Following the agreement reached last Friday in Brussels with the Turkish government, most migrants landing on the Greek islands will be sent back to Turkey. This is how the Europe of the barbed wire disposes of men, women and children fleeing war and misery.
For Hollande, Merkel and others, it does not matter that the Turkish government looks more and more like a dictatorship, where the army destroys Kurdish cities with mortar, where journalists and opponents are put in jail.
In Exchange for a few billion offered to Erdogan, they asked Turkey to become a giant concentration camp for migrants, and to guard the borders of Europe. Just like they had previously done with Gaddafi’s Libya.
Nearly three million Syrian refugees survive in Turkey, one million in tiny Lebanon. The European Union, with its 500 million inhabitants, only pledges to receive 72,000 handpicked refugees in the future. Others, after having risked their lives on a makeshift boat, will be expelled to Turkey, described by European leaders as a “safe country”…
Tens of billions are thus dedicated to close the borders, to pay private cops and military vessels to hunt inflatable boats… while transforming the Mediterranean into a graveyard. To hunt the smugglers? Of course not. Simply opening the borders and using the same billions to host those who flee dictatorships and barbarism would eliminate the smugglers. Shame on our political leaders who, by simple cowardice in front of the far right demagogues, introduce a new apartheid by prohibiting entry to refugees.
