Hungarian police, East Station, Budapest, September 2015. After Monday’s brief respite in the tension … the mood darkened rapidly again, as the police sealed off all entrances to people who looked like refugees. In the streets nearby they carried out identity checks as shopkeepers and smugglers looked on (p. 85).
7 Yazidi refugees, Dimitrovgrad, Serbia, November 2015. A Yazidi family, from Sinjar in Iraq, showed me photos on their phone of Sinjar after the IS attack – street after street of homes in ruins. Their journey across Bulgaria had been rough. Five days in police detention near the border. Seventeen people kept by the smugglers in one small room (p. 142).
8 A volunteer serves food to Afghan refugees beside the police registration point at Dimitrovgrad, Serbia, November 2015. Most of the volunteers were young, pretty women from Germany, always smiling, handing out tea and warm food at all hours of
day and night. Most of the refugees here were Afghan men in their late teens or early twenties. The women said they never experienced sexual harassment (p. 142).
9 A sister and brother at the One Stop Centre refugee camp, Subotica, Serbia, September 2016. When I had finished asking my questions, she said she wanted to tell me something. She wanted, through me, to thank all the people around the world who help the poor people who have no land, and no country now, she said (p. 219).
10 Refugee women cooking supper on the Serbian side of the Hungarian border at Kelebia, September 2016. ‘Women will fight for their children’s sake. They don’t need to eat, they don’t need to sleep, so long as they feel they are taking their children to a place where they will be safe, where they might even be able to go to school’ (p. 219).
