March 13, 2020

Money to go back home: the EU's ineffective response to the refugee crisis

topic:	Refugees and Asylum
located:	Greece, Turkey, Germany, France
editor:	Gurmeet Singh

With so much space being taken up by Covid-19, other major news stories seem to simply disappear. Some vitally important stories are being lost or ignored, such as the refugee situation in Greece.

Since Turkey’s premier Erdogan reopened borders two weeks ago, the refugee situation in Greece has become unmanageable. Reports have emerged of up to 20,000 people living in squalid conditions, being brutalised by EU-supported Greek authorities, and many of whom have potentially contracted the Covid-19 virus.

And now, instead of offering safe passage into the EU, where the very real health and settlement problems of the refugees and migrants could be addressed, the EU has decided to offer money to every person willing to travel ‘back home’.

The Guardian writes: “Migrants on the Greek islands are to be offered €2,000 (£1,764) per person to go home under a voluntary scheme launched by the European Union in an attempt to ease desperate conditions in camps.

The amount is more than five times the usual sum offered to migrants to help them rebuild their lives in their country of origin, under voluntary returns programmes run by the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The offer will last one month, as the commission fears an open-ended scheme would attract more migrants to Europe. It will not apply to refugees who have no homes to return to, but is intended to incentivise migrants seeking better living standards to leave the islands.”

So the money is being used to target ‘economic migrants’. And yet by the EU’s own admission, it does not have statistics on how many of the people on the islands are economic migrants.

It may be then, that this is yet another cynical move by the EU to avoid dealing with the issue, which would be simply accepting and distributing the refugees and migrants around EU countries.

Perhaps the political will is non-existent to deal with the issue; resurgent populist parties and groups in EU countries feed off and benefit from stories of refugees and particularly Muslim refugees entering Europe. To retain stability in its bloc, the EU is doing everything in its power to refuse the refugees - from helping Libyan authorities to locate incoming refugee boats, to now, providing financial incentives to send migrants home.

The BBC writes: “Oxfam's spokesman on EU migration, Florian Oel, said "all EU governments have avoided taking responsibility, not just Greece" over the migrant crisis.

"People in need of safety have been turned into political bargaining chips," Mr Oel told the BBC.

"The EU partners have to share responsibility for those arriving; it means states should relocate refugees to their own countries and do the asylum procedure there. They must agree on permanent rules."

However, he welcomed the EU announcement on relocating unaccompanied children as "a good first step".

Helping the most vulnerable people in the world is the duty of the privileged. The EU seems to be abnegating this duty, or worse, forgetting it has a duty at all, due to the hysteria about a virus all humans are susceptible to. 

Image: antriksh kumar / Pixabay 

Call to Action

No rescue, but Alarm

Support now