Between February and March 2020, twenty thousand Syrian refugees reached the Evros River, the land border between Turkey and Greece. Turkey had opened its borders ocwesterners, organized dozens of buses mostly with Syrian citizens headed for Europe. Greece, alarmed by a new wave of migration, took drastic measures, deployed troops to push back the people massed at the borders and asked European institutions for help.
The answer came from the highest European offices, the President of the Commission Ursula von der Leyen and the President of Parliament David Sassoli who – having reached the borders of the Hellenic peninsula to support mass rejections – defined Greece as the «shield of Europe».
It mattered little that the principle of non-refoulement, a pillar of international law on the request for humanitarian protection, was not respected.
The reason twenty thousand Syrians suddenly found themselves massed along the Evron River was that Turkey was using them as a blackmail weapon towards Europe.
A few weeks earlier, 36 Turkish soldiers had been killed in Idlib where Turkey was trying to stem the advance of Assad and Putin. Erdogan had asked NATO for military support, but in vain.
After days of rejected requests to the sender, Erdogan decided to open the borders and thus remind Europe that 3.5 million Syrians live in Turkey and that border control had a diplomatic and military price. Erdogan had already realized that it had an economic price five years earlier, in the summer of 2015, when a million people crossed the Balkans. Walls, barriers and barbed wire returned to Europe, three hotspots were built on the Aegean islands to detain migrants and make rejections to Turkey more agile, and a budget was set to stem the flow of migration: six billion euros that Europe would pay to Ankara.
Last July, when the economic agreements with Turkey were renewed and strengthened, Catherine Woollard, director of the European Council for refugees and exiles in Brussels, said she was worried because “Turkey is now able to ask for whatever it wants. from the Union and is also able to act as it wishes due to the dependence created by the EU-Turkey agreement ”. Translated it means that it is true that countries like Turkey must be supported economically because they host millions of Syrians while Europe is struggling to host a few tens of thousands but it also means that continuing to give money in exchange for managing migratory flows has made Europe to thetotally blackmailable.
The representation of this blackmail has been plastic, for weeks, on the border between Belarus and Poland.
The chronicle of events is sadly known and also in this case parte from afar, from the presidential elections of 2020 in Belarus, which Lukashenko won despite allegations of fraud. Following voter protests, the Minsk regime responded brutally, with a drastic crackdown on dissent and a wave of arrests of activists and political opponents. European governments claimed respect for civil rights, did not recognize the electoral result imposed by Lukashenko and hosted the leader of the opposition to the regime Svetlana Tikhanovskaya who lives in exile.
Acts to which several economic sanctions packages have been added.
Lukashenko responded by provoking. First by hijacking a Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania forcing it to land in Minsk and arresting a passenger, Roman Protasevich, a dissident Belarusian journalist living in exile.
Then using migration as a weapon to exert diplomatic pressure.
It is in fact after the fourth package of sanctions – last May – that Lukashenko has planned an unprecedented migratory route, trips organized by agencies that offer packages that from the Middle East arrive at the European borders via Minsk, at a price of 3000 dollars all inclusive, both the saw both the escort of Lukashenko’s men in the forests. It doesn’t matter if someone dies of cold on the way. The week scbear, while Poland deployed fifteen thousand soldiers on the border with Belarus, legalizing push-backs and building barbed wire fences, the European Union has agreed new sanctions against Minsk, the backstage, against “people, airlines, travel agencies” and in general, all those involved in the illegal push towards the euro borderspei.
These are the means of European diplomacy that ended up in the cul de sac studied and designed by Lukashenko.
Migration as the front of a hybrid war, the bodies of refugees used as a weapon by a regime that continues to provoke Europe, revealing its contradictions.
OnThe background is the intensification of the Warsaw battle with the EU institutions on the rule of law. In fact, Poland was one of the few European countries to refuse to accept migrants precisely during the migration emergency on the Balkan route in 2015 and since then, six years ago, it has always refused relocation quotas for refugees. Today, in full crisis on the Belarusian border, Poland should ask for help from Frontex, the EU border agency, to get out of the emergency, but doing so would weaken the positions against immigration of the Varsavi governmentto.
A dead end that Lukashenko has managed to build to the extent of the fragility of European governments which today must decide which means to use to manage a new flow, not the result of a contingent crisis but created at the table to apply diplomatic pressure and obtain recognition.
AND why not? Money too.
The tragedy that is taking place on the eastern borders of Europe certainly has its responsibilities in Lukashenko’s cynicism but has its roots in the paradigm created by Europe for six years now to stem a phenomenon, that of migration, which it cannot manage. .
A paradigm created on the obsessive attention to the militarization of borders, and which over time has eroded the very concept of asylum and humanitarian protection: money in exchange for security. It matters little if the money ends up in the hands of authoritarian regimes.
It matters little whether some diplomatic room for maneuver needs to be granted to thirty-year regimes such as that of Minsk.
It is the price of the new diplomacy, the one applied to migrant lives.
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