Tag Archives: Migrant Crisis

Mediterranean deaths soar as people-smugglers get crueler

GENEVA (Reuters) – More people died crossing the eastern Mediterranean in January than in the first eight months of last year, the International Organization for Migration said on Friday, blaming increased ruthlessness by people-traffickers.

As of Jan. 28, 218 had died in the Aegean Sea – a tally not reached on the Greek route until mid-September in 2015. Another 26 died in the central Mediterranean trying to reach Italy. Smugglers were using smaller, less seaworthy boats, and packing them with even more people than before, the IOM said.

IOM spokesman Joel Millman said the more reckless methods might be due to “panic in the market that this is not going to last much longer” as traffickers fear European governments may find ways to stem the unprecedented flow of migrants and refugees.

There also appeared to be new gangs controlling the trafficking trade in North Africa, he said.

“There was a very pronounced period at the end of the year when boats were not leaving Libya and we heard from our sources in North Africa that it was because of inter-tribal or inter-gang fighting for control of the market,” Millman said.

“And now that it’s picking up again and it seems to be more lethal, we wonder: what is the character of these groups that have taken over the trade?”

The switch to smaller, more packed boats had also happened on the route from Turkey to Greece, the IOM said, but was unable to explain why.

The increase in deaths in January was not due to more traffic overall. The number of arrivals in Greece and Italy was the lowest for any month since June 2015, with a total of 55,528 people landing there between Jan. 1 and Jan. 28, the IOM said.

Last year a record 1 million people made the Mediterranean Sea crossing, five times more than in 2014. During the year, the IOM estimates that 805 died in the eastern Mediterranean and 2,892 died in the central Mediterranean.

In the past few months the proportion of children among those making the journey has risen from about a quarter to more than a third, and Millman said children often made up more than half of the occupants of the boats.

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Syrian opposition to go to Geneva as peace talks open

GENEVA/BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syria’s main opposition group agreed to travel to Geneva, where the United Nations on Friday opened peace talks to end the country’s five-year-old war, but said it wanted to discuss humanitarian issues before engaging in political negotiations.

On the ground, opponents of President Bashar al-Assad said they were facing a Russian-backed military onslaught, with hundreds of civilians reported to be fleeing as the Syrian army and allied militia tried to capture a suburb of Damascus and finish off rebels defending it.

U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura had invited the Syrian government and an opposition umbrella group to Geneva for “proximity talks”, in which they would meet in separate rooms.
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Until the last minute, the opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) had refused to go. The group, which includes both armed and political opponents of Assad, had insisted it wanted an end to air strikes and sieges of towns and the release of detainees before talks could start.

Late on Friday, the HNC said it was going to Geneva, having received guarantees that its demands, outlined in a U.N. Security Council resolution last month, would be met, but it made clear its engagement in the process would initially be limited.

“The HNC will go to Geneva tomorrow to discuss these humanitarian issues which will pave the way into the political process of negotiations,” spokesman Salim al-Muslat told the Arabic news channel al-Arabiya al-Hadath.

The HNC said it had drawn up a list of 3,000 Syrian women and children in government prisons who should be released.

SUNDAY MEETING

De Mistura opened the talks on Friday by meeting the Syrian government delegation. He said that while he had not yet received formal notice that the HNC would attend, he expected to meet its delegation on Sunday.

“They’ve raised an important point of their concern, they would like to see a gesture from the government authorities regarding some kind of improvement for the people of Syria during the talks, for instance release of prisoners, or some lifting of sieges,” de Mistura said.

But he added this was a human rights point and “not even an issue to negotiate”, and had strongly suggested the best way to get such measures implemented would be to start negotiating in Geneva, by proxy or directly.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had made a major push to get the HNC delegation to Geneva, and the group said he had contacted it by phone to urge it to attend.

“Secretary Kerry has been in touch with all of his counterparts, including this morning with (Russian Foreign Minister) Sergei Lavrov … and with others, trying to find a way, a formula, in which we can urge the delegation or some version of the delegation to show up here,” a senior U.S. official said.

The Syrian government delegation, headed by United Nations ambassador Bashar al Jaafari, arrived at the talks on Friday afternoon but made no statement.

Another major force, the Kurds who control much of northeast Syria and have proven one of the few groups capable of winning territory from Islamic State, were excluded from the talks after Turkey demanded they be kept away. The Kurds say their absence means the talks are doomed to fail.

GOVERNMENT MOMENTUM

International diplomacy has so far seen only failures in a 5-year-old multi-sided ethno-sectarian civil war that has killed more than 250,000 people and driven more than 10 million from their homes while drawing in regional states and global powers.

De Mistura’s two predecessors both quit in apparent frustration after staging failed peace conferences.

Since the last talks collapsed in 2014, Islamic State fighters surged across Syria and Iraq declaring a “caliphate”, the United States and its European and Arab allies launched air strikes against them, and Russia joined in last year with a separate air campaign to support Assad.

Moscow’s intervention in particular has altered the balance of power on the ground, giving strong momentum to government forces and reversing months of rebel gains.

The Syrian military and allied militia are seeking to build on gains in western Syria, and have turned their focus to opposition-held suburbs southwest of Damascus.

The aim is to crush rebels in the district of Daraya to secure the nearby military airport at Mezzeh, said Rami Abdulrahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict with sources on the ground.

Rebels had rejected a government deadline for them to withdraw from the suburb of Mouadamiya – home to 45,000 people – by Friday, said Abu Ghiath al-Shami, spokesman for rebel group Alwiyat Seif al-Sham.

More than 500 families had fled, he said. “They are suffering a shortage of food, medicine, milk – there is no power, nothing,” he said, adding that 16 barrel bombs had been dropped on Friday.

A Syrian military source denied the use of barrel bombs, which have been widely documented in the war, and accused the opposition of exaggerating the conditions. “There has been progress by the army in the last days, some successes particularly in the Daraya area,” the source said.

Rebels say the fighting is of more concern to them than the fate of the negotiations. Asked about the future of the talks, Shami told Reuters he was “a bit busy” dealing with the fighting.

(Addional reporting by Lisa Barrington, Ali Abdelaty and Stephanie Nebehay; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Dutch suggest EU return migrants to Turkey as more arrive without case for asylum

BRUSSELS/THE HAGUE (Reuters) – The Netherlands floated an idea on Thursday to ferry migrants reaching Greece straight back to Turkey to stop a relentless influx into the European Union as EU officials cited a rise in the numbers of those who would not qualify for asylum.

The 28-nation bloc has all but failed to curb or control the influx of asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa, more than one million of whom arrived in Europe last year, mainly via Greece and heading towards the EU’s biggest economy, Germany.

More than 54,500 people have already reached Europe by sea this year, including 50,668 through Greece, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

They keep flowing in despite stormy winter weather making the journey ever more perilous, a fact highlighted by a UNHCR report that 235 migrants were dead or missing already in 2016. On Thursday, 24 drowned when their boat sank off a Greek island close to the Turkish coast.

Much of the EU debate on how to handle the influx has focused on distinguishing people fleeing war, and thus eligible for international protection, from “economic” migrants seeking better lives without being under immediate threat.

“Indeed we have seen that the numbers of people arriving in Europe who don’t have a genuine claim to asylum have been rising slightly,” a spokeswoman for the European Commission told a regular news briefing on Thursday.

EU nations have grown unnerved by the continent’s worst migration crisis since World War Two, one that has jeopardised the bloc’s Schengen zone of passport-free travel over national borders that has contributed greatly to its vaunted prosperity.

In the latest idea for discouraging migrants from flooding into Europe, the head of a party in the Dutch ruling coalition said it was drafting a plan under which those arriving in Greece by sea could be dispatched straight back to Turkey.

Diederik Samsom said European countries would have to agree in exchange to take several hundred thousand refugees each year out of nearly 2 million currently in Turkey. The Netherlands now holds the EU’s rotating presidency and Samsom said it would seek to push for Europe-wide agreement on the plan.

Samsom also said improving conditions for Syrian refugees in Turkey meant it could soon be regarded as a safe country to which asylum-seekers could be returned.

Amnesty International quickly denounced the idea as “fundamentally flawed”, saying it would deny those arriving the right to have their asylum claims properly considered.

“Any resettlement proposal that is conditional on effectively sealing off borders and illegally pushing back tens of thousands of people while denying them access to asylum procedures is morally bankrupt,” said Amnesty’s John Dalhuisen.

“There is no excuse for breaking the law and flouting international obligations in the process.”

GERMANY, SWEDEN, DENMARK

The government of Germany, where more than a million migrants arrived last year alone, on Thursday agreed tighter asylum rules, while Sweden and Finland said they would deport tens of thousands of last year’s asylum seekers.

In another example of how wealthy European states are seeking to deter migrants, Denmark’s parliament on Tuesday passed measures allowing the confiscation of asylum seekers’ valuables to pay for their stay, despite protests from international human rights organisations.

The European Commission said on Thursday it was looking into whether Denmark’s move was undermining fundamental EU values.

While the overall number of arrivals is relatively low compared to the EU’s 500 million population, the uneven distribution among member states has put heavy pressure on public and security services in some, as well as fuelled support for anti-foreigner nationalists and populists across the bloc.

The EU border agency Frontex said on Thursday the number of Syrians arriving on Greek islands had declined in recent months, while Iraqi arrivals had risen.

“The percentage of declared Syrians among all of the migrants landing on the Greek islands has fallen considerably in the last several months,” Frontex said, adding that some 39 percent of those arriving in Greece in December were Syrians, compared to 43 percent in November and 51 percent in October.

The shifting numbers partly reflect how registration and identification of migrants has improved in Greece over the last quarter, meaning fewer people pass under false nationality.

Syrian nationality has been a common answer to the question of origin as people fleeing the devastating civil war in the Middle East country are seen as standing the greatest chance of successful asylum applications in the EU.

(Writing by Gabriela Baczynska; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Sweden likely to deport up to 80,000 of last year’s asylum seekers

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Sweden is likely to deport up to half last year’s record 163,000 asylum seekers either voluntarily or forcibly, presenting a major challenge to authorities, Interior Minister Anders Ygeman said on Thursday.

Between 60,000 and 80,000 people will likely have to leave, Ygeman said, which would represent about 45 percent of the total number of applicants.

Sweden, with a population of almost 10 million, is one of the countries that has borne the brunt of Europe’s migrant crisis as hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and north Africa have moved north to wealthier members of the European Union.

Germany took in an unprecedented 1.1 million migrants last year.

Both countries have tightened asylum rules to stem the flow and force other countries to share the burden.

The Swedish government fears many people whose applications for asylum are rejected will go into hiding. Police will seek to find and deport them.

Of the 13,000 sent back from Sweden last year, 10,000 went voluntarily whereas 3,000 were forcibly deported.

Over the past few years Sweden has rejected about 45 percent of claims for asylum, but with last year’s record influx the greater numbers are putting an increasing strain on immigration and police authorities.

“We have a big challenge ahead of us. We will need to use more resources for this and we must have better cooperation between authorities,” Ygeman was quoted as saying by daily Dagens Industri.

Adding to the problem is a backlog of applications. The Migration Agency says recent arrivals will have to wait between 15 and 24 months just to have their applications assessed.

Ygeman said he thought chartered planes would be more widely used and hoped flights could be coordinated with Germany.

Germany deported 20,000 foreigners last year.

Sweden reversed its open door immigration policy late last year and has introduced border controls and identity checks to stem the flow of asylum seekers.

It is also working on making it more difficult for companies to hire immigrants without proper documents to decrease the incentives to stay in Sweden.

This week, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven promised more resources for police to deal with the increased workload because of the refugee situation.

(Reporting by Daniel Dickson and Johan Ahlander; Editing by Robert Birsel and Janet Lawrence)

Cologne attacks show Germany unprepared for migration challenge

COLOGNE, Germany (Reuters) – The crowds of drunk young men had been gathering for hours outside the main railway station in Cologne on New Year’s Eve when city police finally told the office that coordinates forces for the region that they wanted to clear the square.

The police coordinating office says it offered to send reinforcements. A report from the city police says the officer in charge decided there was no point asking for help because reinforcements would arrive too late.

Cologne, a city of more than 1 million people, had added just 142 extra police for the holiday. Most had only come on duty at 10:00 p.m.

As every German now knows, the small police force would prove incapable of preventing the crowd on that square from committing hundreds of assaults on women, stealing their valuables, groping and even raping them.

The incidents have caused profound soul searching in a country that allowed in an unprecedented 1.1 million migrants last year in what its leaders described as an act of historic generosity toward refugees.

Germans, who have prided themselves for generations in an orderly society that requires only gentle policing, are beginning to come to terms with change on a vast scale.

“In the past, the police’s softly-softly approach and focus on de-escalation was cherished. But there have been warning signs in recent years that this may not be appropriate now,” said Wolfgang Bosbach, a lawmaker from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) whose constituency is near Cologne.

Cologne prosecutors say 945 complaints have been made to police over the events of that night, including 434 for sex crimes.

Four weeks on, prosecutors have 35 suspects, mostly for pick pocketing and robbery while just three are suspected of sexual crimes. Only nine of the suspects are in custody. Most of the suspects come from northern Africa – Morocco, Algeria or Tunisia.

One of the victims, Henrike, 18, told Reuters she was pestered, groped and sexually assaulted by a group of young men of north African appearance outside the station when she went to watch the city’s firework display.

She feared she was going to be raped when a group of about 25 men encircled her and two friends and tried to pull down their skirts: “They were like animals … It felt like 20,000 hands were touching me all at once,” she said.

German media reported similar sex attacks and robberies on a smaller scale in 12 of Germany’s 16 states.

“THE EUROPE WE WISH FOR”

It wasn’t what politicians promised last year. When hundreds of thousands of migrants were arriving in the European Union last year on the shores of Italy and Greece, Germany made a bold decision: all refugees from the civil war in Syria would be welcome, regardless of where or how they entered the EU.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany was a rich country that could afford to do its part to take in some of the world’s most vulnerable people fleeing war.

“If Europe fails on the question of refugees … then it won’t be the Europe we wish for,” said Merkel in August.

But refugees were not the only people who arrived. In addition to thousands of families fleeing Syria and other war zones, Germany also let in hundreds of thousands of people from other countries with no valid claim for asylum.

The behavior of the groups has been starkly different. The Syrian refugees intentionally welcomed by Merkel have so far proven overwhelmingly law abiding. According to a Jan. 8 police report from North Rhine-Westphalia, the western German state that includes Cologne, only 0.5 percent of Syrian migrants in the city were caught committing crimes within a year.

By contrast, among migrants from North Africa, as many as 40 percent were caught committing crimes within a year, the report says.

Virtually none of the North Africans arriving in Germany have proven to be genuine refugees: last year Germany granted some form of protection to just 0.19 percent of Tunisian migrants, 3.74 percent of Moroccans and 1.6 percent of Algerians.

Many arrive not as families, but as single young men who are not legally permitted to work. Slightly more than twice as many males as females claimed asylum in Germany last year.

“What we experienced at New Year was not only a police problem – it is (a result of) a lack of integration of about 300,000-500,000 young men who have arrived without families in Germany and are sitting around without much to do and who come from a male-dominated culture,” said Christian Pfeiffer, a criminologist and former justice minister of Lower Saxony state from the center-left Social Democrats (SPD).

Ingo Westen, vice-president of the German Moroccan society based in Dortmund an hour’s drive from Cologne, said young North African men arrive with high hopes for lives in “paradise” but quickly become disillusioned by life with just a bed and a small stipend.

“That easily results in people who are not particularly strong getting corrupted by ringleaders who say: ‘let’s rob the department store over there or steal a mobile phone or clothes, and then we’ll have a little bit of money when we sell them.'”

His organization worries that longer-settled migrants who have long been integrated into German society are increasingly falling under blanket suspicion too. It called for the German government to declare North African countries like Morocco to be safe and rigorously deport people who commit crimes.

FEWER SECURITY CAMERAS THAN A GROCERY STORE

Police unions say their forces are simply not adequately staffed and funded for the changing environment. What happened in Cologne was “a result of the savings that have destroyed the police in the last 10 years,” said Arnold Plickert, deputy chairman of the GdP police union.

The number of officers in the federal, state and criminal police has been cut by around 13,000 since 2000 to 260,713, according to the latest figures from GdP, although some federal states, including NRW are now boosting recruitment again.

A survey by regional newspaper Rheinische Post showed NRW has one of the lowest ratios of police officers to inhabitants of all of Germany’s states, with 228 police offers per 100,000 residents compared with the national average of 304. France, by comparison, has 356.

Sebastian Fiedler, head of NRW’s branch of the BDK union for Germany’s criminal police, made up of plain-clothes officers that investigate crimes, said officers had been worried about offenses committed by north Africans for some time.

“But to combat such a criminal phenomenon we need sufficient qualified staff to investigate the gang structures and then destroy them … And that’s where we have a problem,” he said.

In part because of its totalitarian history, Germany has been reluctant to deploy the police surveillance tools used in other European countries. Police cameras, ubiquitous in, say, Britain or France, are virtually unseen, and none were on the square outside Cologne station.

NRW state police operate only two cameras in the entire state of 18 million people, and neither of them is in the city of Cologne, according to Erich Rettinghaus, head of the NRW branch of the DPolG police union.

“The concentration of cameras in a Lidl store is greater than that of the NRW police,” he said, of a grocery chain.

Cologne – with a longer history of a migrant population than many other German cities – sees itself as a tolerant liberal city. Around a third of its population has a migrant background.

Still, the New Year’s events were beyond anything police could imagine: “We only knew about sexual attacks on this scale from abroad, from places like Tahrir Square and India. But it had never happened in Germany before,” Fiedler said.

In a Jan. 8 report, Cologne police said there had been no indications that such a high number of “dangerous people” would gather, and there had been no need for special police measures in the area around the cathedral and station in previous years.

Police in NRW say they have been studying crime among north Africans. In Duesseldorf, NRW’s state capital, police are doing a study known as “Casablanca” looking into groups that carry out robberies using a technique called “Antanzen”, in which criminals dance up to or hug victims to distract them before picking their pockets.

A police project in Cologne called NAFRI has been exploring the workings of possible groups of North African criminals since Jan. 2013. Three analysts have analyzed data on more than 21,000 criminal offences and 17,000 people of northern African origin.

But NRW state Interior Minister Ralf Jaeger said the suspects from New Year’s Eve were not part of the Antanzen scene. In a report dated Jan. 19, the NRW interior ministry said of the 29 New Year’s Eve suspects just one had turned up as part of the NAFRI project.

HARD QUESTIONS

In the wake of the Cologne assaults, Germans have been forced to confront questions that some politicians say were deliberately buried last year while migrants poured in.

The reluctance to confront the issue has itself become part of the debate. Public broadcaster ZDF apologized for initially failing to report the New Year’s Eve assaults. There was widespread criticism of the Cologne police for saying on Jan. 1 that the New Year’s Eve celebration had been peaceful.

Gregor Golland, an NRW state lawmaker from Merkel’s CDU, said the state government, led by the Greens and SPD, “more or less laughed” at his party’s attempts to get the problem of north African criminals on the agenda in 2014 and 2015. “They acted as if it did not exist,” he said.

Hans-Willi Koerfges, an SPD lawmaker in NRW’s parliament, denied his party had ignored the Antanzen phenomenon among north Africans, saying SPD members had expressed concern and it was already being looked into by the time the CDU raised it.

A consensus is growing that, in order to make Merkel’s generosity to refugees work, Germany is going to have to do more to distinguish between those genuinely in need of protection and migrants from safe countries. Merkel’s coalition government backed a new law this week to make it easier to deport migrants who commit crimes.

Former German interior minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, of Merkel’s CDU, said whitewashing by the media and politicians keeping quiet about problems related to the refugee crisis had “led to an illusion about an idyllic world that never existed”.

“Now Germany is getting closer to reality,” he added.

(Additional reporting by Madeline Chambers and Tina Bellon in Berlin, Matthias Inverardi in Duesseldorf, Gerard Bon and Matthias Blamont in Paris, Michael Holden in London; Writing by Madeline Chambers and Michelle Martin; Editing by Peter Graff)

Frustrated with Germany’s asylum red tape, some Iraqis return home

BERLIN (Reuters) – The first thing that Leith Khdeir Abbas, a 27-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker who arrived in Germany four months ago, plans to do after he makes the return journey on Wednesday is to kneel down and kiss the soil that he calls home.

“I fled to Germany to build my future. But I realized I can’t build it on fake promises,” he said at Berlin’s Tegel airport where he and some 50 similarly disenchanted young Iraqi men were about to board an Iraqi Airways plane to Erbil in northern Iraq.

A growing number of Iraqi refugees in Germany are choosing to return to their war-torn country, frustrated with a slow asylum process in a country overwhelmed by the influx of 1.1 million asylum seekers last year, most still living in shelters.

“I feel homesick and humiliated,” said Abbas, waving his arms in frustration as he recalled the poor conditions at a Berlin shelter with unhygienic toilets and bland food.

The trip to Germany from his home city of Baghdad cost him $4,000, including a fee for smugglers who put him on a boat from Turkey to Greece, where he and hundreds of asylum seekers embarked on a weeks-long trek to Germany via the Balkans and Austria.

German Interior Ministry data show that the number of Iraqis choosing to return home began rising in September, when 61 left, up from about 10 in each of the first seven months of the year. In December the number of Iraqi returnees topped 200.

That is still a fraction of the almost 30,000 who applied for asylum in Germany last year, accounting for the fifth largest group after Syrians, Albanians, Kosovars and Afghans.

But the trend highlights the harsh reality for asylum seekers fleeing conflicts in the Middle East. They come to Germany dreaming of a better future only to find out that a host country known for its efficient bureaucracy and wealth is struggling to accommodate a large number of newcomers.

“It is sad to see so many young men going back to a war zone,” said Andesha Karim, an Iraqi Airways representative at Tegel. The airline operates three weekly flights to Iraq from Berlin, Duesseldorf and Frankfurt.

“EUROPE IS NOT NICE”

The reasons for returning seem to have more to do with down-and-out conditions in Germany rather than the improving situation on the ground in Iraq, where government forces have made advances against Islamic State.

Both Erbil – in northern Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region – and Baghdad are outside the territory under Islamic State control and have not seen heavy conflict, although militant bomb attacks occur regularly in the Iraqi capital.

“Europe is not nice. They gave me no residency permit, no money. I will return to Kurdistan, to Iraq. I could join the Peshmerga and fight Daesh,” said Hassan, 19, an Iraqi Kurd, referring to Western-backed militiamen fighting Islamic State.

Most of the young men waiting to board the five-hour, $280 a seat flight to Erbil were traveling on one-way travel documents issued by the Iraqi Embassy in Berlin.

Many had either lost their passports or destroyed them at the German-Austrian border, hoping this would make it harder to deport them if their asylum applications were rejected.

The embassy has since the end of October issued 1,400 such documents, an almost tenfold rise from the 150 issued in the first 10 months of last year, the German Foreign Ministry said.

Iraqi embassy officials could not be reached for comment.

Those who cannot pay for the journey back can apply for financial assistance from the International Organization for Migration.

Not everyone is keen to give up on Germany. Abdallah al-Alagi, another Iraqi, came to Tegel to bid farewell to his friend Abbas, and still hopes to be granted asylum soon.

“I am staying. If there is no progress with my application I will leave for another European country. I don’t have to stay in Germany,” he said.

Abbas tried to hold back tears as he bid farewell to al-Alagi and walked to the check-in desk. “Tell Mom to send me nice food,” al-Alagi shouted, bringing a smile to Abbas’s face.

(Reporting by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Noah Barkin/Mark Heinrich)

EU warns Greece to fix border ‘neglect’

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The EU executive concluded on Wednesday that Greece could face more border controls with other states of the free-travel Schengen zone in May if it does not fix “serious deficiencies” in its management of the area’s external frontier.

EU countries have been increasingly critical of Athens’ handling of the continent’s worst migration crisis since World War Two, with more than a million migrants reaching Europe last year, mainly through Greece.

“If the necessary action is not being taken and deficiencies persist, there is a possibility to … allow member states to temporarily close their borders,” European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis told a news briefing.

He was speaking after the executive accepted a report saying cash-strapped Athens had “seriously neglected” its obligations to fellow Schengen states.

The use of that phrase could pave the way for EU governments to exercise the option of reinstalling controls on their national borders for up to two years once short-term measures currently in place expire in May.

Several EU member states have instituted emergency controls on their borders and warned they may effectively suspend Athens from the passport-free zone. Most of the irregular migrants arriving in the EU have come from Turkey via Greece and trekked northward to Germany.

Dombrovskis said Greece was not identifying or registering people arriving effectively, not uploading fingerprinting data to relevant bases systematically, and not checking travel documents properly and against key databases.

EU border agency Frontex says its latest mission to the Greek island of Lesbos in January showed improvements in registration procedures.

But EU officials carried out an assessment in Greece in November that lead to Wednesday’s conclusion that there were “serious deficiencies” in Greek frontier control.

SEALING GREECE OFF

The step of imposing border controls, under the as yet unused Article 26 of the Schengen code, can be taken for up to six months and can be renewed up to three times for a total of two years.

Dombrovskis said the Commission was intent on preserving Schengen, one of the EU’s key achievements, and said Greece had improved its border controls since November – but not enough.

The next step in the process would be for Schengen member states – 26 countries, most of which are also in the EU – to confirm the Commission’s conclusions in a majority vote. The executive would then recommend remedial measures and assess by May whether Athens had complied.

Greece has no land borders with the rest of the Schengen zone, so installing new frontier checks would affect only air and sea ports.

Diplomats and officials described the move to penalize tourism-dependent Greece as a way to raise pressure on Athens, which is already mired in a financial crisis, to better implement EU measures intended to identify and register all those arriving from Turkey.

The EU is also looking into using Frontex more to help guard the border between Greece and Macedonia, which is not a member of the EU or Schengen. Some Frontex personnel are already at Greece’s northern border, but the agency’s mandate does not allow for interventions in third countries.

Some diplomats said countries could send more police or border guards to Macedonia on the basis of bilateral agreements.

Frontex has a precedent from 2006, when it ran a naval mission in territorial waters off Senegal and Mauritania to prevent African migrants reaching Spain’s Canary Islands. That operation was carried out on the basis of bilateral agreements between Spain, Dakar and Nouakchott.

“Details would need to be worked out but there seems to be very little opposition to this idea, apart, of course, from Greece,” said one EU diplomat involved.

Athens says the influx is impossible to control and its migration minister, Yannis Mouzalas, warned this week that sealing his country off from Schengen would create a humanitarian crisis with thousands of people trapped in Greece.

(Editing by Hugh Lawson)

German Jews fear rising antisemitism during Mideast refugee influx

BERLIN (Reuters) – When Judith G. helped out at a refugee center near Frankfurt last October and identified herself as Jewish, she was spat on and insulted.

German Jews say the case of Judith G., a 33-year-old optician who asked not to be fully named, isn’t isolated and underlines concerns many have about the record arrivals of asylum seekers, largely from Muslim countries in the Middle East.

Official figures show German-born far-right supporters commit the vast majority of antisemitic crimes in the country, and Muslim leaders say nearly all asylum seekers – who can be targets of hate crime themselves – are trying to escape conflict, not stir it up.

Nevertheless, Jews across Germany are hiding their identity when volunteering at refugee shelters for fear of reprisals, adding another layer of complexity to a social, economic and logistical challenge that is stretching the fabric of German society.

“Among the refugees, there are a great many people who grew up with hostility toward Israel and conflate these prejudices with hatred toward Jews in general,” Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews, told Reuters in an interview conducted in October.

Chancellor Angela Merkel stressed last week that antisemitic attitudes among some young people arriving from countries where “hatred toward Israel and Jews is commonplace” needed to be dealt with.

The safety of Jewish communities is particularly sensitive in Germany due to the murder of over 6 million Jews by Hitler’s Third Reich, which is marked on Wednesday by the international Holocaust Memorial Day. Today, the German Jewish community numbers around 100,500.

According to a 2013 study by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, 64 percent of German Jews avoid the public display of symbols that would identify them as Jewish. It also found that only 28 percent of them report antisemitic incidents.

Such incidents, as recorded by the Interior Ministry, dropped in 2015 but Jews still remember chants by young Muslims proclaiming “Jews to the gas” on German streets in protests against the 2014 Israeli-Palestinian Gaza War.

Concerns rose earlier this year when two suspected asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan attacked and robbed a man wearing a skullcap on the northern island of Fehmarn, a crime the local prosecutor treats as antisemitic.

“We don’t approach the issue of refugees with negative expectations in general,” said Walter Blender, head of the Jewish community in Bad Segeberg, a town on the mainland about 60 miles from Fehmarn. “But we are very worried and skeptical, and anecdotal evidence so far showed that we have reason to be scared.”

Preliminary Interior Ministry figures show that far-right supporters were responsible for well over 90 percent of the antisemitic crimes recorded last year up to the end of November. People with a foreign background were blamed for little more than four percent, although this category does not reveal their country of origin or immigration status.

Starting from this month, however, the ministry will produce a breakdown that includes a refugee category.

FINGER POINTING

Germany, which took in 1.1 million asylum seekers from mainly Middle Eastern countries last year, saw crimes against refugee shelters quadruple to 924 incidents in 2015 and Muslim advocacy groups warn against finger-pointing.

“The vast majority of people coming here are fleeing war and terror themselves,” said Aiman Mazyek, president of Germany’s Central Council of Muslims. “All they want is peace and quiet.”

There is little research on the scale of antisemitism in Arab countries, but a Pew poll from 2011 shows a large majority of people there hold unfavorable opinions of Jews.

Researchers say too little effort is put into teaching Western and German values to asylum seekers, including the country’s relationship with Jewish communities.

“There is a lack of a deeper understanding of the culture in many Middle Eastern countries and this results in Western stakeholders being taken by surprise over the fervent antisemitism there,” said Wolfgang Bock, an expert in Islamism and Middle Eastern politics.

In Germany, refugees with recognized asylum claims learn about the country’s history and values alongside language tuition. But some experts say there is nothing about contemporary political issues, such as relations with Israel.

“Education can’t just be about the Holocaust and the Third Reich. Schools also need to talk about the Middle East conflict, antisemitism based on religious argumentation and conspiracy theories,” said Ahmad Mansour, an Arab-Israeli researcher with the European Foundation of Democracy.

But communities across Germany are overwhelmed with processing the hundreds of thousands of asylum applications and are struggling to provide shelter and food to the arrivals.

Some Jewish groups, such as the Berlin-based “Friends of the Fraenkleufer Synagogue”, have taken the cultural exchange issue into their own hands with around 40 volunteers helping out at a local refugee center.

“We want to send a message to all the Jews who sit at home and build big fences around their synagogues that it’s possible and necessary to approach one another, because if we don’t try, things can only turn for the worse,” said Nina Peretz, head of the initiative.

(Editing by David Stamp)

Denmark passes tough migrant law as Nordic refugee welcome dims

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Denmark’s parliament passed measures on Tuesday aimed at deterring refugees from seeking asylum, including confiscating valuables to pay for their stay, despite protests from international human rights organizations.

The measures, which also include extending family reunification among refugees from one year to three years, are the latest sign that the Nordic welcome for refugees is waning as large numbers flee war in Africa and Middle East for a better life in Europe.

The “jewelry bill” is the latest attempt by Denmark’s minority center-right government to curb immigration to a country that took in a record 20,000 refugees last year.

Under the bill, refugees could keep possessions amounting to 10,000 Danish crowns ($1,450), raised from 3,000 crowns after criticism from human rights organizations. Valuables of special emotional value such as wedding rings will be exempt.

The Liberals Party government has just 34 out of 179 seats in parliament and depends on support of rightist parties, including the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party (DF), to pass laws.

During a three and a half hour debate, dissenting voices from small leftwing parties were heard including from Red Green Alliance.

But the bill passed with an overwhelming majority, backed by the main center-left opposition party Social Democrats, highlighting a shift to the right in Denmark’s political landscape thanks to DF’s popularity and rising concern over refugee numbers.

“I wouldn’t say that I have become racist or anything,” said Poul Madsen, a taxi driver, before the bill was passed. “But I may be more aware of the fact that this has some downsides and may be a potential problem for our society and our economy.”

NORDIC WELCOME FADES

Denmark is not the only one Nordxic country trying to shut its doors to migrants. Sweden, which took in over 160,000 refugees last year, the most per capita in Europe, introduced checks on its border to Denmark at the start of the year.

Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven promised on Monday more resources for police after an employee was stabbed to death at a refugee center for unaccompanied minors. A minor was arrested on suspicion of murder or manslaughter after the incident in western Sweden, local TT news agency reported.

A poll on Monday showed support for Lofven’s Social Democrats at its lowest for nearly 50 years, in part due to a sense the government was unable to cope with the refugee influx.

Norway, meanwhile, has been trying to send back refugees who crossed over from Russia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday Moscow would not take them back.

Denmark is also not alone in targeting migrants’ valuables. Switzerland has started taking valuables from asylum seekers over 1,000 Swiss francs ($985), the German state of Baden-Württemberg valuables above 350 euros ($380), while other southern states have been reported to do the same.

“Most (refugees) have lost everything and yet this legislation appears to say that the few fortunate enough to have survived the trip to Denmark with their few remaining possessions haven’t lost enough,” the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said, mirroring criticism from many organizations.

(Additional reporting by Annabella Pultz and Erik Matzen; Writing by Sabina Zawadzki; Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Richard Balmforth)

‘Running out of time’, EU puts Greece, passport-free region on notice

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – The European Union edged closer on Monday to accepting that its Schengen open-borders area may be suspended for up to two years if it fails in the next few weeks to curb the influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa.

After chairing a meeting of EU counterparts in Amsterdam, the Dutch migration minister said they expected an unprecedented prolongation of the time governments can impose border checks because the migrant crisis would not be under control before current, short-term dispensations expire in May.

Some ministers made clear such a — theoretically temporary — move would cut off Greece, where more than 40,000 people have already arrived by sea from Turkey this year despite a deal with Ankara two months ago to hold back an exodus of Syrian refugees. More than 60 have drowned on the crossing since Jan. 1 alone.

Greek officials noted that closing routes northward, even if physically possible, would not solve the problem. But electoral pressure on governments, including in the EU’s leading power Germany, to stem the flow and resist efforts to spread asylum seekers across the bloc are making free travel rules untenable.

“We are running out of time,” said EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos as he urged states to implement agreed measures for reducing and controlling movements of migrants across the continent — or else face the collapse of the 30-year-old Schengen zone, a major EU achievement.

But Dutch minister Klaas Dijkhoff said time has effectively already run out to preserve all of the passport-free regime that has allowed hundreds of thousands of people to trek from Greece and Italy to Germany and Sweden over the past year.

“The ‘or else’ is already happening,” he said. “A year ago, we all warned that if we don’t come up with a solution, then Schengen will be under pressure. It already is.”

The piecemeal reintroduction of controls by several governments under pressure from domestic opinion at national borders with fellow EU states should be better coordinated, said Dijkhoff, whose government last year floated the idea of a “mini-Schengen” that critics saw as a way for Germany and its northern neighbors to bar the influx from the Mediterranean.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who opened her country’s borders to Syrians fleeing civil war last summer, is under mounting pressure to halt the inflow after more than a million migrants entered Germany last year.

Without a clear drop in the numbers arriving before she meets fellow EU leaders at a summit in mid-February, some form of border closer by the bloc’s leading power, which would have a knock-on effect across Europe, would be increasingly likely — not least as Germans vote in key regional elections in March.

The Commission, the EU executive, is already conducting a review of whether Greece’s difficulty in processing constitute “persistent serious deficiencies” on the external EU frontier that would justify a historic move to allow states to reimpose controls on those arriving from Greece.

It is due to make recommendations next month and Athens would have three months to respond. Existing measures taken by some states under a different rule expire in mid-May. Minister Dijkhoff made clear that few expect the situation to be under control by then, so the longer-term suspension should be ready.

Under that measure, Article 26 of the Schengen code, states could reimpose controls on documents for six months, renewable three times, until May 2018. EU officials acknowledged, however, that no one knows what would happen after that if governments were not prepared to return to the status quo before last year.

“Everyone understands that the Schengen zone is on the brink,” Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said.

“If we cannot protect the external EU border, the Greek-Turkish border, then the Schengen external border will move towards central Europe … Greece must increase its resources as soon as possible and accept help.”

The Schengen zone comprises 26 states, most of which are also EU members. Germany, France, Austria and Sweden are among several countries that have introduced temporary border checks as they struggle to control the flow of people.

“Speaking about timetables, it’s already too late. We have seven countries with border controls,” Sweden’s interior minister Anders Ygeman told Reuters.

He said migrant registration centers need to start functioning in Greece and Italy as planned: “In the end, if a country doesn’t live up to its obligations, we will have to restrict its connections to the Schengen area.”

Appearing anxious to calm a confrontation with the radical leftist government in Athens that already clashed with Berlin last year over its demands of bailout loans to keep Greece in the euro zone, his German counterpart was more reserved.

“Blaming people in public doesn’t help,” Thomas de Maiziere said.

The EU has taken various steps to give cash-strapped Athens financial assistance to deal with the crisis, but many member states believe Athens is not using that enough. Of five registration “hotspot” centers due to be set up for migrants arriving in Greece, only one is running so far.

(Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Richard Balmforth)