Daniel Trilling
The refugee crisis in Europe began with the shipwrecks off the coast of Libya in April 2015 and ended seven months later with the terrorist attacks in Paris. The long journeys, deaths, detentions and expulsions faced by the many thousands of uninvited migrants who try to reach Europe by sea or by land did not begin or end there. But the ‘refugee crisis’ is best understood as the brief period in which European leaders were forced to confront the disaster of their border policies; when the strength of public feeling at the damage caused by these policies was enough to force many politicians into making grand statements about Europe’s obligation to save lives, and even to consider opening borders or increase resettlement numbers. The Paris attacks supplied an excuse to start closing borders again, since it appeared that one or more of the perpetrators had slipped into Europe along the refugee trail from Turkey. The Balkan migration route, from Greece to Hungary and beyond, was the first to be sealed off. In the days immediately following the Paris attacks, Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia began to stop undocumented migrants from crossing: first, anyone who wasn’t Syrian, Iraqi or Afghan; later, everyone. Since then, while the rhetoric may vary, the actions taken have been broadly consistent: a shoring up of the old border regime, the toughening of conditions inside Europe to deter migrants, and the further outsourcing of European border control to governments in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
The immediate effect of closing the Balkan route was to trap refugees, mostly from the Middle East and Afghanistan, in Greece. By the end of 2016, about sixty thousand were living in fifty or more camps scattered around the country (with an undetermined number at large), trying to lodge asylum claims or waiting for an opportunity to take a smuggling route into Western Europe. Conditions in the camps are often dire: overcrowded and with poor sanitary conditions. Despite unprecedented funding, mainly from the EU (an investigation for the website News Deeply found that the $803 million spent so far is, per head, ‘the most expensive humanitarian response in history’), many camps weren’t ready for winter – thousands had to live in tents in freezing conditions. The EU, the Greek government and UNHCR blame one another for the failure, but the truth is that the outcome suits Europe by deterring would-be migrants. ‘It sends the message that Greece is a mess so don’t come this way,’ one human rights advocate told News Deeply.
