08/08/2015
Reuters
is reporting along with many others the call from Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras for the EU to help in handling tens of thousands of refugees coming in to Greece from Syria, Afghanistan and other war zones.
This has to be the ultimate irony â to say nothing of the demonstrable failure of the "fortress" policy. It was almost exactly three years ago that the Greek government deployed more than 1,800 additional police officers in Operation Aspida (Shield) on the land border with Turkey to stem the flow of migrants, then commissioning the construction of a four-metre-high barbed-wire fence, the works costing more than â¬3 million.
By the end of October 2012, it looked as if the strategy had been successful. Less than ten migrants a week were making it across the border. Overall, crossings dropped from 15,877 in the first five months of 2012 to 336 in the same period in 2013.
Predictably â so very predictably â the migrant focus shifted to the next (and last) land route, via Bulgaria. Sharing a land border with Turkey, in 2013, this country experienced a significant rise in asylum applications, from 1,387 in 2012 to 7,144 in 2013, peaking in the second half of the year, the vast majority were fleeing the conflict in Syria.
The Bulgarian response was to devise a "containment plan", deploying 1,500 additional police to patrol the border. This was followed by the construction of a security fence on a 20-mile stretch of the country's 170-mile border, run mainly through forested, hilly areas where visibility for border patrols was limited.
A 50-mile extension was then announced in January 2015, at an estimated cost of â¬46 million, after the number of asylum seekers successfully crossing the border had been cut from around 11,000 in 2013 to 6,000 in 2014, while the number of attempts to cross from Turkey had doubled to 38,500.
What then happened is that the migrants shifted their focus to the Black Sea, coming in via the "back door" to Macedonia and thence into Hungary, whence this country is
about to complete a 109-mile fence along its border.
In response to this, the migrants are now travelling to the remoter reaches of Turkey, on the western flanks, where they can make the short sea hops to the Greek islands of Lesbos, Chios and. Kos, the latter only three miles from the Turkish mainland.
Thus, what comes round goes round. Greece, having been amongst the first, after Spain, to erect fences to keep out the migrants, is now again taking the brunt of exodus, having received about 124,000 arrivals by sea this year, mostly from Turkey. The migrants in the main originate from Syria, but also Iraq and Afghanistan.
Needless to say, the influx has piled pressure on Greece's services at a time when its own citizens are struggling, and the government is negotiating with the EU and the IMF for fresh loans to stave off economic collapse.
Boatloads of migrants arriving every day had triggered a "humanitarian crisis within the economic crisis," Tsipras says, then adding: "The EU is being tested on the issue of Greece. It has responded negatively on the economic front - that's my view. I hope it will respond positively on the humanitarian front".
The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), on the other hand, has called on Greece to take control of the "total chaos" on Mediterranean islands. This is in the form of Vincent Cochetel, UNHCR director for Europe. "I have never seen a situation like that. This is the European Union and this is totally shameful", he says.
After visiting the island, he declared: "The level of suffering we have seen on the islands is unbearable. People arrive thinking they are in the European Union. What we have seen was not anything acceptable in terms of standards of treatment".
Meanwhile, little more has been heard after
initial report that migrants trying to sail from Turkey to Greece were being attacked by gunmen trying to prevent them from reaching.
An international NGO had said it suspected the involvement of "mafia gangs", while also noting that the Greek coastguard had previously engaged in activities designed to deter migrants from trying to make their way to Greek shores. Reports of attacks on migrants were particularly common around the Greek island of Lesbos in the east Aegean Sea.
This is possibly the tip of the iceberg, as a rise in attacks on migrants
has been recorded in Germany, while the "hate speech" from the likes of Gerald Warner in
Breitbart continue, as he dubs migrants in Calais "illiterate criminals".
"Future historians", he writes, "will struggle in vain to understand the suicidal masochism that impelled politicians to hand over the continent that is the cradle of civilisation to a devastating invasion. But they will struggle even harder to comprehend why the inhabitants of so many countries meekly submitted to conquest".
If this is what passes for intelligent comment â hugely popular in some quarters â then the failure of the fences is the least of our problems.
Der Breitbart presages something altogether
more sinister, pointing the way to a society where tolerance and humanity has succumbed to the failures of policy, leaving us in a very ugly place.
And, as we surround ourselves with more and more miles of razor wire, and the
bodycount mounts up, a solution looks no closer than ever it was.
