Category Archives: refugees

The refugee crisis requires much more than crisis management

Christopher Dickey writes: Ad hoc measures will be taken here and there, as we have seen, but they will do little more than displace the flood, not stop it:

The boats pushing into the Med from North Africa were never very seaworthy, but now they have to be completely expendable, ready to be seized, and to be written off, or to sink and be written off, by the gangs that launched them leaking and overloaded in the first place.

Close the borders with the Balkan states, and refugees climb into sealed trucks like that putrid 18-wheeler in Austria.

The only medium- and long-term solution for this horrific global problem is to build peace in the war zones of Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia, — the three countries that account for more than half of the world’s refugees; impose order on the chaos of Libya; deliver some modicum of freedom and prosperity in West and East Africa; and greater social and economic justice in Latin America.

To do that requires reliable long-term policies to promote development and good governance, not just the tossing of a few millions of dollars or euros here or there, or preaching about a system of globalized free trade that has made the rich so much richer and the poor, by comparison, so much poorer. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

As tragedies shock Europe, a bigger refugee crisis looms in the Middle East

The Washington Post reports: While the world’s attention is fixed on the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees swarming into Europe, a potentially far more profound crisis is unfolding in the countries of the Middle East that have borne the brunt of the world’s failure to resolve the Syrian war.

Those reaching Europe represent a small percentage of the 4 million Syrians who have fled into Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, making Syria the biggest single source of refugees in the world and the worst humanitarian emergency in more than four decades.

As the fighting grinds into a fifth year, the realization is dawning on aid agencies, the countries hosting the refugees and the Syrians themselves that most won’t be going home anytime soon, presenting the international community with a long-term crisis that it is ill-equipped to address and that could prove deeply destabilizing, for the region and the wider world.

The failure is first and foremost one of diplomacy, said António Guterres, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The conflict has left at least 250,000 people dead in the strategic heart of the Middle East and displaced more than 11 million overall, yet there is still no peace process, no discernible solution and no end in sight.

Now, the humanitarian effort is failing, too, ground down by dwindling interest, falling donations and spiraling needs. The United Nations has received less than half the amount it said was needed to care for the refugees over the past four years. Aid is being cut and programs are being suspended at the very moment when those who left Syria in haste, expecting they soon would go home, are running out of savings and wearing out the welcome they initially received.

“It is a tragedy without parallel in the recent past,” Guterres said in an interview, warning that millions could eventually end up without the help they need to stay alive.

“There are many battles being won,” he added. “Unfortunately, the number of battles being lost is more.”

It is a crisis whose true cost has yet to be realized. [Continue reading…]

A Syrian refugee, having reached Europe — where she hopes to find a doctor who can treat her two-year old daughter’s heart condition — told the New York Times: “I want to find somewhere where there are no Arabs. Europeans are better people. The Arabs hurt us a lot.”

Jenan Moussa, who reports for Al Aan TV, highlights the conflicted views on governance that are stifling the region’s political development.

Facebooktwittermail

Smugglers who drove migrants to their deaths were part of a vast web

The Washington Post reports: The smugglers responsible for driving 71 migrants to their deaths in the back of a cramped, unventilated truck in Austria were part of a vast international syndicate that has been a subject of multiple criminal investigations, a leading European law enforcement official said Saturday.

Just four relatively low-level operatives have been arrested in connection with the deaths, which were discovered Thursday when authorities pried open the door to an abandoned truck emitting a noxious odor on the main highway between Budapest and Vienna.

But Rob Wainwright, director of Europol, said in an interview that his organization and national law enforcement agencies were “working urgently” to catch the ringleaders of an operation that epitomizes the rapid expansion and increasing sophistication of human smuggling networks across the continent.

“It was a direct hit in our systems,” said Wainwright, whose agency serves as the law enforcement arm of the 28-member European Union. “We were able to make intelligence connections with many other cases that we’re currently working on across Europe.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Germany’s embrace of Syrian refugees exposes how little other countries have done

Joyce Karam writes: They’re calling her “Mama Merkel,” sending her love messages on twitter and showing gratitude unseen recently for a Syrian or Arab leader. Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel is being celebrated by many Syrians this week, for defying EU rules and showing compassion to a refugee population that’s been let down all too often in the last four years.

With more than four million refugees since 2011 and with Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon reaching full capacity in hosting those fleeing the Syrian war, the international community is dragging its feet in the face of the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II. Discrimination, hate crimes, and sheer catastrophes in the Mediterranean are encountering Syrians escaping on foot or by water to European shores. Barbed wires, and refugee-profiling awaits across the continent while some countries like Poland and Slovakia have made no secret that they would only take Syrian Christian refugees.

Merkel might not be the most charismatic leader or orator on the global stage, but this week, Germany’s Chancellor has shown both the audacity and the empathy in addressing the Syrian refugee problem. On Tuesday, Berlin announced its intention to welcome all Syrian asylum seekers to stay in the country, disregarding Europe’s Dublin protocol and enraging the far right groups in the process.

Merkel called for restoring European values in tackling the humanitarian problem, for “sharing the burden” dismissing the far right attacks as “disgusting, how right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis are trying to preach dull hate messages.” Merkel also vowed ”there will be no tolerance of those who question the dignity of other people.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Refugee crisis: 200 drown off Libya, over 70 suffocate en route to Austria

The Washington Post reports: The death toll from Europe’s refugee crisis surged higher Friday after Austrian authorities raised the count of bodies found in an abandoned truck to more than 70, even as corpses were being plucked from the sea off the coast of Libya after a boat sank, killing as many as 200.

After an extraordinarily deadly 24-hour period, two crime scenes, more than 2,000 miles apart, were unfolding Friday. Austrian officials announced that three suspects were taken into custody in Hungary in connection with the decomposing bodies found in the back of a truck parked on the side of the main highway between Vienna and Budapest on Thursday.

Those arrested included an unnamed Bulgarian national believed to be the truck’s owner. Another Bulgarian citizen and a third man with a Hungarian identity card were also taken into custody. Initially, seven suspects had been detained for questioning, but all but three were released, said Hans-Peter Doskozil, the police chief in the eastern Austrian province of Burgenland. Austria, he said, was working with Hungary to seek their extradition. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Palestinian refugees being sent by force back to Syria

Nina Strochlic writes: Ahmad is invisible. He uses a fake name, rarely ventures outside, and moves his family between apartments in Jordan’s capital of Amman frequently, sometimes at a moment’s notice if he thinks his cover has been blown.

Ahmad is a refugee twice over. His family fled land that now belongs to Israel for refuge in Syria, where he grew up. Now, he’s hiding from his foster country’s civil war in Jordan. Meanwhile, residents of his former neighborhood in Damascus who couldn’t escape survive by eating grass.

Ahmad is one of the estimated 70,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria living undercover in Syria’s neighboring countries, all but one of which explicitly turn away Palestinians at the border. In Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, hundreds of people like Ahmad have been caught and deported back into Syria.

A mutual acquaintance took me to meet Ahmad on a Friday. The narrow streets of his neighborhood in eastern Amman were empty — I later learned our visit had been timed to coincide with Friday’s prayers, when a foreign visitor attracts less notice. We parked down the block and walked to his apartment, which was completely obscured behind a tall gate.

Tracking down this hidden demographic feels like making contact with a sleeper cell: phone calls come in from unknown numbers; fake names are used; middle men choose anonymous meeting spots. These people have everything to lose if they’re discovered, so they remain undercover, trusting their existence to only a few outsiders.

Palestinians refugees from Syria — known as PRS — are the shadow refugees of a four-year crisis with no end in sight. They are flat-out barred from entering any of Syria’s neighbors other than Turkey. If they do find a way in, they’re rejected by humanitarian organizations, banned from refugee camps, and face deportation back into Syria’s nightmare. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Truck filled with dead refugees found in Austria as another migrant ship sinks off Libya

Reuters reports: As many as 50 refugees were found dead in a parked truck in Austria on Thursday, and another migrant ship sank off Libya, deepening a crisis that is overwhelming Europe and throwing up new tragedies by the day.

The abandoned refrigerated truck was found by an Austrian motorway patrol near the Hungarian border, with fluids from the decomposing bodies seeping from its back door.

“One can maybe assume that the deaths occurred one-and-a-half to two days ago,” Hans Peter Doskozil, police chief in the province of Burgenland, told a news conference, adding that “many things” indicated they were already dead when they crossed the border.

Police said it could take until Friday to count the exact number of victims, which they thought would be more than 20 and could be as many as 50. They suspected those responsible were already out of the country. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The desparate journeys of tens of thousands of people seeking refuge in Europe

The New York Times reports: Aieh is blond and scrappy, with an elfin face and a heart condition. She is 2 and a half years old, but looks more like six months. Her mother, Samar Joukhadar, has carried her from Syria in a pouch hanging on her chest. Her goal is to get her to a doctor who can operate on her heart.

For now, they sit at the railroad track in Idomeni, Greece, waiting to cross the border to the Gevgelija transit camp in Macedonia.

Aieh’s father is a doctor, but the officials at the Syrian government-owned hospital where he worked hassled him until he fled to Yemen, leaving his family behind, Ms. Joukhadar said. He is working in a hospital there. But, she said, that hospital is not capable of doing the operation her daughter needs.

Besides, she says: “I want to find somewhere where there are no Arabs. Europeans are better people. The Arabs hurt us a lot.”

Europe was not their first choice, Ms. Joukhadar said. She tried to find a doctor in Saudi Arabia who would do the operation, but she could not.

Ms. Joukhadar left Syria with her three children and her brother and his two children. They went to Turkey and tried to leave from Mersin, a city on the Mediterranean coast, by boat in December 2014. But the smugglers stole her money — $12,000. She went to the police and gave them names and photographs, but nothing happened, she said.

Finally, they were able to leave from Izmir by dinghy, paying $1,200 per person. They landed on Lesbos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea that has seen a surge in refugees and migrants since the beginning of the year.

As she spoke, Aieh fidgeted and then started to cry. A cousin, Sidra, 15, took her into her arms and fed her a bottle, quieting her down.

Once they reached Athens, they slept on the streets for five days, Ms. Joukhadar said. She made a budget of 50 euros a day for herself, her brother and the five children between them. With that, they were able to eat one meal a day, usually a chicken and potato sandwich.

She had not spoken to her husband in four or five months, she said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Germany is the first European country to free Syrian refugees from a draconian bureaucratic ‘trap’

Quartz reports: Germany, which has a better track record than most European countries on sheltering refugees, has made a move to address one of the more lunatic aspects of the European immigration crisis. The country has said (link in German) it will stop sending away refugees of the five-year war in Syria, and instead process their asylum claims in Germany.

Why doesn’t that already happen? It’s the result of a 2003 piece of legislation that human rights organizations have long been describing as a “trap.”

The legislation is called the Dublin Protocol, and was designed to stop migrants traveling through Europe to countries with favorable regimes before claiming asylum. If people need asylum, the argument ran, they should be claiming it straight away — and the state in which they do so should remain responsible for processing it.

There is a huge problem with this logic, however, and many northern European countries have chosen to turn a blind eye to it: geography. Most people fleeing from the wars in Syria or Afghanistan, as well as those trying to get to Europe for economic reasons, come by land or by sea. The land route brings them through Turkey, which is not a member of the EU, to Greece and Bulgaria, which are.

The sea routes, which are much more perilous and have led to thousands of deaths this year alone, lead migrants to Greece, to Italy, or to the islands of Lampedusa and Malta. Without the funds or paperwork necessary, most asylum claimants aren’t able to fly into the airports of northern European countries. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Europe’s insane plan to destroy migrant boats

Barbie Latza Nadeau writes: Human smugglers in Libya have moved more than 38,000 people across the Mediterranean Sea since the beginning of 2015, killing as many as 2,000 along the way. But a new plan by the European Union to target smugglers’ vessels may soon make the journey even deadlier.

Desperate times may call for desperate measures, and the EU’s plan to systematically “identify, capture and destroy vessels before they are used by traffickers” is case in point. The plan was hatched in emergency talks after as many as 950 migrants died on April 18, fueling promises by EU leaders to “smash the gangs” of traffickers that operate unchecked in Libya.

The plan was presented to the United Nations Security Council in New York on Monday by Federica Mogherini, an Italian who is the high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy. In asking the U.N. Security Council to bless military action against the Libyan-based smuggler rings, she promised that the EU would take full responsibility for “identifying trafficking vessels for destruction before they are filled with migrants.”

But the reality is that such a tactic could become a deadly game of Russian roulette, since the traffickers don’t exactly play by the rules.

At face value, the idea itself could be considered noble—stop the merchants of death by destroying their lethal weapons, in this case unsafe fishing vessels that are packed over capacity with desperate migrants. But everyone from the head of the United Nations to those welcoming migrants on the shores of Italy warn that just one mistake will stain Europe’s hands with the blood of every dead migrant officials say they are trying to save.

In a far-reaching exposé from the epicenter of the trafficking ring in Zuwara, Libya, the Guardian pinpointed the biggest problem with destroying smuggler vessels. “Smuggling boats start life as fishing trawlers. The moment of transition from the latter to the former is informal and almost imperceptible to outsiders,” the author writes after interviewing several smugglers. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Mass migration is no ‘crisis’: it’s the new normal as the climate changes

Ellie Mae O’Hagan writes: I’ve been interested in the way the migrant crisis is being debated in politics and the media. It’s that word – crisis – that is particularly striking. It suggests that what we’re seeing in across Europe is an aberration, a temporary disaster to be “solved” by politicians. Even the sight of ramshackle tents in Calais suggests a phenomenon that could be cleared away at any given moment.

In The Concept of the Political, the philosopher Carl Schmitt argued that, when presented with crisis, liberal democracies will put aside constitutional niceties in order to survive. The public consents to its government violating liberal values because crisis is a state of exception, which requires desperate measures.

Perhaps that explains why there has been so little uproar over supposedly civilised societies using terminology like “marauding” and “swarms”, and making policy decisions that result in hundreds of people drowning in the Mediterranean or languishing in detention centres. These things, we think, don’t reflect who we are as people. They are just necessary responses to this current crisis.

There is only one problem with calling this phenomenon of migration a crisis, and that is that it’s not temporary: it’s permanent. Thanks to global climate change, mass migration could be the new normal. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Welcome to Germany: Locals step in to help refugees in need

Der Spiegel reports: The day has only just begun, but the phone in Anja Damerius’ office at the University of Siegen is already ringing off the hook. An elderly woman wants to read books to refugee children: “Yes, of course!” Damerius says into the receiver. “When are you available?” A family from the neighborhood wants to distribute food. “Come over.” Toys? “Please drop them off at the church, our garage is full.”

The masters student from North Rhine-Westphalia had actually planned on spending her semester break relaxing, sleeping in, meeting friends and doing a bit of partying. But instead, she’s been working on the campus from morning to evening, she says.

Damerius, 33, coordinates the program for 50 to 60 refugee children at the University of Siegen. She is one of a dozen volunteers at the university who are working with asylum seekers, known here as “guests.”

The regional government has placed approximately 200 asylum seekers in the university gymnasium. Initially, it was seen as a temporary solution, meant to provide shelter for a few days until space in the reception center opened up again. But by now, refugees have been living on the campus for almost a month — and nobody at the university is seriously expecting that the asylum seekers will be housed anywhere else by the time the semester starts in mid-October, despite official promises to the contrary. In fact, 17 additional refugees arrived just last week.

But hardly anyone in Siegen is complaining. The student union is organizing meals through the cafeteria; a student initiative has launched daily language courses, and almost 90 interpreters have been recruited; and, with the help of students, the city is organizing primary medical care.

Siegen University rector Holger Burckhart, who is also vice-president of the German Rectors’ Conference, says that given their status as public institutions, universities have a responsibility to help. “We are part of social life and can give something back to society here.” According to Burckhart, the students are getting a clearer sense of the scale of the world’s crises. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Life in the Jungle on a dangerous path to Britain

Owen Jones went to Calais (at the French end of the Channel Tunnel) to meet some of the people risking their lives in the hope of finding asylum in the UK: For most of its inhabitants, the Jungle is a transit camp, not a permanent settlement, but there are the rudimentary trappings of a community. A few shops have been set up in tents, mostly selling warm cans of fizzy drinks. A caravan near the entrance serves as a community noticeboard: it advertises the make-do hospital 250 metres away and its opening hours; bikes for €20-€30 (£14-£21); a bike workshop; advice for dealing with police and the asylum system.

There are political posters, too. “The grass is greener where there are no sides,” says one, featuring a dark-hooded silhouette climbing over a fence. Another says: “NO BORDER – RESIST! REBEL! REVOLT!” A large blue-and-white-striped tent functions as a community centre; it is filled with people in sleeping bags. “I’m human like you” is graffitied on the side, along with words such as “Help!” and various messages in Arabic. Young men sit outside, charging mobile phones with a few precious plug extensions as music blares from a loudspeaker. Every evening, hot meals are distributed, but not quite enough for the number of residents.

The various nationalities group together: the Afghan flag flies over one tent. As a white westerner, I swiftly attract attention. Not everyone is happy to see a British journalist. At one improvised shop, I explain where I’m from and why I’m there. The mood sours instantly. “You in England, you don’t like us,” spits out an Afghan in his early thirties with considerable venom. “You English, I don’t like you either.” With a dismissive swipe of his hand, he tells me to go away.

But nearby, there is a warmer reception: some laughing young Afghan men beckon me over, perching beneath a makeshift shelter and playing with cheap pay-as-you-go mobiles. Habib* tells me that he’s 24 years old, although his friends snigger as though that’s preposterous. “I first left Afghanistan in 2006 and went to the UK, but they refused my asylum and deported me back,” he says. He is not the only Afghan who tells me this: having settled in Britain and being sent to Afghanistan, he feels as though going to Britain is returning home. “Our life is dangerous; we are not safe in Afghanistan, that’s why we leave Afghanistan. We come here to make the good life.”

Habib comes from Jalalabad, where his mother still lives; but his brother and uncle were killed by the Taliban, he says. He travelled all the way from his war-torn home to Calais by lorry, on foot and by taxi. “In England, they give you a home, they give you a doctor, they give you the food money,” he says. When I tell him that a single asylum-seeker such as himself gets only £36.95 a week, he is taken aback but not deterred. “They’re not supporting the refugees here. We need a home, we need school, we need the good life. We are not animals.”

With so many stressed people from different cultures crammed together, he says, fights break out at night. “Of course it’s dangerous here. The Jungle is not safe.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Humanitarian conditions worsen in Syria as more civilians killed

The Washington Post reports: The top United Nations humanitarian official, making his first trip to Syria, said in Damascus on Monday that he was “absolutely horrified” at conditions there and “by the total disregard for civilian life by all parties.”

While Stephen O’Brien, the ­undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, did not single out specific combatant groups for blame, he was particularly critical of airstrikes that killed as many as 100 civilians Sunday in the central market area of Douma, a Damascus suburb.

The remark appeared to be aimed at Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose military is the only force based in Syria with access to air power.

Beyond the human toll, O’Brien said the civil war also has destroyed historic sites in Syria on a massive scale. He said that during his three-day trip he had visited the city of Homs, “where almost every home” in the Old City “had been completely destroyed.”

O’Brien’s visit was designed not only to call attention to the crisis in Syria, but also to put new pressure on U.N. members to close shortfalls in the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Contributions so far this year amount to less than a third of the funds needed to provide for victims, said O’Brien, who described the ongoing attacks on civilian areas as “appalling.”

“We cannot scale up our operations to reach more people if we do not have adequate resources,” said O’Brien, who took over the job from longtime U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos in June.

More than half of Syria’s 22 million people have either fled the country or been internally displaced from their homes in the still-expanding war, according to U.N. figures. O’Brien said that at least a quarter-million people had been killed, with more than a million injured. [Continue reading…]

Reporting on Syrian state media’s coverage of O’Brien’s remarks, Robert Mackey notes: While his criticism was evenhanded — he also condemned the conduct of rebel groups — and made headlines around the world, Syrians who rely on state television for their news heard none of his harsh words about their government’s conduct of the war. Edited video of Mr. O’Brien’s remarks posted on YouTube by the official Syrian Arab News Agency, or Sana, simply faded to black just before he described the attack on Douma.

A look at a transcript of his remarks released by the United Nations shows that Mr. O’Brien’s description of the devastation he witnessed in the Old City of Homs, a former rebel stronghold, was also omitted by the Syrian state broadcaster. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How money, race and religion determine the fate of Europe-bound migrants

The Wall Street Journal reports: As Europe grapples with the biggest wave of migration since World War II, the fates of those crossing the Mediterranean are increasingly being determined by class systems based on money, ethnicity and religion.

On these transnational trails, migrants tell of a fast-developing market for human cargo, where cash or creed can ensure a safer trip, more resources and better treatment.

The discrimination starts at the beginning of migrants’ journeys at the hands of smugglers looking to maximize profits, and it ends with European authorities scrambling to handle the overwhelming numbers of people arriving and prioritizing them by nationality.

In Greece this weekend, authorities deployed a 3,000-capacity passenger ferry to the island of Kos to host Syrian refugees arriving in record numbers. Thousands of other asylum seekers on the island from Iraq and Afghanistan have been left without shelter, and with only sporadic access to food and a much longer wait to get their documents processed.

Syrians are prioritized because the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has advised governments that they are so-called prima facie refugees, meaning they should be granted instant humanitarian protection because they are fleeing a war zone. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The plight of refugees, the shame of the world

Zeynep Tufekci writes: The world is facing the biggest refugee crisis since World War II, a staggering 60 million people displaced from their homes, four million from Syria alone. World leaders have abdicated their responsibility for this unlucky population, around half of whom are children.

The situation is sadly reminiscent of that of refugees fleeing the destruction of World War II and the Nazi onslaught. Then, too, most governments turned their backs, and millions who were trapped perished.

We are mired in a set of myopic, stingy and cruel policies. The few global institutions dedicated to supporting this population are starved of resources as governments either haven’t funded them or have reneged on their pledges of funds. Wealthy and powerful nations aren’t doing their part; the United States, for example, has taken fewer than 1,000 refugees from Syria.

The World Food Program was recently forced to cut its monthly food allocation to refugee families in Lebanon to $13.50 per month, down from $27 in January.

In Iraq, the United Nations announced that a “paralyzing” funding shortfall was causing it to shutter health care services, directly affecting a million people. That means that hundreds of thousands of children will not be vaccinated against polio and measles — a terrifying development risking the resurgence of these diseases in the already devastated region. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees calculates that 750,000 Syrian children in neighboring countries are out of school simply for lack of money. One result has been a huge rise in child labor, with girls in their early teens (or even younger) being married off. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The Gaza Strip’s last safety net is in danger

Sara Roy writes: Not long ago, I had a conversation with an official I know from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The official told me about a conversation he had with a senior Israel Defense Forces officer. In that conversation, my UN colleague asked the IDF official to describe Israel’s policy toward Gaza. The answer was just seven words long: “No development, no prosperity, no humanitarian crisis,” by now a common refrain within Israel’s military and political establishment.

As shocking as this statement is, it offers a remarkably accurate reflection of Israel’s near 50-aear policy in Gaza. While Israel did allow a limited degree of prosperity during the first years of the occupation, it has, nonetheless, aimed to prohibit any form of economic development in the territory—and, hence, the emergence of a Palestinian state. This approach has been especially ruinous for Gaza over the last decade, during which Israel imposed a strangling blockade that eliminated virtually all exports, shrank the manufacturing sector by as much as 60 percent, and reduced Gaza’s GDP by 50 percent, according to the World Bank. Israel has further launched three major military assaults on Gaza since the end of 2008—the latest and largest of them last summer (Operation Protective Edge)—leveling neighborhoods, destroying infrastructure, and inflicting immeasurable damage on the tiny strip and its nearly 2 million inhabitants. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Give me your tired, your poor … the Europeans embracing migrants

The Guardian reports: Judging from the headlines, it sometimes seems no one in Europe wants to help refugees. Record numbers are arriving in Italy and Greece this year, and yet other European governments have agreed to share less than a fifth of them. Hungary is building a wall to keep them out. For the same reason, France has sealed its border with Italy. In Greece, for much of this year there were doubts over the legality of giving a refugee a lift.

But on a local level, there are thousands of people across the continent who are braving the vitriol of their peers, and filling the void left by the politicians. Many Europeans back their governments’ stance but their xenophobia masks another phenomenon – that of a huge drive by ordinary citizens to welcome refugees, rather than reject them. From the Hungarian volunteers providing round-the-clock support to Syrian and Afghani newcomers, to the Spanish priests assisting migrants with paperwork, here are seven movements from across Europe that are fighting for refugees’ rights. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail