Europe to blame for burning of Moria refugee camp
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It almost doesn’t matter who started the fires this week in the squalid refugee camp on Lesbos called Moria, leaving thousands to sleep on the streets.
It could have been the desperate migrants, dwelling in cramped tents without clean toilets and forced by Covid-19 to “quarantine,” whatever that may mean in such conditions. It could have been local Greeks, who resent what they see as a slum that sullies their beautiful island. Or the fires could have flared all by themselves, because in such a wretched place, bad things are just bound to happen.
Either way, Europe — from Brussels to Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw and Athens — is responsible for this tragedy. This is blowback for one of the EU’s worst failures on an admittedly long list: its inability to fix a broken refugee system.
It’s been clear for many years that migration from poor and war-torn regions in the Middle East and Africa to this comparatively orderly continent would be one of the EU’s biggest challenges. But most member states that can’t be reached by dinghy, raft or boat across the Mediterranean — and only Greece, Malta, Italy and Spain can be — refused to acknowledge migration as their problem.
Apply for asylum
The result was the notorious and cynical “Dublin system”. It requires migrants, at least in theory, to apply for asylum only in the first EU member state they physically enter. Unless they jet in by plane — and Syrians who’ve been bombed out of their homes tend to flee without boarding passes — this means the Mediterranean states.
The resulting dysfunction came to a head exactly half a decade ago, during the refugee crisis. In the summer of 2015, Syrians, Afghans and others fled to Greece, which was itself suffering from the euro crisis. From there the migrants walked across the Balkans towards Germany and the north — until many of them were stranded at a train station in Budapest.
Instead of helping, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban blocked them. On their nightly news that summer, Europeans watched families sleeping on platforms and train tracks and walking along highways towards the German border.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, decided that turning back these refugees was not an option. Neither Germany nor the world, 70 years after the Holocaust, wanted to see Germans in uniform fencing in downtrodden and helpless people. So she let them in. Journalists ...
It could have been the desperate migrants, dwelling in cramped tents without clean toilets and forced by Covid-19 to “quarantine,” whatever that may mean in such conditions. It could have been local Greeks, who resent what they see as a slum that sullies their beautiful island. Or the fires could have flared all by themselves, because in such a wretched place, bad things are just bound to happen.
Either way, Europe — from Brussels to Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw and Athens — is responsible for this tragedy. This is blowback for one of the EU’s worst failures on an admittedly long list: its inability to fix a broken refugee system.
It’s been clear for many years that migration from poor and war-torn regions in the Middle East and Africa to this comparatively orderly continent would be one of the EU’s biggest challenges. But most member states that can’t be reached by dinghy, raft or boat across the Mediterranean — and only Greece, Malta, Italy and Spain can be — refused to acknowledge migration as their problem.
Apply for asylum
The result was the notorious and cynical “Dublin system”. It requires migrants, at least in theory, to apply for asylum only in the first EU member state they physically enter. Unless they jet in by plane — and Syrians who’ve been bombed out of their homes tend to flee without boarding passes — this means the Mediterranean states.
The resulting dysfunction came to a head exactly half a decade ago, during the refugee crisis. In the summer of 2015, Syrians, Afghans and others fled to Greece, which was itself suffering from the euro crisis. From there the migrants walked across the Balkans towards Germany and the north — until many of them were stranded at a train station in Budapest.
Instead of helping, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban blocked them. On their nightly news that summer, Europeans watched families sleeping on platforms and train tracks and walking along highways towards the German border.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, decided that turning back these refugees was not an option. Neither Germany nor the world, 70 years after the Holocaust, wanted to see Germans in uniform fencing in downtrodden and helpless people. So she let them in. Journalists ...