Eritrean teenagers and young men, aged from 16 to 20, waiting at the Badme entry point to be moved to the screening registration center. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By James Jeffrey
ADINBRIED, Ethiopia, Jun 22 2017 (IPS)

It’s one thing to read about the exodus of souls flowing out of Eritrea, it’s quite another to look into the tired eyes, surrounded by dust and grime, of a 14-year-old Eritrean girl who’s just arrived on the Ethiopian side of the shared border.

She is carrying a scruffy plastic bag. Inside are a few clothes, an orange beaker, and a small torch whose batteries have nearly run out.“We are the same people, we share the same blood, even the same grandfathers.” --Estifanos Gebremedhin, head of the legal and protection department for Ethiopia’s Administration for Refugee and Returnee Affairs

With her are four men, two women and five younger children, all of whom crossed the Eritrea-Ethiopia border the night before. Ethiopian soldiers found them and took them to the town of Adinbried.

The compound of simple government buildings where they were dropped off constitutes a so-called entry point, one of 12 along the border. It marks the beginning of the bureaucratic and logistical conveyor belt to assign asylum status to those arriving, before finally moving them to one of four refugee camps designated for Eritreans in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.

“It took us four days traveling from Asmara,” a 31-year-man among the group says about their trek from the Eritrean capital, about 80 kilometres north of the border. “We travelled for 10 hours each night, sleeping in the desert during the day.”

In February 2017, 3,367 Eritrean refugees arrived in Ethiopia, according to the Ethiopian Administration for Refugee and Returnee Affairs (ARRA). There are around 165,000 Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers in Ethiopia, according to the UN refugee agency.

Ethiopia’s open-door policy is in marked contrast to the strategies of migrant reduction increasingly being adopted in many Western societies.

And its stance is all the more striking due to the Eritrean and Ethiopian governments forever accusing the one of plotting against the other amid an atmosphere of mutual loathing.

But it appears the Ethiopian government is willing to treat ordinary Eritreans differently.

“We differentiate between the government and its people,” says ARRA’s Estifanos Gebremedhin. “We are the same people, we share the same blood, even the same grandfathers.”

Before Eritrea gained independence, it was Ethiopia’s most northern region. On both sides of today’s border many people still share the same language—Tigrinya—as well as Orthodox religion and cultural traditions.

Shimelba was the first Eritrean refugee camp to open in 2004. It now houses more than 6,000 refugees. About 60 percent of its population come from the Kunama ethnic group, one of nine in Eritrea, and historically the most marginalised.

“I have no interest in going to other countries,” says Nagazeuelle, a Kunama who has been in Ethiopia for 17 years. “I need my country. We had rich and fertile land, but the government took it. We weren’t an educated people, so they picked on us. I am an example of the first refugees from Eritrea, but now people from all nine ethnic groups are coming.”

Discussion among refugees in Shimelba camp of governmental atrocities ranges from accusations of genocide against the Kunama, including mass poisonings, to government officials shopping at markets and then shooting stall owners due to disagreements over prices.

“The world has forgotten us, apart from the U.S., Canada and Ethiopia,” says Haile, an Eritrean in his fifties who has been a refugee for five years. He says his father and brother died in prison. “What is happening is beyond language, it is a deep crisis—so why is the international community silent?”

Eritrean soldiers—now deserters—arriving at the Adinbried entry point. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

There are some, however, who argue the situation in Eritrea isn’t as bad as claimed. A UN report last year accusing Eritrea’s leadership of crimes against humanity has received criticism for being one-sided, failing to acknowledge Eritrea’s progress with the likes of providing healthcare and education, and thereby entrenching a skewed negative perspective dominant in policy circles and Western media.

“It is real, nothing is exaggerated,” says Dawit, a Shimelba resident of eight years. “We have the victims of rape, torture and imprisonment in our camp who can testify.”

About 50 kilometres south of Shimelba is Hitsats, the newest and largest of the four camps with 11,000 refugees, of whom about 80 percent are under 35 years of age.

“In Sudan there are more problems, we can sleep peacefully here,” says 32-year-old Ariam, who came to Hitsat four years ago with her two children after spending four years in a refugee camp in neighbouring Sudan.

Refugees say the Eritrean military launches missions into Sudan to capture refugees who have fled.

Ethiopia also hosts refugees from a plethora of other strife-torn countries. Its refugee population now exceeds 800,000—the highest number in Africa, and the 6th largest globally.

“Ethiopia strongly believes that generous hosting of refugees will be good for regional relationships down the road,” says  Jennifer Riggan, an associate professor of International Studies at Arcadia University in the US, and analyst of Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia.

Others point out how there is also an increasing amount of money involved with refugees. The likes of the UK and Europe are providing Ethiopia with financial incentives to keep refugees within its borders—similar to the approach taken with Turkey—so they don’t continue beyond Africa.

Meanwhile, despite the apparent welcome given to Eritrean refugees, frictions remain.

“People recognise the shared culture and ethnic background, and that helps for many things, but there’s still distrust because of the 30-year-war [for independence],” says Milena Belloni, an anthropologist who is currently writing a book about Eritrean refugees. “There’s a double narrative.”

While both sides talk of the other as brothers, she explains, historically Eritreans have looked down on Tigrayans—based on them working as migrant labourers in Eritrea during its heyday as a semi-industrialised Italian colony—while Tigrayans viewed Eritreans as arrogant and aloof.

Either way, Ethiopia appears to be looking to better assimilate refugees by embracing the 2016 Leaders’ Summit on Refugees—pushed by former U.S. President Barack Obama—that called for better integration and education, employment and residency opportunities for refugees wherever they land around the world.

“Ethiopia’s response is to manage the gate, and figure out how it can benefit from these inevitable flows of people,” Riggan says. “I definitely think Ethiopia’s approach is the wiser and more realistic one.”

About 10 miles north of Adinbried the military forces of Ethiopia and Eritrea straddle the border, eying each other suspiciously through binoculars overlooking derelict military emplacements that serve as grim reminders of a former two-year war and ongoing fraught relations between the two countries.

In 1998 Eritrea invaded the small and inconsequential-looking border town of Badme before pushing south to occupy the rest of Ethiopia’s Yirga Triangle, claiming it was historically Eritrean land.

Ethiopia eventually regained the land but the fighting cost both countries thousands of lives, billions of dollars desperately needed elsewhere in such poor and financially strapped countries, and sowed rancour and disagreement festering ever since.

Because despite the internationally brokered peace settlement that followed the 2000 ceasefire ruling Badme return to Eritrea, Ethiopia still occupies it—the government felt the Ethiopian public wouldn’t tolerate the concession of a now iconic town responsible for so many lost Ethiopian lives—and the rest of the Yirga Triangle jutting defiantly into Eritrea.

While Badme hasn’t changed much since those days—it remains a dusty, ramshackle town—it too is involved in current Eritrean migration.

“I crossed after hearing they were about to round people up for the military,” says 20-year-old Gebre at the entry point on the edge of Badme. “I wasn’t going to go through that—you’re hungry, there’s no salary, you’re not doing anything to help your country; you’re just serving officials.”

With Gebre are another 14 males ranging in age from 16 to 20 who crossed to avoid military service, as well as two mothers who crossed with two young children each.

“Life was getting worse, I had no work to earn money to feed my children,” says 34-year-old mother-of-four Samrawit, who left two older children in Eritrea.

She travelled with 22-year-old mother-of-two Yordanos, having met her at the Eritrean town of Barentua, about 50 kilometres north of the border, and the rendezvous point with their smuggler.

Neither knows how much the smuggler earned for driving them to the border and helping them across: payment was organised by their husbands living in Switzerland and Holland.

“I would like to make sure coming here is worth it before my elder two children come,” Samrawit says.

A group of refugee women and their children await the arrival of Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the Shamshatoo camp in December 2001. The camp, at a frontier province in north-west Pakistan, served as temporary home to some 70,000 Afghan refugees fleeing fighting between the United Front and the Taliban. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 4 2015 (IPS)

The United Nations has declared that 2015 is already “the deadliest year” for millions of migrants and asylum seekers fleeing war and persecution in their countries.

“Worldwide, one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced or seeking asylum,” says the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)."Even as the current challenges are unprecedented in scope and nature, they call for responses that are anchored in the values of compassion and empathy and living up to our collective humanitarian responsibility.” -- Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi

But one of the least publicised facts is that Pakistan was one of the world’s first countries to provide safe haven for millions of refugees fleeing a military conflict in a neighbouring country: Afghanistan.

According to UNHCR, Pakistan has been hosting over 1.5 million registered Afghan refugees — the largest protracted refugee population globally—since the 1980s Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Currently, Turkey ranks at number one, hosting more than 1.7 million registered refugees, mostly from war-devastated Syria, with Pakistan at number two and Jordan ranking third with over 800,000 refugees.

Developing countries now host over 86 percent of the world’s refugees, compared to 70 percent about 10 years ago.

Asked how her country coped with that crisis in the 1980s, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi told IPS Pakistan actually hosted well over 3.0 million refugees when the numbers fleeing conflict peaked in 1990.

A 2005 census confirmed that figure, of which 1.5 million are registered while the rest are undocumented.

“The United Nations and the international community have played an important role in support of Pakistan’s efforts to look after our Afghan brothers and sisters,” she said.

“But a great deal of this effort has been met from our own modest resources because we see this to be our humanitarian responsibility,” said Dr Lodhi, a former journalist with a doctorate from the London School of Economics and who has had a distinguished career as Pakistan’s High Commissioner to the UK and Ambassador to the United States.

“It is the people of Pakistan who have shown exemplary generosity and compassion in embracing the Afghan refugees and extending help and support to them, and that too for over three decades,” she added.

As the UNHCR report notes, she said, Pakistan remains the world’s second largest refugee-hosting country. “I would add that in terms of the protracted presence of refugees, it is still the world’s top refugee-hosting country.”

At a U.N. panel discussion on “the plight of refugees and migrants” last week, she said: “We never tried to turn any back, nor did we erect barriers or walls but embraced them as part of our humanitarian duty.”

As hundreds and thousands of refugees continue to flee to Europe, some of the European countries have tried either to limit the number or bar them completely.

Peter Sutherland, a U.N. special representative for international migration, is quoted as saying the attempt to bar migrants and refugees, mostly from Syria, Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan and Afghanistan, is “a xenophobic response to the issue of free movement.”

The humanitarian crisis has spilled over into Europe, mostly Germany, with about 175,000 claims by asylum seekers, compared with 25,000 claims in the UK last year.

According to the United Nations, the 28-member European Union (EU) received 570,800 claims from asylum seekers in 2014, an increase of nearly 44 percent over 2013.

The crisis point, according to the New York Times, is one of Britain’s main traffic-clogged highways where migrants make their way through the Channel Tunnel from the French port city of Calais.

“The British are blaming the French, the French are blaming the British, and both are blaming the European Union for an incoherent policy toward the thousands of people, many of them fleeing political horrors at home, who are trying to find jobs and a better future for themselves and their families in Europe,” the Times said.

As his country vowed emergency steps to resolve the refugee crisis on the home front, Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann said last week shelter for refugees was a human right the country was legally and morally obligated to provide.

Austria, with a population of about 8.5 million, has received over 28,000 asylum claims in the first half of this year, slightly more than the total for 2014.

In 2014, up to 3,072 migrants are believed to have died in the Mediterranean, compared with an estimate of 700 in 2013, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

Globally, IOM estimates that at least 4,077 migrants died in 2014, and at least 40,000 since the year 2000.

“The true number of fatalities is likely to be higher, as many deaths occur in remote regions of the world and are never recorded. Some experts have suggested that for every dead body discovered, there are at least two others that are never recovered,” said IOM.

Asked about lessons learnt, Ambassador Lodhi told IPS “even as the current challenges are unprecedented in scope and nature, they call for responses that are anchored in the values of compassion and empathy and living up to our collective humanitarian responsibility.”

She said these challenges also require a spirit of generosity and to never turn away from the needs of those who are so tragically displaced by circumstances of war, poverty or persecution.

“This spirit should shape our policies, inform our strategies, as well as empower the institutions of global governance and create conditions that can address the drivers and underlying reasons for such displacements,” she added.

At the panel discussion, Ambassador Lodhi pointed out that more than half of the world’s refugees today are children, a number that has risen steadily, up from 41 per cent in 2009, and the highest figure in over a decade.

This only magnifies the scale of the tragedy at hand, she added.

The recent and ongoing surge of forced displacement has been accompanied by the tragic loss of lives. Thousands of men, women and children have drowned in the Mediterranean.

And in East Asia, she said, thousands of Rohingya Muslims have been reported dead or missing as they made their journeys of escape from persecution, confinement and waves of deadly violence directed at them.

“How has the international community responded to all of this?” she said. “By, frankly, not doing enough and not acting decisively in the face of this humanitarian emergency. The international community – to its shame – has ignored massive human suffering in the past. We are reminded of Rwanda and Srebrenica, among other crises.”

And the current crisis of refugees could mark a new flag of shame, she declared.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Boat carrying asylum seekers and migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. Photo credit: UNHCR/L.Boldrini

By Sean Buchanan
ROME, Apr 15 2015 (IPS)

“The unbearable number of lives lost at sea will only grow if the European Union does not act now to ensure search-and-rescue operations across the Mediterranean,” Human Rights Watch warned Apr. 15.

The international human rights organisation was reacting to reports that as many as 400 migrants may have died in the Mediterranean sea over the past weekend, according to witness accounts collected by the Save the Children charity among the more than 7,000 migrants and asylum seekers rescued by the Italian Coast Guard since Apr. 10.

Noting that 11 bodies have been recovered so far from one confirmed shipwreck over the past few days, Judith Sunderland, acting deputy Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch said that “if the reports are confirmed, this past weekend would be among the deadliest few days in the world’s most dangerous stretch of water for migrants and asylum seekers.”

Many of those rescued over the weekend remain on Italian vessels as authorities scramble to find emergency accommodation, and Human Rights Watch said that the lack of preparation for arrivals was entirely preventable because many had predicted that 2015 would be a record year for boat migration.

“Other E.U. countries have shown a distinct lack of political will to help alleviate Italy’s unfair share of the responsibility,” according to the human rights organisation.

The European Union’s external border agency, Frontex, launched Operation Triton in the Mediterranean in November 2014, as Italy downsized its massive humanitarian naval operation, Mare Nostrum, which has been credited with saving tens of thousands of lives.

Triton’s geographic scope and budget is far more limited than Mare Nostrum, and the primary mandate of Frontex is border control, not search and rescue.

According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as many as 500 migrants and asylum seekers have died already in the Mediterranean in 2015, a 30-fold increase over recorded deaths in the same period in 2014.

However, said Human Rights Watch, if the reports of hundreds more dead over the past few days are confirmed, the death toll in just over three months would be nearly 1,000 people, and that number is likely to rise as more migrants take to the seas during the traditional crossing season in the spring and summer months. The death toll for all of 2014 was at least 3,200 people.

The European Commission is to present a “comprehensive migration agenda” to E.U. member states in May but some of the proposals, while cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric about preventing deaths at sea, raise serious human rights concerns, Human Rights Watch said.

These include setting up offshore processing centres in North African countries, outsourcing border control and rescue operations in order to prevent departures, and increasing financial assistance to deeply repressive countries like Eritrea, one of the key countries of origin for asylum seekers attempting the sea crossing, “without evidence of human rights reforms.”

While some proposals contain elements that could potentially address root causes of irregular migration or provide safe alternatives for migrants, Human Rights Watch said that the proof of their success will rest on whether they respect the rights of migrants and asylum seekers, rather than simply stop the flow.

Early signs of intent suggest that rather than building the capacity to protect, the emphasis will be on enhancing and outsourcing containment mechanisms to prevent departures, and “it’s hard not to see these proposals as cynical bids to limit the numbers of migrants and asylum seekers making it to E.U. shores,” Sunderland said.

“Whatever longer term initiatives may come forth, the immediate humanitarian imperative for the European Union is to get out there and save lives.”

Meanwhile, the debate around immigration in Italy has taken on xenophobic tones in some quarters, with the leader of Italy’s anti-immigrant Northern League, Matteo Salvini, calling on all local authorities to resist “by any means” requests to accommodate asylum seekers, and saying that his party is ready to occupy buildings to prevent arrivals.

Edited by Phil Harris    

The Australian Human Rights Commission has condemned the government’s asylum seeker detention policies. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia, Mar 11 2015 (IPS)

As conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere pushed the number of refugees to 13 million last year, the international community is struggling to shoulder the humanitarian responsibility of protecting those fleeing violence and persecution in their homelands.

But in Australia – a wealthy nation, far from major war zones, whose 23 million people enjoy a per-capita GDP of 67,458 dollars – the government has implemented ruthless policies for the roughly one percent of global asylum seekers who hope to find refuge on its shores.

“[Australians] are being systematically conditioned into accepting the cruel treatment of others as necessary and inevitable.” -- Australian writer and social ecologist Isobel Blackthorn
Why, in a country boasting of prosperity and peace, are asylum seekers demonised for seeking safety and freedom? Why have policies resulting in degrading human treatment, amounting to torture, as recently found by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, been implemented with so little public resistance in Australia?

Last year Australia received 4,589 asylum applications compared to 29,009 in France and 51,289 in the United States. Over 37 years Australia received a total of 69,445 asylum seekers, only slightly higher than the 67,400 Germany received during the first six months of last year.

Immigration is a contentious issue in many countries, but Australia is the only one to indefinitely incarcerate asylum seekers in immigration detention centres on arrival.

Those who arrive by sea are transferred to offshore detention centres in the developing Pacific Island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea. They are refused resettlement in Australia, even if assessed as refugees. More than a year ago the government began turning asylum-seeker boats back at sea.

“There is no greater deterrent to protecting our borders and stopping boats coming to Australia than by stopping the boats physically […],” Scott Morrison, then Minister for Immigration, said to media this past November.

This is necessary to stop people drowning at sea, the government argues, despite the policy threatening the lives of vulnerable people and violating the principle of non- refoulement laid out in the 1954 U.N. convention referring to the status of refugees.

In a report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council Monday, Juan Mendez, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on torture, concluded that Australia’s “Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment, which has passed both the house and the Senate of Australia at this point, violates the [Convention Against Torture, or CAT] because it allows for the arbitrary detention and refugee determination at sea, without access to lawyers.”

Mendez’s report also found that the indefinite detention of asylum seekers on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, together with reports of ill-treatment and outbreaks of violence, constituted a violation of the human right “to be free from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, as provided by articles 1 and 16 of the [Convention Against Torture].”

In a statement published on Mar. 9, Daniel Web, director of legal advocacy at the Melbourne-based Human Rights Law Center, said, “Under international law, Australia can’t lock people up incommunicado on a boat somewhere in the middle of the ocean. Nor can we return people to a place where they face the risk of being tortured. Yet these are precisely the powers the Government has sought to give itself through recent amendments to its maritime law.”

Australia’s mandatory and prolonged immigration detention policies are also “in clear violation of international human rights law”, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) recently reported.

Refugee assessments were suspended more than two years ago to remove advantage to those arriving by irregular means. By mid-2014, approximately 3,624 asylum seekers, including 699 children, were in detention centres.

Long confinement on average for 413 days in harsh living conditions were key factors in 34 percent of children and 30 percent of adults being diagnosed with serious mental disorders. There were 1,149 recorded incidents of serious assault, including sexual abuse, in detention centres, and 128 of children self-harming, the AHRC found.

The government’s recent announcement that children below 10 years will be released into community detention with bridging visas won’t apply to those who arrived before Jul. 19, 2013.

There is recognition by Australian legal and policy experts that “critical to any asylum policy is not whether it deters, but whether the needs of those seeking protection are met.” Organisations such as the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and Refugee Action Coalition also provide refugee advocacy and support.

But a 2010 public survey revealed more than 60 percent of respondents accepted the government’s hard-line stance.

Conditioning the public to accept cruelty

For some experts, even more disturbing than the policies themselves is public acceptance of routine ill treatment of refugees.

“Australia has fought its ideological war with as much moral insanity as would be found in a dictatorship,” the Australian writer and social ecologist, Isobel Blackthorn, wrote in the National Forum last year.

“We are being systematically conditioned into accepting the cruel treatment of others as necessary and inevitable.”

Professor Nick Haslam, head of Melbourne University’s School of Psychological Sciences, told IPS, “Activists have been quick to criticise successive governments while letting the general public off the hook.”

Official references to asylum seekers as “illegals”, suggesting criminality – despite the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) stating clearly that “seeking asylum is not illegal and respecting the right to seek asylum includes provision of humane reception” – have not been sufficiently challenged.

There has been little public resistance to the electoral point-scoring of politicians who ignore the ‘push’ factors, such as global conflict, and regale the ‘pull’ factors, that the good life in Australia is attracting an invasion. This theory ignores the fact that the vast majority of asylum seekers head to Europe and the United States.

According to Blackthorn, “Many in Australian society adopt without question the views and falsehoods promulgated by politicians and the media that set out to inflate our sense of entitlement in ‘the lucky country’.”

In the 1990s, Robert Manne, Emeritus Professor at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, identified a “new complacency” in Australia following the demise of communism, when many western leaders believed their actions were now beyond reproach.

During the Australian Liberal Government, led by Prime Minister John Howard from 1996-2007, “[National] self-criticism gradually became confused with un-Australian self-hatred,” Manne wrote in 2011, with social and political passiveness encouraged.

Complacency and parochialism have been exacerbated by geographical isolation and two decades of uninterrupted economic prosperity due to the mineral resources boom.

“Lacking a history that makes it easy to imagine the kind of desperation borne of political oppression and fear, many Australians are genuinely disturbed by the disorderly nature of the refugee scramble for safety,” Manne stated.

Haslam told IPS that public indifference is “driven primarily by the perception that asylum seekers are undeserving opportunists who are seeking entry to the country in an unfair manner” and that many are economic migrants, rather than in need of protection.

In reality, more than 88 percent of asylum seekers between 2008 and 2013 were found to be legitimate refugees.

Blackthorn suggests that the “asylum seeker issue feeds a nationalism that comes dangerously close to the far right”, adding that if the public doesn’t collectively use its democratic right to demand change of their government it is possible that “Australia will fall foul of the sorts of extremisms that have led to so many fleeing their homelands.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

For most Sri Lankans seeking asylum in Australia, there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, just a sad return journey home. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Feb 25 2015 (IPS)

Weerasinghearachilage Ruwan Rangana had it all planned out last year in September: the big break that would change his life and those of his extended family had finally arrived.

The Sri Lankan youth in his early twenties was not too worried that the arrangement meant he had to make a clandestine journey in the middle of the night to a beach, board a two-decade-old trawler with dozens of others and be ready to spend up to three weeks on the high seas in a vessel designed to carry loads of fish.

“Besides trade and security, a large driver of the Australian government’s foreign policy is its single-minded focus on ensuring that all asylum seekers or refugees are processed at offshore facilities." -- Human Rights Watch
He and his fellow commuters prayed that the boat would not crack in two before it reached Australian waters, where they all expected to find a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow.

Rangana told IPS that most of the roughly three-dozen people on board were leaving in search of better economic prospects, though members of the minority Tamil community are known to take the same journey to escape political persecution.

The boat ride was the relatively easy part. After reaching Australia, Rangana would have to seek asylum, land a job and secure an income, before beginning the process of bringing his family there to join him.

“At least, that was the plan,” said the young man who was a contract employee of the state-owned Ceylon Transport Board in the remote village of Angunakolapelessa in Sri Lanka’s southern Hambantota District earning a monthly salary of 12,000 rupees (about 90 dollars) when he took the boat ride.

Half of the plan – the life-threatening part – worked. The other part – the life-changing one – did not.

Despite a leaking hull, the vessel did reach Australian waters, but was apprehended by the Australian Navy, newly emboldened by a policy to turn back boatloads of asylum seekers after fast-tracked processing at sea, sometimes reportedly involving no more than a single phone call with a border official.

By mid-September Rangana was back in Sri Lanka, at the southern port city of Galle where he and dozens of others who were handed over to Sri Lankan authorities were facing court action.

Thankfully he did not have to spend days inside a police cell or weeks in prison. He was bailed out on 5,000 rupees (about 45 dollars), a stiff sum for his family who barely make 40,000 rupees (about 300 dollars) a month.

Now he sits at home with no job and no savings – having sunk about 200,000 rupees (1,500 dollars) into his spot on the rickety fishing boat – and makes ends meet by doing odd jobs.

“Life is hard, but maybe I can get to Australia some day. I did get to the territorial waters; does that mean I have some kind of legal right to seek citizenship there?” he asks, oblivious to the tough policies of the Australian administration towards immigrants like himself.

Clamping down on ‘illegal’ entry

Since Australia launched Operation Sovereign Borders in September 2013 following the election of Tony Abbott as Prime Minister, at least 15 boats have been turned back at sea, including the one on which Rangana was traveling, to Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

Last year only one boat reached Australia, according to the government.

The programme has resulted in a significant drop in the number of illegal maritime arrivals in Australia. Compared to the one boat that reached Australia in 2014, the 2012-2013 period saw 25,173 persons reaching the country safely.

In the 10 months prior to the controversial military programme, 281 unauthorized boats arrived with a total of 19,578 people on board, according to the Australian Department of Immigration.

Just this past week, Australian authorities interviewed four Sri Lankans at sea, and sent them back to the island. Officials claim that the new screening process saves lives and assures that Australian asylum policies are not abused.

“The Coalition government’s policies and resolve are stopping illegal boat arrivals and are restoring integrity to Australia’s borders and immigration programme. Anyone attempting to enter Australia illegally by sea will never be resettled in this country,” Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s office said in a statement this week.

As of end-January, there were 2,298 persons in immigration detention facilities in Australia, of whom 8.1 percent were Sri Lankans.

The policy has been criticised by activists as well as rights groups, including by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“UNHCR’s position is that they (asylum seekers) must be swiftly and individually screened, in a process which they understand and in which they are able to explain their needs. Such screening is best carried out on land, given safety concerns and other limitations of doing so at sea,” the agency said in a statement earlier this month.

According to the international watchdog Human Rights Watch, “Besides trade and security, a large driver of the Australian government’s foreign policy is its single-minded focus on ensuring that all asylum seekers or refugees are processed at offshore facilities.

“The government has muted its criticism of authoritarian governments in Sri Lanka and Cambodia in recent years, apparently in hopes of winning the support of such governments for its refugee policies,” the rights group added in a statement released last month.

The end of Sri Lanka’s 26-year-long civil conflict and the election of a new, possibly more democratic government in January this year add to Canberra’s justification for turning away those who seek shelter within its borders.

In reality, the risk for asylum seekers is still high. Newly appointed Minister of Justice Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe told IPS that the government was yet to discuss any changes to accepting returnees. “They will face legal action; change in such a policy is not a priority right now,” he added.

Lawyers working with asylum seekers say their clients are unlikely to face extended jail terms, but could be slapped with fines of up to 100,000 rupees (750 dollars), still a lot of money for poor families.

Even if the legal process is swift, and those impounded are able to post bail, their reasons for wanting to leave remain the same.

Take the case of Kanan*, a young man from the war-torn northern town of Kilinochchi. He took a boat in August 2013 after paying a 750-dollar fee, agreeing to pay the remaining 6,750 dollars once he reached Australia.

He never even made it halfway. Six days into the journey, the boat broke down and was towed ashore by the Sri Lankan Navy.

He was fleeing poverty – his home district boasts unemployment rates over twice the national figure of four percent – and possible political persecution, not an unusual occurrence among the Tamil community both during and after Sri Lanka’s civil war.

He knows that very few have gotten to the Australian mainland and that even those whose cases have been deemed legitimate could end up in the Pacific islands of Nauru or Papua New Guinea.

But Kanan still hopes to give his ‘boat dream’ another try. “There is no hope here; even risking death [to reach Australia] is worth it,” says the unemployed youth.

*Name changed on request

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jan 12 2015 (IPS)

It is sad to see how a continent that was one cradle of civilisation is running blindly into a trap, the trap of a holy war with Islam – and that six Muslim terrorists were sufficient to bring that about.

It is time to get out of the comprehensible “We are All Charlie Hebdo” wave, to look into facts, and to understand that we are playing into the hands of a few extremists, and equating ourselves with them. The radicalisation of the conflict between the West and Islam is going to carry with it terrible consequences

Roberto Savio

The first fact is that Islam is the second largest religion in the world, with 1.6 billion practitioners, that Muslims are the majority in 49 countries of the world and that they account for 23 percent of humankind. Of these 1.6 billion, only 317 million are Arabs. Nearly two-thirds (62 percent) live in the Asia-Pacific region; in fact, more Muslims live in India and Pakistan (344 million combined). Indonesia alone has 209 million.

A Pew Research Center report on the Muslim world also inform us that it is in South Asia that Muslims are more radical in terms of observance and views. In that region, those in favour of severe corporal punishment for criminals are 81 percent, compared with 57 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, while those in favour of executing those who leave Islam are 76 percent in South Asia, compared with 56 percent in the Middle East.

Therefore, it is obvious that it is the history of the Middle East which brings the specificity of the Arabs to the conflict with the West. And here are the main four reasons.“We are falling into a deadly trap, and doing exactly what the radical Muslims want: engaging in a holy war against Islam, so that the immense majority of moderate Muslims will be pushed to take up arms … instead of a strategy of isolation, we are engaging in a policy of confrontation”

First, all the Arab countries are artificial creations. In May 1916, Monsieur François Georges-Picot for France and Sir Mark Sykes for Britain met and agreed on a secret treaty, with the support of the Russian Empire and the Italian Kingdom, on how to carve up the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War.

Thus the Arab countries of today were born as the result of a division by France and Britain with no consideration for ethnic and religious realities or for history. A few of those countries, like Egypt, had an historical identity, but countries like Iraq, Arabia Saudi, Jordan, or even the Arab Emirates, lacked even that. It is worth remembering that the Kurdish issue of 30 million people divided among four countries was created by European powers.

As a consequence, the second reason. The colonial powers installed kings and sheiks in the countries that they created. To run these artificial countries, strong hands were required. So, from the very beginning, there was a total lack of participation of the people, with a political system which was totally out of sync with the process of democracy which was happening in Europe. With European blessing, these countries were frozen in feudal times.

As for the third reason, the European powers never made any investment in industrial development, or real development. The exploitation of petrol was in the hands of foreign companies and only after the end of the Second World War, and the ensuing process of decolonisation, did oil revenues really come into local hands.

When the colonial powers left, the Arab countries had no modern political system, no modern infrastructure, no local management.

Finally, the fourth reason, which is closer to our days. In states which did not provide education and health for their citizens, Muslim piety took on the task of providing what the state was not providing. So large networks of religious schools and hospital were created and, when elections were finally permitted, these became the basis for legitimacy and the vote for Muslim parties.

This is why, just taking the example of two important countries, Islamist parties won in Egypt and Algeria, and how with the acquiescence of the West, military coups were the only resort to stopping them.

This compression of so many decades into a few lines is of course superficial and leaves out many other issues. But this brutally abridged historical process is useful for understanding how anger and frustration is now all over the Middle East, and how this leads to the attraction to the Islamic State (IS) in poor sectors.

We should not forget that this historical background, even if remote for young people, is kept alive by Israel’s domination of the Palestinian people. The blind support of the West, especially of the United States, for Israel is seen by Arabs as a permanent humiliation, and Israel’s continuous expansion of settlements clearly eliminates the possibility of a viable Palestinian State.

The July-August bombing of Gaza, with just some noises of protest from the West but no real action, is for the Arab world clear proof that the intention is to keep Arabs down and seek alliances only with corrupt and delegitimised rulers who should be swept away. And the continuous Western intervention in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and the drones bombing everywhere, are widely perceived among the 1.6 billion that the West is historically engaged in keeping Islam down, as the Pew report noted.

We should also remember that Islam has several internal divisions, of which the Sunni-Shiite divide is just the largest. But while in the Arab region at least 40 percent of Sunni do not recognise a Shiite as a fellow Muslim, outside the region this tends to disappear, In Indonesia only 26 percent identify themselves as Sunni, with 56 percent identifying themselves as “just Muslim”.

In the Arab world, only in Iraq and Lebanon, where the two communities lived side by side, does a large majority of Sunni recognise Shiites as fellow Muslims. The fact that Shiites, who account for just 13 percent of Muslims, are the large majority in Iran, and the Sunni the large majority in Saudi Arabia explains the ongoing internal conflict in the region, which is being stirred by the two respective leaders.

Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, then run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (1966–2006), successfully deployed a policy of polarisation in Iraq, continuing attacks on Shiites and provoking an ethnic cleansing of one million Sunnis from Baghdad. Now IS, the radical caliphate which is challenging the entire Arab world besides the West, is able to attract many Sunnis from Iraq which had suffered so many Shiite reprisals, that they sought the umbrella of the very group that had deliberately provoked the Shiites.

The fact it is that every day hundreds of Arabs die because of the internal conflict, a fate that does not affect the much larger Muslim community.

Now, all terrorist attacks in the West that have happened in Ottawa, in London, and now in Paris, have the same profile: a young man from the country in question, not someone from the Arab region, who was not at all religious during his teenage years, someone who somehow drifted, did not find a job, and was a loner. In nearly all cases, someone who had already had something to do with the judicial system.

Only in the last few years had he become converted to Islam and accepted the calls from IS for killing infidels. He felt that with this he would find a justification to his life, he would become a martyr, a somebody in another world, removed from a life in which there was no real bright future.

The reaction to all this has been a campaign in the West against Islam. The latest number of the New Yorker published a strong article defining Islam not as a religion but as an ideology. In Italy, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the right-wing and anti-immigrant Lega Nord has publicly condemned the Pope for engaging Islam in dialogue, and conservative Italian pundit Giuliano Ferrara declared on TV that ”we are in a Holy War”.

The overall European (and U.S.) reaction has been to denounce the Paris killings as the result of a “deadly ideology”, as President François Hollande called it.

It is certainly a sign of the anti-Muslim tide that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was obliged to take a position against the recent marches in Dresden (Muslim population 2 percent), organised by the populist movement Pegida (the German acronym for “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West”). The marches were basically directed against the 200,000 asylum seekers, most of them from Iraq and Syria, whose primary intention, according to Pegida, was not to escape war.

Studies from all over Europe show that the immense majority of immigrants have successfully integrated with their host economies. United Nations studies also show that Europe, with its demographic decline, requires at least 20 million immigrants by 2050 if it wants to remain viable in welfare practices, and competitive in the world. Yet, what are we getting everywhere?

Xenophobic, right-wing parties in every country of Europe, able to make the Swedish government resign, conditioning the governments of United Kingdom, Denmark and Nederland, and looking poised to win the next elections in France.

It should be added that, while what happened in Paris was of course a heinous crime, and while expression of any opinion is essential for democracy, very few have ever seen Charlie Hebdo and its level of provocation. Especially because in 2008, as Tariq Ramadan pointed out in The Guardian of Jan. 10, Charlie Hebdo fired a cartoonist who had joke about a Jewish link to the French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s son.

Charlie Hebdo was a voice defending the superiority of France and its cultural supremacy in the world, and had a small readership, which it obtained by selling provocation – exactly the opposite of the view of a world based on respect and cooperation among different cultures and religions.

So now we are all Charlie, as everybody is saying. But to radicalise the clash between the two largest religions of the world is not a minor affair. We should fight terrorism, be it Muslim or not (let us not forget that a Norwegian, Anders Behring Breivik, who wanted to keep his country free of Muslim penetration, killed 91 of his co-citizens).

But we are falling into a deadly trap, and doing exactly what the radical Muslims want: engaging in a holy war against Islam, so that the immense majority of moderate Muslims will be pushed to take up arms.

The fact that European right-wing parties will reap the benefit of this radicalisation goes down very well for the radical Muslims. They dream of a world fight, in which they will make Islam – and not just any Islam, but their interpretation of Sunnism – the sole religion. Instead of a strategy of isolation, we are engaging in a policy of confrontation.

And, apart from September 11 in New York, the losses of life have been miniscule compared with what is going on in the Arab world, where just in one country – Syria – 50,000 people lost their lives last year.

How can we so blindly fall into the trap without realising that we are creating a terrible clash all over the world? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

“It’s like putting explosive, gasoline and matches all in one shed. These are things that should be stored in separated places.”

Giuseppe Giorgioli, an inhabitant of the Tor Sapienza district of Rome and a member of the Tor Sapienza Committee, was explaining the mid-November outburst in the district against a reception centre for asylum seekers and refugees, in which dozens of paper bombs were thrown.

The Tor Sapienza district, situated in the east side of the Italian capital, is home to almost 13 thousands citizens and, according to Giorgioli, is treated as a “second class quarter” by the Rome administration because of its relatively small dimensions.Episodes like the attack on a reception centre for asylum seekers and refugees “are being worsened by a growing poverty that now affects 13 million people in Italy, with 42 percent of young people unemployed” – Monsignor Giancarlo Perego

“For the last 10 to 15 years there has been a progressive phenomenon of disruption-parking in our suburb. This is how we ended up hosting four reception centres for migrants and two gypsy camps, while other districts in the city have none,” Giorgioli complained.

The residents’ uprising followed an alleged attempt of rape by a Romanian citizen against a local resident and a series of attempted robberies in apartments in the neighbourhood.

The Tor Sapienza Committee had organised a demonstration to ask the Rome Town Council to act against the urban decay the neighbourhood is suffering but once the march was over, a group of people – about one hundred according to witnesses – gathered in front of the building where the ‘Il Sorriso’ cooperative manages different services, including a reception centre for asylum seekers and refugees and three structures hosting foreign unaccompanied minors.

“When I arrived in the centre the following morning, I found huge pieces of asphalt, broken glass and people – both adults and minors – suffering from panic attacks,” recalls Alessia Armini of Italy’s System of Protection for Asylum Seekers and Refugees (SPRAR), who is coordinator of the cooperative. “Let’s not forget the kind of vulnerable guests we have in such centres,” she adds.

While no one denies the critical conditions suffered by many suburbs in Rome, with cuts in transport services, council houses not having been refurbished for decades and inefficient garbage collection among others, the explanations for such a violent outburst vary widely.

“People are not racists, they are exasperated. Rome is just the tip of the iceberg, but this is about the whole country,” Paolo Grimoldi, MP for right-wing Northern League party, told IPS. “When you receive 150 thousand migrants – we say illegal, the government says refugees – in one year who are given a house, money and are taken care of by the State, this inevitably destabilises our social fabric.”

However, according to Monsignor Giancarlo Perego who runs Migrantes, the foundation of the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) for migrants, the numbers tell a different story: “Migrants are abandoning our country because it no longer represents an economic opportunity for many of them,” he told IPS.

“The reasons must be found in a management of the suburbs that looked at the interests of building speculators rather than guaranteeing common assets such as meeting places that are necessary to build a feeling of safety within a territory.”

In addition, the economic crisis also plays an important role also in this context. “Episodes [like the Tor Sapienza] incident are being worsened by a growing poverty that now affects 13 million people in Italy, with 42 percent of young people unemployed,” said Perego.

“But such a difficult situation does not exempt us from the need of building relationships, delivering correct information and managing the places where people live in order to encourage encounters and not social clashes.”

For their part, the citizens of Tor Sapienza firmly reject any accusation of racism. “We welcome everybody and we’ve been welcoming everybody for twenty years,” Giorgioli told IPS.

“You don’t become racist in four days. But there are rules that need to be respected and services that the town council needs to provide. If such services are not provided, unfortunately someone with less patience begins to see red.”

In the days that followed the attack on the reception centre, both local and national politicians visited the neighbourhood, provoking strong criticism – and not only from angry citizens – that they were using the situation for instrumental reasons.

“I think that any form of manipulation, whether from left or right, is a serious aspect to be avoided. Politicians must govern a city, not pour in new reasons for social clashes,” Perego said.

Meanwhile, the violent episode in Tor Sapienza and signs of social unrest in other Italian neighbourhoods that have sparked debate and drawn attention to the migrant issue are not to be underestimated.

“In these suburbs, the level of social distress is extremely high, but all that hate, taking a symbol and pouring everything out on it … it’s frightening,” said Armini. “We heard people [outside the centre] screaming ‘let’s burn them all, let’s make soap out of them’. This issue brought out the worst in people.”

While condemning the recent violence, Giorgioli of the Tor Sapienza Committee is not sure that such situations will not be repeated

“I have reasons to fear that the same people who have already shown that they are capable of violent actions will repeat them if there are no signs of change. They could feel disrespected, as if the institutions were making a fool of them.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

When a natural disaster strikes, people are sometimes left with no choice but to leave the areas affected. Yet, for some, even this option might not exist. Cyclone survivors in Myanmar shelter in the ruins of their destroyed home. Credit: UNHCR/Taw Naw Htoo

By Ido Liven
LONDON, Nov 10 2014 (IPS)

Climate change is projected by many scientists to bring with it a range of calamities – from widespread floods, to prolonged heatwaves and slowly but relentlessly rising seas – taking the heaviest toll on those already most vulnerable.

When a natural disaster strikes, people are sometimes left with no choice but to leave the areas affected. Yet, for some, even this option might not exist.

While many could be uprooted in search of a safer place to live, either temporarily or permanently, some may become “climate hostages”, unable to escape.

“People around the world are more or less mobile, depending on a range of factors,” argues Prof Richard Black from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, “but they can become trapped in circumstances where they want or need [to move] but cannot.”When a natural disaster strikes, people are sometimes left with no choice but to leave the areas affected. Yet, for some, even this option might not exist … they may become “climate hostages”, unable to escape

According to Black, “it is most likely to be because they cannot afford it, or because there is no [social] network for them to follow or job for them to do … or because there is some kind of policy barrier to movement such as a requirement for a visa that is unobtainable, in some countries even the requirement for an exit visa that is unobtainable.”

For the most vulnerable, climate change could mean double jeopardy – first, from worsening environmental conditions threatening their livelihood, and second, from the diminished financial, social and even physical assets required for moving away provoked by this situation.

A project on migration and global environmental change led by Black was one of the first to draw attention to the notion of “trapped populations”.

In its report, published in 2011 by the Foresight think tank at the U.K. Government Office for Science, the authors warned that “in the decades ahead, millions of people will be unable to move away from locations in which they are extremely vulnerable to environmental change.”

An example the Foresight report mentions is that of inhabitants of small island states living in flood-prone areas or near exposed coasts. People in these areas might not have the means to address these hazards and also lack the resources to migrate out of the islands.

The report warned that such situations could escalate to risky displacement and humanitarian emergencies.

In fact, past cases offer some evidence of groups of people who have become immobile as a result of either extreme weather events or even slow onset crises.

One such example, says Black, is the drought in the 1980s in Africa’s Sahel region, when there was a decrease in the numbers of adult men who chose to migrate – the same people who would otherwise leave the area.

“Under drought conditions they were less able to do so because that involves drawing on your assets – in the Sahel often assets would be livestock – and the drought kills livestock, which means you can’t convert livestock into cash, and then you can’t pay the smuggler or afford the cost of the journey that would take you out of that area.”

Nevertheless, Black argues that in many cases it would be especially difficult to distinguish people who remain because they can and wish to, from those who are really unable to leave. In addition, environmental change could also drive people to migrate towards areas where they are even more at risk than those they have left.

In the Mekong delta in southern Vietnam, researchers foresee climate change contributing to floods, loss of land and increased soil salinity. Facing these hazards, local residents in an already impoverished region could find themselves unable to cope, and also unable to move away.

“It would generally be income and assets that will determine whether people can stay where they are or need to relocate,” says Dr Christopher Smith from the University of Sussex, who is currently conducting a European Community-funded project assessing the risk of trapped populations in the Mekong delta.

“Within the short term, it would mostly be temporary movement, but in the future … there could be more permanent migration.”

According to Smith, “the Mekong, being such a long river that flows through so many different countries, will make [this case] quite unique in terms of changes to the water budget in the delta and, of course, factors like cultures and populations in the delta will play a part.”

Conclusions from the study are likely to be relevant to other cases around the world, and specifically to other low lying mega-deltas with similar characteristics, Smith adds.

In Guatemala, researchers found that relatively isolated mountain communities could also be facing the risk of becoming stranded by climate change.

According to a study published earlier this year, irregular rainfall could be posing a serious threat for the food security and sources of income of communities in the municipality of Cabricán who rely on subsistence rain-fed agriculture.

Yet, the risks associated with climate change are not confined to developing countries. Hurricane Katrina, which hit the south-east of the United States in 2005, offered a vivid example when the New Orleans’ Superdome housed more than 20,000 people over several days.

“That was to do with the fact that an evacuation plan had been designed with the idea that everybody would leave by car, but essentially there were sections of the population that didn’t have a car and were not going to leave by car, and also some people who didn’t believe the messages around evacuation,” says Black.

“And those people who were trapped in the eye of the storm were then more likely to be displaced later – so they were more likely to end up in one of the trailer parks, the temporary accommodation put on by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

Scientists are wary of linking Hurricane Katrina, or any single extreme weather event, to climate change. Yet, studies show that a warmer world might not necessarily mean more hurricanes, but such storms could be fiercer than those that these areas are used to.

Beyond science, says Black, international organisations are aware of the issue. “I’ve had quite extensive discussions with UNHCR [the U.N. refugee agency], the International Organization for Migration, the European Commission and a number of other bodies on these matters. There is a degree of interest in this idea that people can be trapped.”

A paper on Populations ‘trapped’ at times of crisis written by Black with Michael Collyer of the University of Sussex and published in February, notes that while it might still be early to suggest specific policy measures to address this predicament, there are several steps decision makers can take, and not only on the national level.

“As long as we have limited information on trapped populations,” say the authors, “the policy goal should be to avoid situations in which people are unable to move when they want to, not to promote policy that encourages them to move when they may not want to, and up-to-date information allowing them to make an informed choice.”

Intergovernmental fora – and among them the loss and damage stream in international climate negotiations – are yet to address specifically the challenge of trapped populations, but Europe might already be showing the way.

A European Commission working paper on climate change, environmental degradation and migration that accompanies the European Union’s strategy on adaptation to climate change adopted in April 2013 mentions the risk of trapped populations, albeit implicitly only outside the region, and recommends steps to address the issue.

Reviewing existing research on the links between climate change, environmental degradation and migration, the authors note that relocation, while questionably effective, “may nevertheless become a necessity in certain scenarios” such as the case of trapped communities.

“The EU should therefore consider supporting countries severely exposed to environmental stressors to assess the path of degradation and design specific preventive internal, or where necessary, international relocation measures when adaptation strategies can no longer be implemented,” states the working paper.

Ultimately, the situation where individuals, families, and indeed entire communities, find themselves unable to move out of harm’s way is not unique to the effects of climate change – it can be other natural hazards such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions or human-induced crises like armed conflict.

The international community’s response to people moving in the face of such crises is most often based on giving them a status, such as “internally displaced persons”, “asylum seekers” or “refugees”.

But this would not be the appropriate response when people remain, argues Black.

For them, “the issue is not a lack of legal status – it’s a lack of options … Public policy needs to be geared around providing people with options, in my view, both ahead of disasters and in the immediate aftermath of disasters.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The Italian Navy rescued 1,004 refugees and migrants on 14 August 2014. Some arrived barefoot, some children were shaking with cold. Men, women and children from Syria, Somalia, Gambia, Bangladesh and other countries were rescued. Credit: Amnesty International

By Matt Carr
MATLOCK, United Kingdom, Oct 10 2014 (IPS)

Since the end of the Cold War, the Mediterranean has become the most lethal of Europe’s barriers against irregular migration, having claimed nearly 20,000 migrant lives in the last two decades.  

And the first nine months of 2014 indicate that the phenomenon is on the rise, with more migrant deaths than in any previous year.

Last month, a report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported that 3,072 migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean this year out of a worldwide total of 4,077 deaths worldwide.  These figures are almost certainly underestimates, because many migrant deaths in the Mediterranean are not reported.

In the same month, a report from Amnesty International on migrant deaths in the Mediterranean estimated that 2, 200 migrants died between the beginning of June and mid-September alone.“It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Mediterranean has become an instrument in a policy of deterrence, in which migrant deaths are tacitly accepted as a form of ‘collateral damage’ in a militarised response to 21st century migration whose overriding objective is to stop people coming”

The worst incident in this period took place on Sep 11. when 500 men, women and children, many of them refugees from Syria and Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, drowned after their boat was deliberately rammed by their traffickers in Maltese territorial waters.

This horrendous crime took place less than one year after the horrific events of Oct. 3 last year, when at least 360 migrants drowned when their boat sank near the Italian island of Lampedusa.

At the time, the drownings at Lampedusa prompted an unprecedented outpouring of international anger and sympathy.

Pope Francis, European politicians such as Cecilia Malmstrom (European Commissioner for Home Affairs) and Juan Manuel Barroso (President of the European Commission), and  U.N. Secretary-General  Ban Ki-Moon all joined in the chorus of condemnation and called on Europe and the international community to take action to prevent such tragedies in the future.

Twelve months later, these worthy declarations have yet to be realised.

Following the Lampedusa tragedy, Italy undertook the largest combined naval/coastguard search and rescue operation in its history – known as ‘Operation Mare Nostrum’ – to coincide with Italian occupancy of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union.    At a cost of nine million euros per month, the operation has rescued 100,000 people.

Yet despite these efforts, the death toll is already four times higher than it was in the whole of last year.  This increase is partly due to the rise in the numbers of people crossing, primarily as a result of the Syrian civil war and the collapse of the Libyan state. This year, more than 130,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean, compared with 60,000 the previous year.

A group of Somali women, among those rescued by the Italian Navy vessel Virginio Fasan, between 13 and 14 August 2014. Credit: Amnesty International

These numbers have tested the resources of Malta and Italy.  Some drownings have occurred as a result of a lack of clarity and coordination between the two countries over their mutual search and rescue areas.  In addition, Malta has sometimes been reluctant to rescue migrant boats in distress – a reluctance that some observers attribute to an unwillingness on the part of the authorities to accept them as refugees.

But the European Union has also been conspicuously absent from the unfolding tragedy on its southern maritime borders.

Despite numerous calls from the Italian government for assistance, it was not until August this year that the European Union mandated ‘Frontex’ – the European border agency – to undertake ‘Operation Triton’ in the Mediterranean to complement Italy’s search and rescue operations.

But Frontex is primarily concerned with immigration enforcement rather than search and rescue, and the joint operations that it coordinates are entirely dependent on resources provided by E.U. member states.

Glaring lack of response

It is at this level that the lack of response is most glaring.  There are many things that European governments could do to implement to reduce migrant deaths.

They could use their navies to establish the ‘humanitarian corridors’ between North Africa and Europe, as the U.N. refugee agency UNCHR once suggested during the Libyan Civil War.  They could facilitate legal entry, so that men, women and children fleeing war and political oppression can reach Europe safely without having to place their lives in the hands of smugglers. 

The European Union could also abolish or reform the Dublin Regulation that obliges asylum seekers to make their applications in one country only.  This law has placed too much responsibility on European ‘border countries’ like Malta, Italy, Spain and Greece, all of which have experienced surges in irregular migration over the last twenty years.

More generally, Europe could establish an international dialogue with migrant-producing countries to make labour migration safe and mutually beneficial. However, many governments clearly regard ‘Mare Nostrum’ as an essential moat between ‘Fortress Europe’ and its unwanted migrants.

Most migrants who cross the Mediterranean are refugees from nationalities that UNHCR considers to be in need of some form of protection under the terms of the Geneva Convention.   But in order to obtain this, they have to reach Europe first and undergo all the risks that these journeys entail.

All this has transformed the Mediterranean into what Amnesty calls a “survival test” for refugees and migrants. Few politicians will openly admit this because such an admission would directly contradict the values that the European Union has set out to uphold since the European project first took shape after World War II.

Most governments prefer instead to condemn the smugglers and organised criminals who profit from such journeys, and wring their hands whenever a particularly terrible tragedy takes place. Men who sink migrant boats or send them to sea without lifebelts certainly deserve to be condemned.

But, as Amnesty International points out, Europe’s ”woeful response” has also contributed to the death toll.  And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Mediterranean has become an instrument in a policy of deterrence, in which migrant deaths are tacitly accepted as a form of ‘collateral damage’ in a militarised response to 21^st century migration whose overriding objective is to stop people coming.

Until these priorities change, migrants will continue to die, and 2014’s grim record may well be superseded.  Italy has already threatened to stop its search and rescue operations when its presidency of the European Union comes to an end later this year.

Amnesty International has urged European governments to fulfil their humanitarian obligations to save lives in the Mediterranean and warned that “the EU as a whole cannot be indifferent to this suffering.”

So far, there is little sign that anybody is listening.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The author posts blogs on this and other issues at infernalmachine.co.uk/

Amid escalating conflicts and rampant violations of human rights all over the world, spreading “human rights education” is not an easy task. But a non-governmental organisation from Japan is beginning to make an impact through its “global citizenship education” approach.

At the current annual meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which began on Sep. 8, two side events marked the beginning of what promises to be a sustained campaign to spread human rights education (HRE).

Alongside the first, the launch of the web resource “The Right to Human Rights Education” by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, a special workshop was also convened on HRE for media professionals and journalists.

The workshop was an initiative of the NGO Working Group on HRE chaired by Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a prominent NGO from Japan fighting for the abolition of nuclear weapons, sustainable development and human rights education.“It is important to raise awareness of human rights education among media professionals and journalists who are invariably caught in the crossfire of conflicts” – Kazunari Fujii, Soka Gakkai International

“This is the first time that the NGO Working Group on Human Rights Education and Learning and a group of seven countries representing the Platform for Human Rights Education and Training have organised a workshop on human rights education for media professionals and journalists,” said Kazunari Fujii, SGI’s Geneva representative.

Fujii has been working among human rights pressure groups in Geneva to mobilise support for intensifying HRE campaigning. “Through the promotion of human rights education, SGI wants to foster a culture of human rights that prevents violations from occurring in the first place,“ Fujii told IPS after the workshop on Tuesday (Sep. 16).

“While protection of human rights is the core objective of the U.N. Charter, it is equally important to prevent the occurrence of human rights abuses,” he argued.

Citing SGI President Daisaku Ikeda’s central message to foster a “culture of human rights”, Fujii said his mission in Geneva is to bring about solidarity among NGOs for achieving SGI’s major goals on human rights, nuclear disarmament and sustainable development.

The current session of the Human Rights Council, which will end on Sep. 26, is grappling with a range of festering conflicts in different parts of the world. “From a human rights perspective, it is clear that the immediate and urgent priority of the international community should be to halt the increasingly conjoined conflicts in Iraq and Syria,” said Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the new U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“In particular, dedicated efforts are urgently needed to protect religious and ethnic groups, children – who are at risk of forcible recruitment and sexual violence – and women, who have been the targets of severe restrictions,” Al Hussein said in his maiden speech to the Council.

“The second step, as my predecessor [Navanetham Pillay] consistently stressed, must be to ensure accountability for gross violations of human rights and international crimes,” he continued, arguing that “impunity can only lead to further conflicts and abuses, as revenge festers and the wrong lessons are learned.”

Al Hussein, who comes from the Jordanian royal family, wants the Council to address the underlying factors of crises, particularly the “corrupt and discriminatory political systems that disenfranchised large parts of the population and leaders who oppressed or violently attacked independent actors of civil society”.

Among others, he stressed the need to end “persistent discrimination and impunity” underlying the Israel-Palestine conflict – in which 2131 Palestinians were killed during the latest crisis in Gaza, including 1,473 civilians, 501 of them children, and 71 Israelis.

The current session of the Human Rights Council is also scheduled to discuss issues such as basic economic and livelihood rights, which are going to be addressed through the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, the worsening plight of migrants around the world, and the detention of asylum seekers and migrants, including children in the United States.

“Clearly, a number of human rights violations and the worsening plight of indigenous people are major issues that need to be tackled on a sustained basis,” said Fujii. “But it is important to raise the awareness of human rights education among media professionals and journalists who are invariably caught in the crossfire of conflicts.”

During open discussion at the media professionals and journalists workshop, several reporters not only shared their personal experiences but also sought clarity on how reporters can safeguard human rights in conflicts where they are embedded with occupying forces in Iraq or other countries.

“This is a major issue that needs to be addressed because it is difficult for journalists to respect human rights when they are embedded with forces,” Oliver Rizzi Carlson, a representative of the United Network of Young Peacebuilders, told IPS.

Commenting on the work that remains to be done in spreading global citizenship education, Fujii noted that tangible progress has been made by bringing several human rights pressure groups together in intensifying the campaign for human rights education.

“Solidarity within civil society and increasing recognition for our work from member states is bringing about tangible results,” said Fujii. “The formation of an NGO coalition – HR 2020 – comprising 14 NGOs such as Amnesty International and SGI last year is a significant development in the intensification of our campaign.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Afghan migrants wait patiently for the smugglers who will take them to Iran. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
ZARANJ, Afghanistan, Sep 16 2014 (IPS)

“Of course I’m scared, but what else can I possibly do?” asks Ahmed, a middle-aged man seated on the carpeted floor of a hotel located on the southern edge of Afghanistan. He is bound for Iran, but he still has no idea when or how he’ll cross the border.

In his early 40s, Ahmed looks 15 years older than his real age. He says he has no means of feeding his seven children back in his hometown of Bamiyan, 130 km northwest of Kabul. Being illiterate poses yet another major hurdle to earning money and supporting his family.

“We’re all starving back home,” Ahmed tells IPS from his position on the floor where he will rest until the smugglers finally show up. It won’t be too long now, he says.

"We were going to Tehran but were caught in Iranshahr - 1,500 km southeast of the Persian capital. The police beat us with batons and cables, all over our bodies, before taking us back to the border by bus." -- Abdul Khalil, a 22-year-old Afghan migrant
“They never spend more than two days here,” notes Hassan, the innkeeper, who prefers not to disclose his full name. He is well versed in the details of Ahmed’s impending journey, since he is the one who mediates between his ‘guests’ and the smugglers who – for a sizeable fee – facilitate the trip across the border.

“They’ll be taken in the back of a pickup all the way down to Pakistan. From there they have to walk through the desert for a full day until they reach the Iranian border. Many don’t even make it there,” Hasan tells IPS.

Ahmed is just another customer at another one of many similar establishments scattered around Zaranj’s main square, 800 km southwest of Kabul. This is the capital of Afghanistan’s remote Nimruz province, the only one that shares borders with both Iran and Pakistan.

Also called ‘Map Square’, due to a giant map of Afghanistan hanging atop a huge pedestal, Zaranj is the last stop before a journey, which, in the best-case scenario, will be remembered as a nightmare.

Every day, thousands of Afghans put their lives in the hands of mafias that offer them an escape route from a country still in turmoil 13 years after the U.S. invasion in 2001.

In 2011, some 35 percent of Afghanistan’s population of 30.55 million people lived below the poverty line, a situation that has barely improved today. The official unemployment rate stood at seven percent that same year, but the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that this number could be much higher.

Thus it comes as no surprise that Afghanistan is, after Syria and Russia, the source country for the largest number of asylum seekers worldwide.

A recent report by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) found that in 2013 alone, some 38,700 Afghans requested refugee status, accounting for 6.5 percent of the global total of asylum seekers.

Of the many destinations, Turkey remains by far the most popular, with 8,700 Afghan refugees requesting asylum last year.

Other industrialised countries like Sweden, Austria and Germany also attract a good share of Afghans in search of a better life, but the proximity of Iran, coupled with a shared language, makes it a far more sensible choice.

What many migrants find across the border, however, is a far cry from the warm embrace of a kindly neighbour.

Point “zero”

There are less than two kilometres between Map Square and the official border crossing with Iran. It’s obviously not the way out for Ahmed, but it might well be his route back.

Right next to the bridge over the Helmand River, the “no man’s land” between the two countries, lies “zero” point. It’s the place where all Afghans coming from the other side, either deported or on a voluntary basis, are told to register in.

At five in the evening, their number almost reaches 500.

Afghan migrants walk back home after being deported from Iran. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

“Only today we have registered 259 deportees and 211 who came voluntarily,” Mirwais Arab, team leader of the Directorate for Refugees and Returnees at the “zero” point, explains to IPS.

“Among all these we can only address the most immediate needs of 65; we give them food and shelter for the first night and a small amount of money so that they can go back home,” adds the government official.

Given the number restrictions, and the limited assistance available, the majority of migrants keep walking once they have registered in. This is not an occasional drip but a steady stream of exhausted men. The sense of defeat is overwhelming.

Many of them, like the Khalil brothers, aged 21 and 22, are very young. They tell IPS that they reached Iran six days ago, via Pakistan, after a long journey across the desert.

Like many others, they had to pay a high protection fee to a Taliban-affiliated group to ensure they could pass unharmed. Their return journey to Afghanistan was not much easier:

“We were going to Tehran but were caught in Iranshahr – 1,500 km southeast of the Persian capital. The police beat us with batons and cables, all over our bodies, before taking us back to the border by bus,” recalls Abdul, the elder of the two, speaking to IPS on the hard shoulder of the road at Zaranj’s southern entrance.

The Arifis’ story is even more dramatic. After reaching Zaranj from Kunduz, located on the northernmost edge of Afghanistan, they crossed the border illegally. They were five in all, but one of them, a seven-year-old, has not yet made it back.

Fifteen-year-old Ziaud furnishes IPS with the details of his family’s ordeal:

“When we were arrested by the Iranian police, they dragged my brother Mohammed and myself into one car, and my parents into another one. That’s when our little brother disappeared,” says the teenaged migrant.

“My father is going to try to go back today to get him,” he adds, still in a state of shock.

Najibullah Haideri, head of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Nimruz, tells IPS that Iran deports an average of 600 men and 200 families on a monthly basis.

Meanwhile, Ahmadullah Noorzai, head of the UNHCR office in Zaranj, tells IPS that the wave of deportations started six years ago.

In a report released in 2013, Human Rights Watch pointed out that Afghans, by far the largest expatriate population in Iran, are subjected to a host of abuses by both state and private actors, which violate Iran’s obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention and endanger some one million Afghans recognised as refugees, as well as scores of others who have fled the war-torn country.

The NGO claimed that “thousands of Afghan nationals, who are in Iran’s prisons for crimes ranging from theft to murder and drug trafficking, are regularly denied the right to access lawyers.”

According to HRW, hundreds of Afghan migrants are believed to have been executed in recent years without any notification to Afghan consular officials.

“Getting a visa to Iran costs about 85,000 Afghanis (around 1,150 euros),” the manager of another hotel in Zaranj, who prefers to remain anonymous, explains to IPS.

“Prices for an illegal entry start at 25,000 (around 330 euros), but it always depends on the final destination. The most expensive are Tehran, Esfahan and Mashad – Iran’s largest cities. Migrants pay only when they reach their final destination so they’ll try again and again until they make it, or until they get killed,” adds the innkeeper.

Just behind him, Hamidullah, 43, and his son Sameem, 17, wait their turn to access a better life. Chances are, they’ll be back at this border crossing before too long.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

With Italy having taken over presidency of the European Union (EU) until December 2014, questions remain regarding Europe’s migration policies as reports of migrants dying at sea while trying to reach Italy regularly make the headlines.

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that since the beginning of 2014, 500 migrants have died in the Mediterranean Sea and almost 43,000 have been rescued by the Italian Navy.

However, Italy’s “Mare Nostrum operation has gone a long way towards addressing the issue of saving people’s lives,” says Anneliese Baldaccini, Amnesty International’s Senior Executive Officer for Asylum and Migration.

Mare Nostrum – the Italian search-and-rescue operation – was launched following the tragedy of October 2013, when 366 migrants died as the boat in which they were travelling sank off the coast of Lampedusa, an Italian island which is closer to Tunisia than Italy.“The EU needs to do more to create legal channels for asylum seekers and migrants” … at the moment, "the EU is focused almost exclusively on strengthening its borders” – Gregory Maniatis, advisor to the U.N. Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration

Italy is the lone sponsor of the search-and-rescue initiative, investing an estimated nine million euros every month.

In an interview with IPS, Baldaccini highlighted the unsustainability of this operation, arguing that this is why “Amnesty is calling on the European Union to act in a concerted way to support Italy in these operations”. So far, she continued, “the EU has proved reluctant in doing so.”

“With its Mare Nostrum operation, Italy has been pushing for a collective humanitarian response,” said Gregory Maniatis, Senior Policy Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and advisor to Peter Sutherland, U.N. Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration. “But what is missing at the EU level is a common vision of the problem,” he told IPS.

“The EU needs to do more to create legal channels for asylum seekers and migrants,” Maniatis explained. At the moment, “the EU is focused almost exclusively on strengthening its borders.”

Maniatis also argued that the EU does not have a sustained focus “to improve asylum processing to create a truly common European system, to increase its capacity to receive refugees, and to establish ways for people to apply for asylum without undertaking the dangerous Mediterranean crossing.”

According to Amnesty International, there is a dichotomy between the “EU’s aspiration to promote human rights and the reality of human rights violations in member states.” In its recommendations to the Italian EU presidency, Amnesty International stated that currently, “border control measures expose migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers to serious harm.

Their detention is systemic, rather than exceptional. And their lack of agency makes them vulnerable to abject exploitation and abuse.”

Amnesty International has calledon Italy, in view of its presidency of the European Union, “to show leadership and steer the Union in the direction of human rights, putting people before politics”.

The European Council Summit held on June 26-27 agreed broad guidelines for Europe’s migration and asylum strategy but these “do not change the current status quo” according to Amnesty’s migration expert Baldaccini. They “even represent a setback,” she told IPS. Overall, said Baldaccini, they “show a lack of political commitment.”

She went on to explain that the Secretariat of the European Council has partly blamed the recent rise of far-right parties at the last European Parliament elections as being the reason why no progress was made in terms of migration policies.

In general, states – and not only far-right parties – are reluctant to “mention human rights as it could be perceived as encouraging more arrivals to Europe,” Baldaccini said.

Many organisations have called on the European Union to change its approach to migration policies. The Lampedusa tragedy is only one example of a long series of similar events, said Elena Crespi, Western Europe Programme Officer at the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), an NGO representing 178 organisations throughout the world.

“Despite repeated commitments to change,” Crespi told IPS, “EU migration policies remain security driven, and aim at reinforcing border control while migrants’ rights are given little attention.”

One such example, she argued, is the increasing presence of FRONTEX, the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union.

Crespi explained that the intensification of FRONTEX operations has not resulted in fewer incidents, nor better respect for migrants’ and asylum-seekers’ rights. On the contrary, an increased number of allegations have been made regarding human rights violations at the Union’s external borders, which remain unaddressed.

FRONTEX has turned down the recommendation by the E.U. Ombudsman to put in place a mechanism to allow alleged violations to be investigated.

This, said Crespi, raises questions regarding the compatibility of FRONTEX’s operations in terms of human rights.

The presence of the European Border Agency is not sufficient to prevent people from dying at sea, she noted. Instead, enhanced border control pushes more and more people into taking increasingly dangerous routes into Europe, thus putting their lives at risk.

Italy is now pushing for FRONTEX to assume the costs of the Mare Nostrum operations, explained Simona Moscarelli, a legal expert for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Rome. But to do this, the “FRONTEX mission will have to be revised because its mandate does not include search-and-rescue operations.”

“FRONTEX’s role is not to save lives but rather to prevent and deter migrants from coming into Europe,” Crespi told IPS.

Moreover, “the vast majority of migrants travelling across the Mediterranean Sea are Syrian and Eritrean nationals and should be entitled to asylum,” Moscarelli told IPS.

According to the UNHCR, the number of Syrians reaching Europe by sea increased in 2013. Last year, Italy rescued an estimated 11,307 Syrians in the Mediterranean.

“The European Union must overhaul its approach to migration, and put respect for migrants’ and asylum seekers’ rights at its centre. Opening new channels for regular migration, enhancing reception capacity including by increasing responsibility sharing for migrants coming into Europe and investigating human rights violations are some steps that could be taken in the right direction,” said Crespi.

Corner of unofficial camp in Calais housing Syrian, Sudanese and Afghan asylum seekers before it was closed on May 28 for health reasons. Credit: Roger Hamilton-Martin/IPS

By Roger Hamilton-Martin
LONDON, Jun 5 2014 (IPS)

Syrian refugees fleeing the conflict in their home country have come up against a less than accommodating “Fortress Europe”.

As of June 1, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are more than 2.7 million Syrian people who have sought refuge outside of their home country. Notable host countries include Lebanon (estimated 1.1 million), Jordan (600,000), Turkey (760,000), Iraq (200,000) and Egypt (140,000).

However, after what Kristalina Georgieva, European Commissioner for International Cooperation described as “disproportionate worries” over Libyan refugees reaching Europe during the collapse of Gadhafi’s regime in 2011, the continent has again failed its neighbours during an international crisis.“Some attribute it [current reluctance to receive Syrians] to the economic crisis, but I think there is clearly an Islamophobic element” – Nils Muiznieks, Council of Europe’s independent Commissioner for Human Rights

UNHCR has called on Europe to accept 30,000 Syrians in 2014, and 100,000 during 2015/2016. The European Union’s most generous country has been Germany, agreeing to 10,000, while several states – including the United Kingdom – have refused to accede to the U.N. programme altogether.

Europe is the largest donor of humanitarian aid, and has made it clear that help will be given in monetary donations for the region, but this generosity will not extend to significant resettlement or temporary hosting. Nicosia, the closest European capital to Damascus, is half as far away as the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, yet Iraq has accepted many times more refugees than all of the E.U. states combined.

Explaining Europe’s reaction to the crisis in Syria, Nils Muiznieks, the Council of Europe’s independent Commissioner for Human Rights, told IPS: “When I talk with UNHCR and others, you see that the current reluctance to receive Syrians is in pretty striking contrast with reactions to previous flows of refugees from other countries. Some attribute it to the economic crisis, but I think there is clearly an Islamophobic element.”

The United Kingdom has a long history of resettling refugees in reaction to international crises – the 42,000 Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin in the early 1970s and the more than 22,000 Vietnamese displaced during the Vietnam War are just two examples.

However, after rejecting the United Nations Syrian resettlement plan for Europe, David Cameron’s government set up its own resettlement scheme, known as the Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme, which will only permit resettlement for a few hundred Syrians currently located in regional refugee camps. The first few arrived in March.

Those countries that adopted the U.N. plan will be subject to accepting increasing numbers of refugees as the war continues and the U.N. raises its quotas. However, the United Kingdom will not be subject to these increases.

British Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn spoke to IPS about the scheme: “I feel very disturbed that the British government has not taken in many (Syrians) at all, and has decided to run a British programme rather than a U.N. programme, which seems to be a rather dangerous precedent – you end up with a degree of selectivity.”

“I asked a specific question of the Home Office about why we couldn’t be part of the U.N. programme, they kept saying ‘we’d rather do things the British way.’ I don’t know what the British way is on this. This is a global crisis, we should be part of the solution.”

Political feeling has swung to the right during the past year in the United Kingdom, with the rise of nationalist parties such as the U.K. Independence Party, which performed well at the European elections in May. The party campaigned on an anti-Europe, anti-immigration message.

The response of the mainstream U.K. parties to the rise of UKIP has been to pander to an increasingly divided electorate by stepping up anti-immigration rhetoric. Rejecting the U.N. resettlement scheme prevents immigration figures being further augmented, allowing fodder for parties like UKIP to win votes.

A further blow to Syrians attempting to reach the United Kingdom to claim asylum was struck last week, when an unofficial camp in Calais on the French border closest to the United Kingdom was closed for health reasons.

The camp, which also was used by contingents of asylum seekers from Sudan and Afghanistan, served as a launching point to reach the English coast. Many were attempting to reach the United Kingdom to re-join family or find work to send money back to family in Syria.

French police entered the camps flanked with bulldozers after an outbreak of scabies amongst the migrants, who mostly live in small makeshift tents. In a statement, Amnesty International condemned the convictions saying, “Under international law, France must not carry out forced evictions and must protect all people from them, including migrants and asylum-seekers.”

Immigration is also a hot issue in France, with the anti-immigration Front National party making large gains in the European parliamentary elections. It has called for return to full national border controls, and a reconsideration of the Schengen agreement that allows for free movement between European states that have adopted it.

Meanwhile, asylum seekers remain in limbo, caught between a land that they need to escape from and a continent that is reluctant to welcome them.

A refugee in Calais called Abdul, who spoke to IPS, said: “Every time my dad speaks to me he says we don’t have money to eat. I tell him there is no work in France. What I want is to be able to work and send them back some money. I want to go to the United Kingdom as soon as possible so I can save my family from the life they are living.”

Additional reporting (video) by Natasha Tsangarides and Phillip Nye. Arabic translation support by Claire Badawi.

Migrants being transferred from the Lampedusa centre. Credit: Caritas Italiana.

By Silvia Giannelli
ROME, Mar 11 2014 (IPS)

“We walk inside an area that is 128 steps long and seven-and-a-half steps wide. This is the path they made for us: two metres of bars over our heads, and upon the bars, two metres of plexiglas. We are like canaries in a cage, like birds of different races all in one cage.”

Ahmed (name changed) is from Africa but he has been living in Italy for 22 years now. On Dec. 20 the police stopped him and asked for his documents. Ahmed does not have them, and so has been kept in the Ponte Galeria Centre for Identification and Expulsion (CIE) of Rome since then. “It’s been two months now, but it feels like two centuries,” he told IPS on phone from the centre."You are lucky if you get out of here with 100 grams of your brain left.” -- Ahmed, a migrant from Africa

Last month, the Caritas Italiana and Migrantes Foundation published their annual dossier on migration, which states that “the true reform of the repatriation system would be the closure of the centres.” Oliviero Forti, director of immigration issues at Caritas explained to IPS the reasons behind such a strong recommendation.

“Helped by Prof. Roberto Cherchi, constitutional lawyer, we came to the conclusion that there is a problem of constitutional legitimacy connected to those places. Precisely for the way they are conceived, built and managed, it is easy to slip into gross violation of human rights.”

The CIE is a part of the Italian system of reception and identification for migrants. Besides, there are the centres of reception (CDA is the Italian acronym), the centres of reception for asylum seekers and refugees (CARA) and the centres of first aid and reception (CSPA). The CSPA in Lampedusa, Sicily, caused outrage when a national newscast circulated a video of naked migrants sprayed for scabies in the December cold.

The CIE are centres for migrants who have no resident permits or identity documents, and for those who have received a deportation order. Yet, as the Caritas and Migrantes dossier reports, the available places are far fewer than the number of migrants in such a state.

As a consequence, placement is decided on a case-by-case basis, following such informal criteria as whether the person is considered a danger to society and whether the chances of identifying and deporting the person are high. This brings disparity in treatment often based on nationality.

Khalid Chaouki, Italian MP from the Democratic Party, visited the Ponte Galeria CIE following a protest by some inmates who literally sewed their mouths shut in January to draw attention to the conditions at the Rome centre. “The situation there was even worse than in Lampedusa, because it is in fact a prison outside the law, where people who often haven’t committed any crime are detained for months,” he told IPS.

Migrants who should be in other centres are often kept in the CIE. “Unfortunately we often found women victims of trafficking, minors, stateless people and also EU citizens, Romanians for instance,” Gabriella Guido, spokesperson for LasciateCIEntrare (Let Us In) told IPS. LasciateCIEntrare is a campaign that began in 2011 after then Italian minister of the interior banned media access to the centres.

That was the year that the maximum holding period was extended from six to 18 months. “Often the problem with the identification is that the foreign consulates are not very cooperative, but if a migrant is not recognised in the first 30 to 60 days, it is not going to happen in 18 months either. The extension of the permanence only increased the stress, the riots and the episodes of self-harm inside the CIE.”

“Nobody sleeps here,” Ahmed said, “apart from the ones who take sleeping pills. Many withdraw into themselves. There is a guy who doesn’t speak any more, and one who talks to himself. You are lucky if you get out of here with 100 grams of your brain left.”

Media access to the CIE now depends on permission from the prefect. Forti says the reception system needs deeper reform. “Regularisation of migrants, fair salaries, legal protection of foreign citizens, all of this means granting a correct culture of work in Italy, both for migrants and for Italian citizens.”

But there is political opposition to this idea. Nicola Molteni, Italian MP for the Northern League told IPS that Italy has been a victim of the “indulgent political behaviour of the last two governments” and that it has been abandoned by the European Union.

“We have 3.2 million unemployed, one million of unemployed youth, and we must give a job to our people first. With these numbers we don’t even need regular migration, not to mention the illegal one, which often leads migrants into the hands of organised crime.”

Molteni and his party defend the CIE. “They have a functionality and necessity which is fundamental,” he said. He says the problem is “the complete lack of a push-back policy, of a control of the borders and of international cooperation with the North African countries to prevent migration.”

At the other end of the political spectrum, Chaouki says the CIE centres are an ideological flag of the Northern League, that have solved no problems. “We need to develop alternatives to those centres, we need to open new regular channels of access to Italy, new procedures of reception and also of deportation that are not harmful to people,” he told IPS.

According to the Caritas dossier, of the 35,872 expulsion proceedings in 2012, 18,592 resulted in actual expulsions. In all 7,944 foreign citizens passed through the CIE, of which only half were eventually deported.

“Despite the huge amount of money spent to maintain these places, they don’t even serve the purpose they were created for. Our conclusion is that their function is rather to placate the anxiety of those who perceive migrants as a threat to security,” said Forti.

Ahmed’s voice becomes harsh over the phone: “We are losing our minds here. If an average Italian could see us now, he would think that is better to keep us locked inside. But they do nothing, because they see nothing.”

Asylum seekers who travel to the United States to escape persecution in their home countries receive no assistance from the U.S. government and are not allowed to work for months, which activists say lead many to live on the streets or work illegally.

And despite a recent high-level judicial decision on the issue, many say only action by Congress will be able to fix the problem permanently.

Current U.S. law bars asylum-seekers entering the United States from applying for work authorisation for at least six months, a timeframe that is often only a minimum. In fact, waiting times can typically extend for several additional months due to what is known as the “asylum clock”, a term used to describe the six-month period during which asylum-seekers wait for their claims to be adjudicated by U.S. immigration laws.

“The problem, however, is that this is actually not a real clock,” Bill Frelick, the director of the refugee programme at Human Rights Watch, a global watchdog group, told IPS. “It’s a clock that stops and starts when a delay in the proceedings is caused by the applicant. But when it stops, sometimes it takes years to restart it again.”

The issue is discussed at length in a new report from Human Rights Watch, which notes that the main feature of the clock is its ability to start and stop because of what are also called “applicant-caused delays” (ACD). These can range from an applicant’s inability to find an attorney, to his or her decision to postpone a hearing.

“The [ACD] provisions are actually a result of regulations implemented by the two main federal agencies that deal with asylum-seekers,” Mary Kenney, a senior attorney at the American Immigration Council (AIC), a non-profit here, told IPS.

The two federal agencies Kenney refers to are the U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services (USCIS), which is a part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that adjudicates immigration cases.

“It is important to distinguish between the [ACD] provisions from the 180-day waiting period,” Kenney says. “The 180-day waiting period is the result of legislation passed by Congress, which didn’t mention anything about the clock’s start and stop rules.”

On the other hand, the asylum clock regulation is a result of the way the legislation was implemented by the USCIS and the EOIR, she notes.

Although it declined to comment on the report itself, a USCIS spokesman told IPS that the recommendations brought forward by HRW, which include legislative amendments to two U.S. statutes, would require legislative action, a process which USCIS, as a federal agency that implements congressional legislation, is not a part of.

Judicial relief

Nevertheless, things seem to be moving in the right direction for asylum seekers. In light of the difficulties of going through the legislative process, some have opted for a less direct approach  by attempting to change some of the regulations that implement current U.S. law.

Last week, a judge in the state of Washington ordered the approval of a nationwide class action settlement agreement, which originated from a case filed in 2011 by the AIC and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP), an organisation based in Seattle that assists immigrants and refugees.

Due to this settlement, beginning Dec. 3 some of the “clock” hurdles currently faced by asylum seekers are going to give way to a fairer and more transparent process, advocates say.

“Up until the settlement, courts had a policy according to which the clock wouldn’t start until the applicant actually appeared for his or her first hearing in court, which obviously could take several months,” Chris Strawn, an attorney at NWIRP Seattle’s office, told IPS. “Now, thanks to the settlement, the clock starts from the moment in which the application is filed, regardless of the time it’s going to take for the applicant to appear in court.”

Another major improvement has to do with those instances in which a judge denies the application and the applicant appeals to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), the highest administrative body that interprets and applies immigration law. Prior to the recent settlement, handed down Nov. 4, an appeal immediately brought the asylum clock to a halt, even if the BIA later reversed the judge’s decision and sent the case back down for consideration.

“With the old rule, the judge’s denial meant that the clock would stop, and it would stop permanently,” the AIC’s Kenney says. “Now, however, if the [BIA] remands the case, the clock will restart and the applicant will be credited with the time lost during the appeal.”

This is a major change, she says.

The settlement contains other improvements, as well, including more flexible and transparent USCIS practices likely to contribute to fewer bureaucratic problems for people who apply for asylum status in the United States.

Safety nets

The Nov. 4 settlement will make it easier for asylum seekers to obtain work authorisation within a reasonable time. But according to Human Rights Watch, much remains to be done to permanently rectify this issue.

“As we were working on the report, we also noticed that other developed countries had individualised procedures for asylum seekers, and provided them with food and housing,” Frelick says. “But in the United States, there are no such safety nets.”

Often, he says, asylum-seekers find themselves with no work and are forced to live on the streets, subsisting off of food provided by charities.

The report calls on the U.S. Congress to repeal the provisions concerning work authorisation in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), and amend Section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), by allowing asylum seekers to apply for work authorisation as early as 30 days after filing their application.

For now, the settlement amends some of the regulations, but the IIRIRA and INA have remained untouched.

The EOIR declined to comment on these recommendations, but told IPS that the agency stands by the Nov. 4 settlement agreement. On Nov. 21, the EOIR will hold a teleconference to assist stakeholders in understanding the terms of the settlement, with more information available here.

After what is remembered as the North Africa emergency of 2011, Italy is again seeing an increase in the arrivals of migrants, especially asylum seekers.

According to the latest report from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) on asylum trends, the “Arab Spring” in North Africa “led to a tripling of the number of asylum applications in 2011 (34,100 claims) – making Italy the fourth-largest recipient among the group of 44 industrialised countries. In 2012, however, the number of boat arrivals dropped significantly.”

Nevertheless, the turmoil in Egypt and Syria could lead to yet another emergency that Italy, as one of the main gateways to Europe, will have to face. The number of boats arriving at the southern shores is increasing and has already surpassed the 2012 total.

According to an estimate from UNHCR, more than 18,000 boat people have turned up this year. Many of them are Syrians – at least 250 Syrians turned up on just two days, Aug. 23 and 24. Italy received 15,700 asylum applications in 2012."In cities like Rome where the system is more congested, asylum seekers end up living literally on the streets.” -- Valeria Carlini, spokesperson for the Italian Refugee Council

Such a scenario represents a tough challenge to the already weak Italian reception system, which saw a migration flow of around 60,000 people as an emergency in 2011. The first victims of these emergencies are usually the asylum seekers themselves for whom , the government is unable to guarantee basic rights.

According to Valeria Carlini, spokesperson for the Italian Refugee Council (CIR) “the CARA system (centres dedicated to the reception of asylum seekers right after their arrival) is already collapsing. In these big centres, some of which can host up to 1,800 people, asylum seekers should stay for no more than 35 days, which is also the time limit to complete the asylum procedure. The truth is that the procedure can take up to eight months,”

Structures for the second level of reception, SPRAR, have increased capacity this year from 3,700 to 5,000 “which is clearly not enough to face the need of all the refugees that Italy receives,” Carlini told IPS.

“According to a law of 2005, whenever the system is not able to provide the asylum seeker with a hosting solution, the prefectures are obliged to guarantee this person with a per diem to pay for an accommodation. Since the law was approved, we have never seen any prefecture giving this money.

“In cities like Rome where the system is more congested, asylum seekers end up living literally on the streets,” she said.

Investing in the SPRAR system has not been a priority for Italy. Giovanni Cervioni with the local association Filo D’Arianna was responsible for a reception project in Tuscany during the North Africa emergency of 2011. “The most absurd thing during that time was to see how a huge amount of public money was spent in creating a new emergency plan with no coordination nor national guidelines, instead of funding a structure, SPRAR, that already existed and that was working despite its scarce resources.”

According to Cervioni, the emergency plan simply consisted in handing out up to 46 euros a day per asylum seeker to any individual or association who was able and willing to host them, becoming a temporary business for operators in the hospitality sector.

“Essentially, the aim was to keep those people for the time required to give them a permit that would be accepted at the EU borders and then free the structure and let them go wherever they wanted,” Cervioni told IPS.

Maria De Donato at the legal department of CIR reveals a more serious detail about Italian management of migrants. The UNHCR, the International Organisation for Migration and Save the Children have said that Egyptian and Tunisian migrants are detained and then expelled from Italy simply on the basis of their nationality.

“This has been going on for months now, and we have reasons to believe it is an illegal procedure: upon their arrivals, Egyptian and Tunisian migrants are detained with no possibility to communicate with the outside and then repatriated after some days or weeks,” De Donato told IPS.

It is unlikely that these people are given the chance to ask for asylum, which would make this a serious violation given the worsening conditions in Egypt. “Targeting these nationalities is probably due to re-admission agreements between the two countries and Italy, but we think this is a case of collective expulsion, which is clearly prohibited by the Article 19 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights,” De Donato said.

The North Africa emergency plan ended in February 2013 “and we are now in the same conditions as before the emergency,” Cervioni said. “We are facing again a consistent number of arrivals and we are back from the starting point, only this time I doubt that the government can afford to spend that much money again.”

Australians protest in Sydney against the new 'PNG Solution' for asylum seekers. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
SYDNEY, Aug 5 2013 (IPS)

The Australian asylum policy of rejecting boat arrivals has been condemned by the United Nations Refugee Agency, Pacific island leaders, migration experts and human rights organisations.

A new Regional Settlement Arrangement agreed between Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Peter O’Neill, announced less than two months ahead of an Australian national election, will see the removal of asylum seekers for refugee processing and resettlement in the neighbouring Pacific Island state of Papua New Guinea (PNG) located north of Australia, for an initial period of one year.

At least 70 asylum seekers have already been flown to the PNG-based Manus Island detention centre under the new deal.

On Aug. 3, Australia announced a similar arrangement with the tiny 21-square-kilometre South Pacific nation of Nauru, situated 4,500 km north-east of Australia, which also hosts an Australian offshore asylum seeker detention centre. According to an official Nauru spokesperson refugees will have temporary residence only.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said it was “troubled by the absence of adequate protection standards and safeguards for asylum seekers and refugees in Papua New Guinea,” and that the new arrangement “raises serious and, so far, unanswered protection questions.”

It said poor administrative capacity and physical conditions for refugees are likely to be “harmful to the physical and psycho-social wellbeing of transferees, particularly families and children.”

The UNHCR reiterated that countries should “grant protection within their own territory, regardless of how [refugees] have arrived.”

PNG, a Melanesian nation of seven million, is signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, but has reservations on the rights of refugees to basic services such as employment, housing and education.

The country is ranked 156 out of 187 countries for development, and has limited capacity to absorb tens of thousands of additional refugees from another state.

In exchange for taking Australia’s asylum seekers, PNG will receive an additional aid package worth 507.2 million Australian dollars (452 million U.S. dollars).

According to Australia, the new policy aims to stop people smugglers and deter refugees from taking dangerous journeys in unseaworthy vessels.

However, Hadi, an asylum seeker from Afghanistan who arrived by boat and settled as a refugee in Australia in 2011, told IPS that the new arrangement was an “election stunt using people who have no voice.

“It will not make any difference. People who are getting on boats are desperate. They are leaving their countries to survive,” he declared.

In August last year, Australia announced a ‘no advantage’ immigration policy directed at asylum seekers and announced it was reinstating offshore detention centres in PNG and Nauru. But unannounced maritime arrivals have increased rather than decreased, with 17,202 last year and about 15,000 so far in 2013.

The number of asylum seekers that Australia receives is very low. Last year 15,790 or three percent of the total of 479,270 global asylum applications were lodged in the country, compared to the United States which received 83,430, or 17 percent of the world share, and Germany and France which received 64,540 and 54,940 respectively.

Most of those arriving in Australia originate from Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Sri Lanka, and 90 percent are recognised as refugees.

Will Jones at the Refugee Studies Centre of the University of Oxford told IPS that given Australia’s minor share of the world’s asylum seekers, the new policy was “completely disproportionate, extraordinarily expensive, and inefficient” for processing refugees.

In 2011-2012, Australia’s Department of Immigration incurred expenses of 1.4 million Australian dollars (1.2 million U.S. dollars) for offshore asylum seeker management, almost half the department’s total costs, compared to 95,272 Australian dollars (85 million U.S. dollars) spent on managing asylum seeker processing within Australia.

Refugee organisations have said that the new strategy jeopardises the protection of vulnerable people already suffering from trauma and displacement, who face an unacceptably poor framework of support.

At present asylum seekers are detained in makeshift facilities designed for approximately 500 people on Manus Island. Last month, following an inspection, the UNHCR reported that “the current arrangements still do not meet international protection standards for the reception and treatment of asylum seekers.”

It reported harsh living conditions and poor standards of privacy, hygiene and access to medical services.

The Australian government claims it will complete a permanent detention centre on the island in 2014 and meet the costs of the new settlement policy, but PNG will be responsible for all refugee assessments.

Dr Ray Anere of the National Research Institute in PNG capital Port Moresby said the country is yet to establish a legal framework, national policy and adequate administrative mechanisms to address the needs of asylum seekers, as well as “provision of proper medical, accommodation and other basic services.”

PNG currently hosts an estimated refugee population of 9,500 with many entirely dependent on support from humanitarian and charitable organisations. They are especially vulnerable to high levels of human insecurity in a nation facing serious domestic challenges of basic service delivery, high unemployment and crime, widely prevalent gender violence and inadequate law enforcement.

Unaccompanied minors arriving by boat face particular risks following the Australian government’s assertion that they will not be reunited with families in Australia. This is despite commitments to the best interests of children under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and UNHCR’s settlement guidelines, which stipulate that no action should be taken to hinder family reunification for unaccompanied minors.

Resentment has quickly emerged in the south-west Pacific against the refugee settlement ‘deal’ as an unwelcome imposition on neighbouring small island developing states and an abdication by Australia of its humanitarian responsibilities.

There have been public denouncements by Fiji’s foreign minister, Ratu Inoke Kubuabola, and former PNG prime minister Sir Michael Somare. PNG opposition leader Belden Namah has renewed a legal challenge to Australia’s asylum seeker detention centre, in the country’s Supreme Court.

Local political commentator Deni ToKunai, known as Tavurvur, told IPS that “opposition to the new arrangement is extensive in PNG,” and “the real source of division will come from the public sphere and be focussed on the key issues of processing and settling asylum seekers when the permanent processing centre is built.”

Zeki Gorbuz, a Turkish asylum seeker in Greece, who was arrested on Feb. 12, remains detained today due to an international warrant that was transmitted by Turkish authorities to Greece just one day before his asylum interview. Turkish media were quick to report the arrest, describing Gorbuz as a radical leftist and regional leader of the Marxist Leninist Communist Party (MLCP), which has been designated as a terrorist organisation by the Turkish government.

On the same day that Gorbuz was detained, Bulent Aytunc Comert, who arrived in Greece as an asylum seeker in 2002, was also arrested. His request for asylum was approved in 2003 but was never cleared by the ministry of police.

Branded by Turkish authorities as a member of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), Comert is a fugitive. He was imprisoned in the notorious solitary confinement units known as the “White Cells” on what he says was a fabricated murder charge.

“Members of several civil society organisations and student groups [in Turkey] have been put into prison, often on flimsy evidence and based on the anti-terrorism law that can be used to charge pretty much any form of dissent as terrorism."
Having come here to escape persecution, Gorbuz and Comert, like many other Turkish political dissidents and Turkish Kurds, are now stuck in no-man’s land, suspended between the highly bureaucratic Greek immigration and asylum system, and an extremely hostile government in Turkey.

Indications of a secret deal to return asylum seekers in Greece to Turkey are surfacing, while human rights activists warn of the grave impacts of Greece’s plan to extradite persons in need of international protection against criminal charges that might be fabricated by Turkish authorities.

According to Turkish media reports, a Feb. 4 meeting between Turkish Chief of Police Mehmet Kiliclar and Greek Police Chief Nikolaos Papagiannopoulos ended with the Greek official’s promise to dismantle Kurdish as well as radical leftist “Turkish terrorist cells” here.

A month later, on Mar. 4, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras visited Turkey for a high profile meeting with his counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul, where the two heads of state signed 25 cooperation deals covering areas such as health, tourism and fighting illegal migration.

That same day, the Ankara Strategic Institution pointed out that private Turkish investment in Greece has been used as a pressure tool in order to promote the deal on extradition. More reports followed referring to preparations for extraditions but the Greek government is yet to responded to any of them.

Besides Gorbuz and Comert, three more asylum seekers have been arrested since February, including Meric Serkan on Feb. 14, Fadik Adauman on Feb. 26 and Huseyin Cakil on Apr. 6. All are wanted by Turkish authorities for “terrorist activity” and, according to the Greek Council for Refugees, all five have been victims of torture during their detention in Turkey.

The activist group Movement for Freedom and Democratic Rights (KEDDE), which has been a whistleblower on the deal between Turkish and Greek authorities, says there is no guarantee of Turkish dissidents’ safety if they are forced to return.

“People arrested under the Turkish anti-terror law are subject to a long detention with an indefinite time limit and with no access to their case file until the beginning of the trial (which could be situated two years later),” according to a statement on the group’s website.

“It might also mean they become subject to the jurisdiction and judgment of special courts, for the operation of which Turkey has been several times condemned by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, since these courts make use…as means of ‘proof’ confessions extorted through torture.”

Cakil’s case was tried in the Greek city of Thessaloniki and, given that his asylum claim has been informally accepted and is pending ministry clearance, the move to extradite him was denied.

Gorbuz and Comert who were apprehended in Patras, about 215 kilometres west of Athens, were also spared extradition but they will now have to face a court of second instance.

Given that most cases here take months or even years just to reach court, let alone a decision, this “rapid response by Greek authorities…is indicative of political interests (both Greek and Turkish) behind the cases,” lawyer Dimitris Sarafianos, member of the European Association of Lawyers for Democracy and World Human Rights (ELDH), told IPS.

He believes it “strange” that the prosecutor of the court of second instance appealed the decision in “absolute contradiction with the fact that the prosecutor of the hearing had pointed out that the charges were heavily unfounded, requesting for the continuation of the detention of one refugee (Gorbuz).”

“Given the persistent rumours referring to a secret agreement between the two Prime Ministers, Samaras and Erdogan, concerning matters of extradition of asylum seekers to Turkey, it is clear that the Greek government is prompt to violate the Geneva Convention,” the lawyer said.

According to Sarafianos, who participated in an ELDH fact-finding mission to Turkey, over 10,000 citizens of Kurdish origin are currently faced with charges, as are scores of Turkish unionist in the private and public sectors, professors, students and lawyers defending human rights.

The extradition deal currently being worked out the with Greek authorities appears to be part and parcel of this ongoing wave of detentions and arrests of political dissidents as well as suspected members of the DHKP-C – branded a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the European Union — and members of Turkey’s Contemporary Lawyers Association (CHD).

Earlier this year, Erdogan rushed to connect the DHKP-C with the Feb. 1 bombing of the U.S embassy in Ankara.

Dr. Kerem Oktem, expert on contemporary Turkish politics and research fellow at the European Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, told IPS that although the detentions “caused a great outcry…many of the arrested people are intimately related to the DHKP-C, which took responsibility for the bombing of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) headquarters and the Justice Ministry in Ankara on Mar. 11.”

Although Oktem acknowledges that “members of several civil society organisations and student groups have been put into prison, often on flimsy evidence and based on the anti-terrorism law that can be used to charge pretty much any form of dissent as terrorism”, he believes it would be incorrect to characterise the crackdown as being directed solely against dissenting civil voices.

Often it is aimed at apprehending “groups and individuals that maintain relations with real terrorist groups”, he said.

(END)

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, Mar 17 2013 (IPS)

As fighting rages on throughout Syria, civilian families desperate to escape are fleeing west to Greece.

What they find here, however, is anything but a warm welcome, as massive operations to seal the borders and round up so-called “illegal immigrants” unfolds in the form of arbitrary arrests, poor conditions in detentions centres, and heavy racial profiling.

“Operation Aspis” on the northeastern Evros border region and the countrywide “Operation Xenios Zeus” involve hundreds of newly deployed forces.

Border guards spot incoming migrants and deter them from crossing into Greece. They are assisted in their duty by high tech border control equipment acquired with financial support from the European Commission (EC).

Meanwhile urban police scan the region, rounding up undocumented migrants, including refugees, and sending them to improvised detention camps around the country.

Allegations from immigrant rights groups and other international organisations regarding maltreatment of detainees as well as substandard detention conditions have circulated since the operations commenced last August.

In mid-January, during a visit to Greece, the Parliamentary Committee of the Council of Europe (PACE) urged EU members to stand in solidarity with Greece as it tackles this “migration crisis”.

PACE deplored the detaining of Syrian refugees, which is tantamount to preventing them from applying for asylum because of the lack of legal assistance, interpretation and information available to them in detention centres.

Additionally the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention undertook its first official fact-finding mission to Greece from Jan. 21-31 to assess the extent of deprivation of liberty in the country.

“The imprisonment of a migrant or an asylum seeker for up to 18 months, in conditions that are sometimes found to be even worse than in the regular prisons, could be considered a punishment imposed on a person who has not committed any crime,” Vladimir Tochilovsky, a member of the group, said at a press conference in Athens. He later told IPS that the group met with Syrians in multiple detention centres.

While some blame lies with the Greek migration authorities, other evidence suggests that complicity on the part of European officials and funding from the European Commission are the biggest culprits in this wave of rights abuses.

IPS has recently gained access to technical documents regarding the EC’s funding of these operations, which prove that the Commission considers the harsh policing of Greek borders and territory “imperative” to protecting human rights. Last December the EC made it clear that it was a priority “to continue, through the External Borders and Return Fund, financial and operational assistance to Greece in its building of an effective return and border management system” adding that the money the EC gives to Greece is “aimed at improving standards and ensuring respect of EC Law and fundamental rights”.

A revised version of the Annual Funding Programme of the European Return Fund submitted by Greek police to the European Commission outlines a nine-million-euro action to renovate or build new detention facilities that can house up to 7,200 migrants.

The project aims to “decrease allegations of human rights violations in the area of returns”.

The EC has recently restructured the Return Fund – to which member states allocated 676 million euros for the period 2008-2013 — in order to accommodate the new needs that have arise from Operation Xenios Dias.

“The amendment of the implementing rules for the Return Fund was adopted in September 2012 introducing several changes extending the possibility to finance infrastructure projects such as renovation and refurbishment or, in case of specific needs, construction of detention facilities,” Michele Cercone, EC spokesperson for home affairs, told IPS.

“In addition…new guidelines were provided to Member States in July 2012 that extend funding to running costs of detention camps in order to help Member States… improve the reception conditions in detention facilities,” he added.

Until recently, the Fund did not cover running costs, but the amendment has now made it “possible for member countries to operate these detention centres”.

Another 1.9 million euros will go towards the continuation of Operation Aspis, which will be extended until June or July 2013.

Additionally the EC has planned to increase its co-financing rate of all similar actions up to 95 percent, thus taking over practically the entire cost of operations.

A proposal is already being examined by the European Parliament and the Council of Europe and will become official legislation before the end of the month.

Annette Groth, a German parliamentarian with Die Linke a and member of the PACE delegation told IPS that Europe ought to consider its responsibility for continuing to fund operations while leaving Greece to deal with what is practically a humanitarian crisis.

“Whoever makes these decisions in Brussels knows exactly what they are doing. The situation in Greece resembles nothing like the human rights we talk about in Europe, this policy of mass detention in deplorable conditions of all incoming migrants and refugees. For the latter it is equivalent to denying them the right to asylum any longer,” said Groth.

“It makes no sense blaming only Greece. We have to recognise that the European Commission is indirectly responsible for these human rights violations,” she added.

Evidence of appalling conditions for migrants is unlikely to spur a rapid change in EC policy.

According to Cercone, “Only after the completion of the whole process”, within a time frame of three years, “will it be possible to assess in detail the effective use of funds”.

But a source in a major international organisation and with interlocutor status to the EC has told IPS that the Commission not only knows but is also very concerned about the situation in Greece.

Furthermore, he said, assistance from the Return Fund is only to be dispensed for expenses relating to detention centres holding returnees, not asylum seekers. “Since Greece is detaining indiscriminately…funding might be withheld,” he told IPS.

*The full EU response to IPS’ questions can be read here.

Excerpt:

A 35-square-metre facility in Chios Island in the Aegean Sea, where more than 50 migrants and refugees have been held. Credit: Apostolis Fotiadis/IPS

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, Mar 16 2013 (IPS)

Faraj Alhamauun, a Syrian national now residing in Istanbul, was detained while crossing Greece, in the hopes of heading north, last September.

An activist who cooperated with Human Rights Watch (HRW) after the war broke out in Syria, Alhamauun was injured last summer in a bombing outside the northwestern city of Aleppo.

Despite his serious leg injury he was held in a detention camp in Greece’s northeastern Orestiada region, where he claims his belongings and money were confiscated upon his arrest and never returned to him.

Afterwards he was verbally and physically harassed multiple times.

Alhamauun says he complained about his treatment to a delegation of European officials who visited camp Fylakio where he was detained last October.

“After they left I was physically abused for talking to them,” he told IPS in an exclusive phone interview. Alhamauun went on a hunger strike in protest of his plight, and was hospitalised before finally being returned to Turkey.

His story is not unique here, where funding from the European Commission is enabling massive migration control operations that have resulted in a slew of human rights violations.

Funding extensions for the coming months are being considered, despite European officials having full knowledge of the indiscriminate detention of asylum seekers, as well as the inhumane conditions in detention centres across the country.

Last August, Greek police deployed 1,881 new officers along the river Evros in “Operation Aspis”, an attempt to seal the border with Turkey, through which Syrian refugees were pouring into Greece.

Meanwhile, the continuing countrywide “Operation Xenios Zeus” has led to 4,849 arrests of irregular migrants or refugees and over 90,000 apprehensions based on heavy racial profiling by authorities.

Commencement of these operations coincided with the beginning of a major humanitarian crisis in Syria, with fighting transferred into big urban centres and the number of refugees fleeing to neighbouring countries skyrocketing.

In order to accommodate arrested migrants, the government has begun transferring detainees to improvised camps that were former police academies and old army depots, such as Xanthi and Komotini in northern Greece, Korinthos in the Peloponnese, and Paranesti in the northeastern region of Drama. These buildings, as former inmates like Alhamauun disclosed to IPS, are often black holes for human rights.

Asylum-seekers are also kept in local police departments’ cells or other makeshift facilities throughout the country. The detention period can last anywhere from 12 to 18 months.

A December 2012 report by ‘The Guardian’ presented serious allegations that the successful police operation in Evros involved the pushback of Syrian refugees arriving at the northeastern border.

Lathra, a refugee rights group based on Chios island, recently reported that the coastal guard is holding large numbers of migrants – among them Syrian refugees, pregnant women and children – in a 36-square-metre wooden container in the port.

Since last August at least 84 people, including Syrians, have died in shipwrecks off the coast of Turkey attempting to reach Greece.

Although operations like Aspis and Xenios Zeus have been largely “successful” from the authorities’ point of view, Greece has limited resources with which to continue them.

It appears that the European Commission is aware of the results of these operations, since it embarked on a fast-track monitoring mission of the northern Greek border and detention camps last September.

The Commission has admitted in correspondence with IPS that the purpose of the trip was to assess funding required for these operations.

Since then, multiple delegations of European officials and international organisations have given negative testimony on the situation in Greece.

On a visit to Greece between Oct. 28-30, a Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee (LIBE) called for the closure of certain detention camps and encouraged Greece to speed up the creation of a new asylum system that would transfer responsibility from the police to a civilian structure.

Two weeks earlier, on Oct. 8, 2012, Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom herself visited at least one of the detention centres in question.

In her personal blog the Commissioner wrote that she spoke with detained asylum seekers, adding, “The humanitarian conditions are very basic, in some places downright awful. Some centres should be closed down entirely; others are newly opened and quite OK.”

But in an interview with IPS back in August 2012, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) described the conditions in these new centres in Xanthi, Komotini and Korinthos as “substandard”.

Only the Amygdaleza detention centre in Athens has been universally described as an acceptable place.

Despite these findings by experts and officials, migrants have little access to redress.

Four Syrians arrested with Alhamauun were found guilty for initiating a riot inside Fylakio camp, for which Alhamauun was acquitted. Court cases against troublemakers, who are mostly protesting conditions inside detention camps, are a new phenomenon in Greece, following implementation of the migration policy put forward by Police Minister Nikos Dendias last August.

At the beginning of October 2012, fifteen migrants went to court in the northwestern coastal city of Igoumenitsa for escaping from a camp that has lately gained a reputation as “the worst in the country”.

After hearing that their detention involved extremely harsh conditions, including being locked up on a 24-hour basis, the court ruled that the situation was a “violation of the European Convention of Human Rights” and the European Returns Directive, and acquitted them.

(END)

Excerpt: