Europe’s Persistent, Pestilent Migration Crisis… -The iPINIONS Journal

It is making the mass migration John Steinbeck dramatized in The Grapes of Wrath look like a giddy gold rush. In fact, it’s often difficult to tell these days whether Europe is trying to cope with a migration or fend off an invasion.

The EU refused to prepare for a predictable rekindling of the migration crisis — and is now responding with deadly force [along] Greece’s northern border with Turkey and the Bulgarian-Turkish borderlands [in] violent scenes reminiscent of war zones.

Thousands of desperate migrants fleeing war zones — including mothers with babies in their arms — are storming barbed-wire fences to get into European Union territory to apply for political asylum, while Greek security forces in anti-riot gear beat them back and shoot rubber bullets and billowing clouds of tear gas at them.

(Foreign Policy, March 5, 2020)

The reason what is happening today was so predictable is that even I warned about it in commentaries like “Europe’s Migration Crisis: Sowing Seeds of Unintended but all too Foreseeable Consequences”, September 7, 2015:

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Even the United States is no longer welcoming unyielding waves of huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Therefore, as Orbán warns, it seems irresponsible for Europe to be doing so.

Accordingly, I reiterate that European leaders should coordinate comprehensive humanitarian interventions, enabled and protected by NATO (not UN) forces, to contain would-be migrants within their borders. It’s clearly far better to provide local safe zones than for migrants to continue risking life and limb, only to end up in splendid desolation in Europe, or in fetid isolation in internment camps, where millions are being detained today in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, [Greece], and, increasingly, in Hungary.

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What’s more, the titles to just a few of my commentaries show why I’ve watched for years in feckless despair as this crisis unfolded like a slow-motion train wreck:

“Europe Erecting Fences to Maintain Good Relations with African Neighbors,” October 8, 2005
“Lampedusa Tragedy Highlights Europe’s ‘Haitian’ Problem,” October 7, 2013
“African Migrants (Still) Turning Mediterranean Sea into Vast Cemetery,” June 1, 2016
“Truth About Viral Image of (Another) Syrian Boy,” August 24, 2016
“Colonial Ties Have Europe in Knots Over African Migration,” July 9, 2018

Meanwhile, migrants from Africa and the Middle East are disrupting the tranquility and prosperity of many frontline European communities (notably in Greece), so much so that locals who once welcomed them are now mounting daily protests to evict them.

In fact, the situation is becoming combustible in many communities. This, because increasingly restive migrants are protesting dire living conditions in refugee camps with as much fervor as increasingly fed-up locals are protesting surging crime and other vices, including sex and drug trafficking.

Apropos of this, I refer you to “‘It’s a powder keg ready to explode’: In Greek village, tensions simmer between refugees and locals,” CNBC, March 1, 2020.

But I hasten to note that leaders outside the EU have played a triggering and all too often exploitative role in this crisis. Here, for example, is how I indicted African leaders in this respect:

I just hope the damning irony is not lost on any proud African that, 50 years after decolonization, hundreds of Africans (men, women, and children) are risking their lives, practically every day, to subjugate themselves to the paternal mercies of their former colonial masters in Europe.

(“African Migrants Turning Mediterranean Sea into Vast Cemetery,” The iPINIONS Journal, February 12, 2015)

Yet the salutary neglect of those African leaders seems ingenuous compared with the diabolical machinations of leaders like Assad of Syria, Erdogan of Turkey, Putin of Russia, and yes, even Trump of the United States.

The titles to a few of my commentaries on this spectre of the crisis speak volumes.

“Now Houla: Assad of Syria Continues to Massacre with Impunity,” May 29, 2012
“Why Putin, Not Obama, Is the Master of Assad’s Fate,” December 14, 2012
“Bombing ISIS [in Syria] Smacks of Masturbatory Violence,” November 15, 2015
“Syria: Mission Accomplished?” April 15, 2018
“Trump Makes Way in Syria for Erdogan to Displace (or Massacre) the Kurds. Maybe…,” October 8, 2019

These commentaries make clear that I anticipated every move, as well as the all too predictable consequences, as world leaders played geopolitical chess games with the lives of the besieged people of Syria.

For example, in the last of the commentaries listed directly above, I reiterated my misgivings about the EU (and NATO) allowing Turkey to hold a veritable Damoclean sword over European countries. This pertains to the nearly four million refugees and migrants who want to storm EU borders but who Turkey has been holding at bay (a.k.a. hosting) pursuant to an agreement since 2016.

That’s why it came as no surprise that Turkey is now making the EU a new migration offer it can’t refuse:

Since Turkey announced on Feb. 28 that it would no longer abide by a 2016 deal to keep refugees on its territory, accusing the EU of falling short on commitments of financial support, some 35,000 migrants have massed on the border with Greece where they have been thrust back by Greek forces.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said … member states were willing to offer more money to Turkey beyond the 6 billion euros ($6.79 billion) pledged in 2016 [but] Turkey, which hosts almost 4 million refugees and migrants, first had to stop using migrants as a bargaining chip.

(Reuters, March 6, 2020)

Ka-ching!

This is undeniably craven. Erdogan is willfully using these hapless souls not only as a bargaining chip, but as chum. He clearly couldn’t care less how many of them perish while waiting in his purgatory or while migrating on his teaser run to Europe – like President Coriolanus Snow previewing his latest Hunger Games maze.

Yet I don’t blame Erdogan for extorting EU leaders for every dime he can get. And I have no sympathy for EU leaders whose manifest guilt is forcing them to pay – no matter how begrudgingly.

As I advised above, EU leaders should have dealt with displaced Syrians (who compose the vast majority of refugees and migrants in Turkey) by creating safe zones in Syria. That would not only have been the more honorable and humane thing to do, but – as Erdogan is making painfully clear – the more economical and efficient too.

It pains me to think how many lives would have been saved, and how many men, women, and children would have been spared their ongoing genocidal misery …

But only God knows how all the antagonists involved will eventually settle this hornet’s nest. In the meantime, God help the refugees and migrants who now wither hither and thither at their whim.

That said, I feel constrained to end this never-ending story of migration with this from “African Migrants (Still) Turning Mediterranean Sea into Vast Cemetery,” June 1, 2016:

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I’m acutely mindful that people have been migrating in similar fashion for similar reasons since time immemorial. What’s more, I readily admit that, if I were living in one of the countries of origin affected, I too would be migrating to Europe … by any means necessary.

I cannot overstate the comeuppance this crisis portends for Europeans — who are reacting to these Arab and African migrants with such hysterical xenophobia and racism. After all, Europeans used to hurl self-righteous criticisms at Americans for reacting to Haitian and Hispanic migrants the same way.

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How’s that for coming full circle…?