DOI: 10.1515/tfd-2016-0020
THE FEDERALIST DEBATE
Year XXIX, N° 2, July 2016
Borderless Debate: The Challenge of the Refugee Crisis Facing Europe
2016 Will Be Remembered
as the Year of Shame
Barbara Spinelli
For years, after the great Lampedusa shipwreck
on 3 October 2013, the EU has tacitly allowed
the deaths at sea of thousands of refugees
fleeing towards the European coasts, having
been unable to guarantee safe and legal access
routes to the Union.
This year, in 2016, the EU has taken a further
step towards barbarity: not only has it closed its
internal borders by dismantling the Schengen
area, but it has consciously decided to send
refugees back to the war zones from which
they had previously fled, and from which they
are still escaping. The agreement with Turkey
signed on 20 March 2016, which enables the
mass deportation of refugees who manage
to reach Greece, cannot be interpreted in
any other way. Thousands of these returnees
are sent back by the Erdogan regime to the
Syrian war zones from which they had initially
escaped: a deportation that violates national,
European and international laws.
The dirty work is entrusted to itsTurkish ally, but
it is Europe itself that takes the responsibility
for this collective refoulement, bringing about
the deadly triangulation of forced returns.
The European Union’s actions will one day
be judged as a crime against humanity. These
manoeuvres will also have proved useless,
because those who are trying to flee from wars
and dictatorships will not stop – and cannot
stop – trying to escape.
With the Balkan route closed, inevitably other
escape routes will open or re-open: starting
from the Central Mediterranean route, which
arrives at the Sicilian coast and the island of
Lampedusa. At the same time the European
Union’s policies generate illegality while
remaining completely ineffective: it is not the
traffickers who will have to pay the price, but
the refugees and the whole of Europe.
Europe is paying a high price in terms
of political and moral prestige, while the
unificatory project born after the Second World
War is beginning to disintegrate. The incentives
to remain united and to show solidarity will
decrease, the far right and racisms will take
advantage of the upheaval. Here it should be
remembered that Greece, brought to its knees
after six years of absurd austerity, was also
left abandoned and without financial help in
relation to the refugee crisis.
The vicious circle is diabolic: if the hotspots in
the Greek islands are unable to appropriately
welcome and register refugees, it is because
the European Union does not assist Athens
economically, with the excuse that the hotspots
and the reception centres are not organized
and functioning as they should be.
But if they are not working, it is because the
money is not arriving – like a dog chasing its
tail. To this we have to add the walls erected
on the borders of Greece and the former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (Idomeni)
and the refusal of nearly every EU member
state (except for Portugal) to agree to accept
the refugees who managed to survive and land
safely on the shores of Greece.
In this context, the lies circulating in the
countries of the Union about refugees should
not be forgotten. There is talk of invasion and
of a biblical exodus towards Europe. But when
studying the figures all one needs to do is
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Borderless Debate: The Challenge of the Refugee Crisis Facing Europe
look at the evidence. With 60 million refugees
in the world, one million has in 2015 arrived
in the countries of the European Union. It
is just 1.2 percent of the EU population. The
majority of Syrian refugees today live in
Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
At this point I would like to summarize the
main points of my political action within the
European Parliament. On 3 October 2014,
one year after the Lampedusa shipwreck, I
went to the island with a delegation from the
parliamentary group GUE/NGL. I condemned
the replacement of the Italian Mare Nostrum
operation with the Frontex Plus operation,
later renamed Triton, which would have
carried out checks and patrols, rather than
search and rescue, and without venturing into
international waters.
Triton had the obvious purpose of encircling
Europe with a wall, and to ignore (in fact:
accept) the deaths at sea of migrants and
refugees. It has been guilty, since 2013, of what
Hermann Broch has called, after the end of
German Nazism, the“crime of indifference”.
“Human beings are not only the victims of
wars”, I said at the time,“but also of truth and
legality”. More precisely, a series of articles of
the European Charter of Fundamental Rights,
beginning with Article 2 (the right to life) and
Article 19 (the prohibition of refoulement).
The Lisbon Treaty is also violated (Article 80),
which requires financial solidarity between
Member States“whenever necessary”.
However Mare Nostrum was not due to have
been replaced either by Frontex Plus, or by
additional operations such as Triton, Poseidon
or Hermes. Put simply, there would have been
no more search and rescue missions beyond 12
miles of the coast.
Interior Affairs of the European Parliament
(LIBE).“First: Italy is left alone. Second: Mare
Nostrum is over and there will be more deaths
in the Mediterranean. I ask Dr. Fernandez if
you are aware that these are the conclusions
which we have to draw, and that two articles
of our treaties are violated: Article 80 of the
Lisbon Treaty, which requires solidarity and the
distribution of resources, including financial,
between Member States in case of necessity,
and Article 19 of the Charter of Fundamental
rights which prohibits the refoulement policy”.
I received no answer, and following Italy,
as we have seen, Greece also has been left
abandoned by Europe, and with an economy
already shattered by the Troika’s economic
memorandum.
In early December 2014, Klaus Roesler,
director of the Frontex operative division at the
time, wrote a letter to Giovanni Pinto, central
director of the Immigration Department and
of Border Police (IDBP) at the Ministry of the
Interior, which became public as a result of a
journalistic leak.Roesler was saying that he was
worried “about repeated interventions ‘out of
area’ in the Mediterranean beyond 30 nautical
miles from the Italian coasts”. The heart of
the scandal was something that happened a
month earlier. On November 20, after having
received a series of requests for rescue at sea,
the Operations Control Centre of the IDBP
in Rome gave instructions to a Frontex unit
to go to the reported location and verify the
possible presence of boats in distress.“Frontex
maintains that a satellite phone call cannot
be considered in itself a search and rescue
event—we read in the letter—and therefore
recommends that steps should be taken to
investigate and verify, and only later, in case
of difficulty, should another maritime unit be
activated.
Moreover, Frontex considers unnecessary and
inappropriate in terms of cost the use of an
offshorepatrolvesselfortheseinitialverification
activities out of area”. This was a genuine
warning letter in which the Director of Frontex
“I draw two conclusions”, I wrote on 4
September 2014, addressing myself to the
executive director of Frontex, Mr. Gil AriasFernandez, invited to present the activities
of Frontex in the Mediterranean before the
Commission of Civil Liberties, Justice and
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at the time advised that“the instructions given
to the ships to move into areas placed outside
of the Triton operative area to assist vessels in
distress are not consistent with the operational
plan, and unfortunately will not be taken into
consideration in the future”.
We are facing war crimes and extermination
in peace times. The crime is not sporadic but
systemic, and must be put at the same level as
prolonged wars and famines.
In reference to this, I wrote a letter to the
newly appointed Director of Frontex, Fabrice
Leggeri, while the UNHCR was noting that in
2014 no less than 3,419 people had died in the
Mediterranean in an attempt to reach Europe.
I was asking for explanations about what Gil
Arias-Fernandez had admitted in an interview1
with the Spanish newspaper El Diario —that
the aim of Frontex was to “prevent illegal
entries […] since it had no mandate to rescue
at sea”. In this case also I have received no
answer.
In the first weekend of April 2015, the Italian
authorities announced that they had saved
around 2,800 migrants and that the rescue
operations had been conducted mainly
by Italy in international waters, while the
European Operation Triton had continued
to patrol the area within thirty miles of the
Italian coast, far from the area where the boats
are in distress. A few days later, on April 12, a
boat capsized causing 400 deaths. I wrote an
open letter to Commissioners Avramopoulos,
Mogherini and Timmermans, co-signed by
24 colleagues from different parliamentary
groups (a figure that would have been much
higher if we did not have the urge to send the
letter immediately).
We were asking the EU to take its responsibility
regarding the search and rescue operations
in the Mediterranean seriously. “The current
emergency situation will continue to worsen.
In the meantime, not even one of the four areas
that the European Commission has spelled out
for the next Agenda for Migration (expected in
May) addresses the need for concrete search
and rescue operations in the Mediterranean”. A
few days later, the 18 April shipwreck occurred.
There were more than 800 deaths. I launched
an appeal signed by many intellectuals and
activists in which we asked to substitute the
word “emergency” with “urgency”, giving
reality to the name it deserved.
“We are facing war crimes and extermination
in peace times. The crime is not sporadic but
systemic, and must be put at the same level as
prolonged wars and famines,”we said2 then.
From the beginning of July, the deaths at sea
resumed. Castaways in the Sicilian Channel
were not rescued by Frontex — the European
Union was absent — but by the three private
humanitarian ships provided by the Migrant
Offshore Aid Station (Moas), Doctors without
Borders and Sea-Watch, along with the units of
the Italian Coast Guard and Navy, and the few
ships left by the Member States, whose organic
membership to the Triton mission was far from
clear, since on their respective government
websites they were said to be available to
individual states, under the coordination of the
Italian Coast Guard. The same applied to the
Irish ship LÉ Niamh, whose rescue work was
not referred to as related to the Triton-Frontex
operation but to “joint operations with the
Italian Navy”.
Looking back — as the Forensic Oceanography
report requires us to do — we have an idea of
how in just two and a half years, we have passed
from hypocritical declarations on Lampedusa to
active indifference in front of the 350 children
drowned at sea following the death of Alan
Kurdi, as if this were a natural catastrophe that
does not affect the political sphere. The more
European institutions have talked about rights
and humanity, the more they have proceeded
towards a subtraction of means, personnel,
financial assistance for search and rescue,
engaging in agreements with Third Countries
not reliable from the point of view of respect for
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Borderless Debate: The Challenge of the Refugee Crisis Facing Europe
fundamental rights (the Rabat and Karthoum
processes) and in the deliberate and shameless
outsourcing for refoulement culminating in the
EU-Turkey agreement.
wars and devastation: wars and devastation
for which the Europeans, along with the U.S.
administration, are in large part responsible,
within the“chaos arc”that extends from North
Africa to Afghanistan.
Alternative ways exist to address the issue of
refugeesandmigrants.Weneedtoopensafeand
legal humanitarian corridors and understand
that smugglers and gangs proliferate in the
absence of such corridors. Illegality always
propagates in absence of legality, as Italy
knows well in its anti-Mafia policies. We need
to mobilize political imagination to overcome
the cage imposed by the Dublin regulations, to
assist the most vulnerable countries like Greece
and Italy, to not criminalize the refugees, the
migrants, and the many associations that
seek to ensure their safety and their right to
flee from countries rendered uninhabitable by
1
2
Finally, we have to mobilize thinking and
actions, taking a long-term view on what
is happening. In front of our eyes Europe is
changing, we have to start seeing it as a new
melting pot of peoples, knowing that most of
the refugees are expected to remain with us
for a long time and to become our future cocitizens. There is talk of a migrant crisis, when
we are actually dealing with a refugee crisis,
triggered by European misanthropic inertia.
There is talk of crisis, when we are actually
being offered an opportunity — a Kairos — not
to be missed.
http://www.eldiario.es/desalambre/preguntas-nueva-tragedia-Lampedusa_0_356265046.html
http://barbara-spinelli.it/2015/04/22/sos-sterminio-in-mare-lettera-aperta/
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