In October of last year, official Rome signed an astonishing agreement with a man long considered enemy of democracy No. 1 – the Libyan dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The essence of the agreement: on the territory of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, using Italian money, special camps will be set up where refugees from African countries, who for many years have been flowing in an endless stream through Libya to Italy, will be held.
In addition, the heads of police departments of both states also signed a secret agreement under which Italy supplies Libya with helicopters, radar installations, and electronic night-vision devices – all so that the Libyans could more carefully monitor their borders, which are located not far from the Italian coast. For his useful camp services, Gaddafi asked the Italians for very little – support in the UN vote on lifting the embargo on arms trade with Libya.
Refugee camps in the desert... Just last year, the leaders of the European Union member states shelved a similar project presented by the British government. At that time, London proposed creating “centers” for refugees on European money in countries bordering the EU – Albania, Ukraine, Russia, and Morocco – and, according to this project, asylum seekers who had already entered EU countries were also to be sent to these camps. Today this topic seems to have become relevant again.
Recently, Germany’s Interior Minister Otto Schily, apparently impressed by the desperate rescue operation of the German charitable organization Cap Anamur (a ship chartered by this organization picked up 37 Africans from a sinking ferry in the Mediterranean, after which the leadership of Cap Anamur literally twisted the Italian government’s arm, securing the admission of these people to the country), said approximately the following: “African problems should be solved in Africa! We want to give refugees who are now crossing the Mediterranean at the risk of their lives the opportunity to file their applications in North African countries” – for which he received a veritable storm of criticism from many German politicians.
For example, the deputy head of the CDU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, Wolfgang Schäuble, called this project “concentration camps in the Sahara” and stressed that such camps “in no case will solve anything.” The Scandinavian countries, traditionally friendly towards African refugees, also reacted to Schily’s statements without much understanding. “Every refugee must have the opportunity to apply for political asylum in the country where they would like to stay,” is the common position of Scandinavia, expressed by Sweden’s Minister for Migration Barbro Holmberg.
Norway, which is not an EU member, has introduced its own regulation under which refugees from so-called “countries where there is no immediate threat” receive a response to their applications within 48 hours of submission. “We call it ‘Quick in – quick out,’” says Øystein Mjærum, advisor to the Norwegian Prime Minister. “Rumors about our system have already spread quite far. Our goal is to prevent people who are genuinely at risk in their homeland from suffering because of economic refugees.”
Despite such a disparity in projects, the European Union has already chosen its main path: refugee problems are slowly but surely being pushed toward the EU’s borders – both literally and figuratively. In June of last year, EU leaders allocated a total of 400 million euros to strengthen the external borders, as well as to work with the so-called transit countries through which flows of refugees pour into the European Union, and with source countries.
With the help of the Eurodac system, which collects digitized fingerprints of all asylum seekers who have applied in a central computer in Luxembourg, in 2003 alone the relevant authorities of the EU countries were able to intercept 17,000 so-called repeat applications. And the overall result of the policy of increased control is this: over the past 10 years, the number of applications for political asylum submitted in the European Union has halved.
Shortly before May 1, 2004, the day when 10 new members joined the European Union, the EU Council of Ministers agreed on a common interpretation of the so-called safe third country – an interpretation proposed by the German government. “This is the end of the individual approach to the right to political asylum,” the human rights organization Pro Asyl complains. Because determining which country is sufficiently safe and sending asylum seekers there can now be done by any EU country independently.
For example, Poland mainly sends refugees to Ukraine, with which it has signed an agreement to that effect. Apart from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus are also considered safe. “Although so far we have not deported Chechens there,” says Jan Węgrzyn, head of the Polish Office for Foreigners. At that, 90% of the refugees in Poland are Chechens, many of them arrived completely legally, by train through Brest. Other refugees – Pakistanis, Indians, Vietnamese – get stuck on the external side of the Polish border: in transit prisons or camps in Mukachevo, Chop, and other cities of Western Ukraine.
Poland’s eastern border, which has now also become the border of the European Union, is gradually turning into a second Iron Curtain: well-equipped border guards and customs officers intercept refugees. Or, as happened recently, smugglers drown them in border lakes, having taken money from these unfortunate people for “help” in crossing the border – a month ago, Ukrainian border guards fished out a truck with 27 dead Afghans...
“Meanwhile, former transit countries are gradually becoming target countries,” believes Pierre Rossi-Longhi from the International Organization for Migration. Not only because their standard of living is rising or refugee acceptance criteria are being aligned with pan-European ones, but also because in the enlarged European Union the distribution of responsibilities is still quite vague.
According to rules drawn up by the EU Council of Ministers, a refugee must file an application in the country where he first arrived, or he will be deported. “We are already receiving the first requests from Sweden and Austria to return refugees from those countries back to us,” says Lucia Voisnis, head of the Lithuanian refugee agency. “Now we need to establish that these people actually first arrived precisely here. We simply lack experience for such cases.”
For new Europeans, the very idea that refugees might stay and must be integrated into society is unfamiliar. “Most of them simply move on to Berlin, London, or Amsterdam,” says Martin Rozumek from the Czech charity organization OPU. “Moreover, the authorities count on their disappearance.”
Skeptics such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the Dutchman Ruud Lubbers, have already taken up gloomy prophecies: in their opinion, the refugee reception system in the European Union will soon simply collapse. In principle, his prediction is quite justified: even in the best years of economic prosperity, the social systems of European countries were not designed for the number of refugees that have poured in these days, mostly from African and Middle Eastern countries. In times of crisis, it is hardly possible to cope with this flow at all. Well, it turns out there is only one way out – batten down the hatches?