Migrant crisis sees no slowdown during winter

As sunshine chases the mist from Slovenia’s bucolic border with Croatia, brightening the fields around the village of Dobova, Rana Dagestani may have taken the tranquility for proof that Europe was indeed the unshakeable refuge of her dreams.

Dagestani and her relatives arrived on a good day for the Dobova transit camp, when the winter chill relented briefly and refugees and migrants arriving from Croatia spent only a few hours here before moving on towards Austria.

“We feel safe at last,” she says, flanked by her husband, three children and mother- in-law, in a large heated tent where hundreds of people wait for buses and trains to take them north.

“We have been travelling for a long time, so we are very tired and feel a bit dirty. But the main feeling now is that we are safe.”

The orderly calm at Dobova was reassuring for the family from Mosul, an Iraqi city seized in 2014 by Islamic State, but it was also misleading.

A fortnight has been enough to show that the new year has not brought cohesion or solidarity to Europe’s handling of its worst refugee emergency since the second World War, and to confirm that the crisis is only getting deeper.

Top European Union officials have started 2016 by chivvying Turkey to do much more to stop Syrian refugees leaving for Greece, as agreed last December in a €3 billion deal that has yet to make any meaningful impact on the influx to Europe.

“The numbers are still way too high in Greece, between 2,000-3,000 people [arriving] every day. We cannot be satisfied at this stage,” European Commission vice- president Frans Timmermans said after talks in Ankara this week.

Last January, by comparison, only about 5,000 migrants crossed the Mediterranean during the entire month, and the current rate of arrivals in Greece is roughly the same as for last June, when travel conditions were ideal.

Alarming indicators

Other indicators are equally alarming: under a plan to distribute 160,000 refugees around the EU, only 272 people have been relocated. Only three of the 11 proposed EU “hotspot” facilities to register and fingerprint people arriving illegally in Italy and Greece, and stop “economic migrants” moving on, exist.

Every day buses take many hundreds or even thousands of migrants – paying €30 a ticket – from Athens to Greece’s northern border with Macedonia.

Officially, only people from the war zones of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are now allowed to cross, but an unknown number from other states find a way through the woods into Macedonia or pay €1,000 or more to smugglers to guide them.

Some of these migrants – from places as far afield as Pakistan, Algeria, Nepal and Iran – are caught and sent back to Greece, but most make it through sooner or later.

The situation in the border area is starting to resemble that of last spring, before Macedonia allowed migrants to enter and to use public transport to cross the country.

Back then, smuggling gangs routinely beat migrants and held them captive until money was paid for the next leg of the journey; others were struck by cars and trains, sometimes fatally, as they trekked northwards along road and rail lines.

The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) is now “concerned over the consequences of border restrictions implemented by several countries in the Balkans, as desperate people continue to seek safety in Europe despite the harsh winter,” said Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the refugee agency.

“The UNHCR keeps advocating for legal pathways for the desperate to reach Europe. In the absence of this, desperate people are being exploited by ruthless smuggling and human trafficking networks,” he added.

Enriching smugglers

It is now clear on the Balkan route – taken by the vast majority of the more than one million migrants who reached the EU last year – that the supposed border restrictions are only enriching smugglers and corrupt police, while doing nothing to reduce the numbers of asylum seekers reaching western Europe.

Across the Balkans – a poor and fractious region with a recent history of conflict – each state denounces its southern neighbour for failing to reduce the flow of migrants, while quickly ushering them all on to the next country along the route.

But patience with this policy is wearing very thin farther north.

Germany has already refused entry to several hundreds of people this year, due to a lack of valid documents or because they planned to seek asylum elsewhere.

In response, Austria has increased checks on its border with Slovenia, and has turned away some 3,000 migrants in recent weeks for falsely claiming to be from Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan.

These measures too, however, appear to be largely for show. “When Austria sends people back, we ask more detailed questions and register them again. But in the end, nearly everyone continues into Austria,” said Robert Perc, a spokesman for Slovenian police in the Dobova region.

“We tried sending so-called economic migrants back to Croatia, but it wouldn’t accept them, and we didn’t act like a bad neighbour and push them back over the border,” he explained.

Across the Balkans border fences are going up, and EU members and candidate countries are simply moving migrants on and preventing their return. A little farther north, Hungary and Slovakia rejects calls for EU “solidarity” and are taking court action against a German-led plan to share refugees around the bloc.

Refugee refuseniks

For the likes of Germany, which registered more than one million asylum seekers last year, and

Sweden

, which has accepted more refugees per capita than any other EU member state, it is galling to have requests for help in this crisis spurned by states that rely heavily on EU funds and, in Greece’s case, bailouts.

“European solidarity is not a one-way street,” German foreign minister Frank- Walter Steinmeier pointed out last month. “Those who refuse [to accept refugees] must know what is at stake for them: open borders in Europe.”

As they seek leverage over refugee refuseniks such as Hungary and Slovakia, some officials are suggesting that the current 26-state Schengen zone of “passport-free” travel may be shrunk to exclude central and southern Europe.

"I don't want to make any concrete threats here," German chancellor Angela Merkel said on a visit to Romania this month.

“But I would like to say that a Schengen system can only work if joint responsibility is taken for refugees and joint responsibility is taken for protecting external borders.”

As border controls reappear from the Balkans to Scandinavia, and cracks widen between EU states, so inside many countries far-right parties are on the rise, and fear and suspicion of mostly Muslim migrants is rampant.

The November 13th killings in Paris by gunmen and bombers linked to Islamic State (also know as Isis and Daesh) and New Year’s Eve sexual attacks on women in Cologne that have been blamed on migrants, have put an increasingly divided Europe on edge, and emboldened those who insist that Europe now faces not just a humanitarian but a security crisis.

The “open-door” policy advocated by Germany and its liberal allies last summer is dead.

In Denmark, meanwhile, the government wants to confiscate valuable items from migrants to help pay for their stay in the country, a proposal denounced by the UNHCR as “an affront to their dignity”, which could “fuel fear, xenophobia and similar restrictions”.

Freezing weather

It is to this fractious, fearful and unprepared Europe that least 1.5 million people are expected to flee this year, on a journey that claimed more than 3,750 lives in 2015 – and almost killed Rana Dagestani and her family.

“Crossing from Turkey to Greece, our boat was damaged and we spent an hour in the water until we were rescued,” she recalls at the Dobova camp, as her 12-year-old son Mohammed tends to Neda, her one-year-old daughter.

“We had no choice but to leave when Daesh [Islamic State] came. I ran a private school in Mosul, and Daesh threatened to kill me unless I paid them $10,000 (€9,180). So we moved to Erbil and lived there for a year, before setting off for Turkey.”

The misery and danger that drive the crisis are not diminishing, and life for refugees in the Middle East is only getting harder.

Turkey – home to more than two million refugees – has abruptly imposed visa restrictions on Syrians arriving from third countries by air and sea.

The move caught out 407 Syrians who were stranded at Beirut airport in Lebanon, which promptly sent them back to Syria in what Amnesty International called "an outrageous breach of Lebanon's international obligations."

Moreover, many of the one million Syrian refugees in Lebanon are now losing their legal status, since the state introduced a compulsory permit that costs $200 (€183) per adult.

Jordan is also sharply scaling back a welcome that has seen some 1.4 million Syrians enter the country; only about about half of them are registered as refugees. The Amman government says that about 16,000 Syrians are now at a makeshift camp on Jordan’s border, with only 50-100 allowed in each day.

From shattered Syrian towns where residents are starving, to Balkan borders where people-smuggling is resurgent, to European capitals that are increasingly at odds, every major sign points to a crisis that is still getting worse.

Freezing weather is forecast for Dobova this weekend. By now, Rana Dagestani and her family should be in Germany, far from war but facing life in a continent that cannot discern its own future through the current storm of events.

“We made it to Europe, and we have to go on,” Dagestani says, as she waits to embark on the next leg of her voyage.

“Now we can only hope for the best.”