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Ed Webb

Turkish asylum seekers allegedly being pushed back in small boats by Greece | openDemoc... - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...-back-in-small-boats-by-greece

mediterranean Turkey EU migration Greece rights law

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Dec 21 - Cached
  • According to Kurt, during the beatings, the Greek coast guard repeatedly asked the three men questions about how they had managed to cross the Aegean, what they had used to do so, and at which point they had started their journey. The three men refused to answer. “I reckon they beat us to punish us for being able to cross the Aegean without them knowing,” Kurt said. “They wanted to get more information about how we managed to cross and what methods we used. They were showing their teeth to prevent us from trying to cross again.”
  • The number of Turkish refugees illegally sent back home by Greek border officials has seemingly risen dramatically amid a surge in migration that some say is fueled by President Erdogan's crackdown on opponents.
  • At least 76 of those pushed back were arrested by Ankara over trumped-up terrorism charges as part of a crackdown targeting Turkish and Kurdish dissidents in the country.
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  • Pushing refugees back to countries they fled from is illegal under the international law of non-refoulement, the principle that forbids a country from forcing refugees or asylum seekers to return to a country in which they are liable to be subjected to persecution. Athens has continually denied allegations about its use of this practice.  
  • Of his first attempt to reach Greece, he said: “It shocked me to face violence in Greece – a part of the EU, which we see as the motherland of democracy. But here I was in the EU, witnessing the violation of my human rights as an asylum seeker.” He said the soldiers had taken his laptop, e-book, phone and personal belongings before throwing him into a cell, without food or water, along with 60 others including Afghans, Pakistanis and Syrians, claiming: “They beat those guys even worse.” 
  • Greek authorities often fail to disclose details of asylum seekers like Topalan when they are requested by lawyers and human rights organisations attempting to track them
  • Karamanidou said that despite violating international law, pushbacks are becoming a “normalised” practice at European borders. As British home secretary Priti Patel has already confirmed, the UK is also planning to emulate ‘Greek-style clampdowns’ as part of its border control strategy on the Channel. Of the UK’s plans, Karamanidou said: “A decades-long routine of pushbacks on the Greek-Turkish land border also contributes to this.”
Ed Webb

Tracking the European Union's migration millions - The Correspondent - 0 views

thecorrespondent.com/...1225216520-474742c6

NIgeria EU Europe migration media

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Western countries – whether it’s the US, the EU or Australia – are increasingly electing populist parties, whose solution to almost every problem is: less immigration.
  • People move because they want to improve their lives, or the lives of their children. They move because they want to see the world. They move because they want to have agency over their own future. Whether there are fences, walls or entire oceans: people will move.
  • In western media, the overwhelming majority of migration reporting is from the perspective of arrival – not departure
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  • Nigeria, a country of over 190 million people and Africa’s richest economy, lies on the west coast of the continent. Nigerians represent the largest group of African migrants who arrive in Europe via irregular routes: either on a fake visa, or across the Mediterranean Sea. Of the 180,000 migrants who reached Italy’s shores in 2016, 21% were Nigerian
  • only 9% of these Nigerian asylum seekers are actually given asylum in the EU. The remaining 91% are sent home, or disappear into the shadow population
  • hundreds of millions of euros, invested to improve border control and "tackle the root causes of migration" in Africa
  • Where development aid used to be a moral business (i.e. it is our duty to help people out of poverty) or a trade business (if we help people out of poverty we increase our markets), today it is often a migration business (if we create opportunities in developing countries, people will stay there rather than migrate to the west).
  • I want to know where the money is coming from, where it’s going, what Europe is trying to achieve, and what the results are in practice.
  • a collaborative journalism project for about six months
  • “I have spent most of my career presenting alternatives to the migration narrative prevailing in the Italian media: a black-and-white narrative that is either full of compassion or alarmist. In Niger, I have seen with my own eyes how Brussels’ policy can have undesirable consequences - for migrants as well as local communities and power structures,”
  • What are the effects of this money on Nigerian society? Who gains power, and who loses it? Who actually benefits? 
Ed Webb

The invisible violence of Europe's refugee camps | Refugees | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...gee-camps-191021185959684.html

Greece Turkey migrants refuge refugees camps EU

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Nov 19 - Cached
  • In 2016, the EU signed a controversial refugee deal with Turkey, known as the EU-Turkey Statement , to stop the refugee flow from Turkey's western coast to Greece. Under the agreement, Ankara agreed to take back all refugees and migrants who cross to Greece from its territories in return for aid money and the relocation of some Syrian refugees from Turkey to Europe. As part of the deal, Greece agreed to its islands being used as "holding areas" to stop new arrivals from reaching mainland Europe, on the condition that most of the people held there would be swiftly returned to Turkey.  The plan for the containment of refugees on the Greek islands relied heavily on five "hot spots", including Moria, where asylum seekers would be registered and provided with temporary shelter.
  • While Turkey initially succeeded in stopping a high percentage of refugees from embarking on a dangerous journey across the Aegean Sea, this did not last long. As the relations between Ankara and Brussels took a downturn, the refugee flows to Greece began to increase again. Moreover, Greek authorities proved inefficient in processing asylum applications and Turkey kept stalling over the readmissions. As a result, the population in Moria and the other Greek "hot spot" refugee camps started to increase rapidly.
  • These camps, with Moria chief among them, are now places where already traumatised people are stripped off their dignity.
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  • More than 14,000 people are currently living in Moria, even though the camp was originally designed to host about 3,000
  • Most of the thousands of refugees who are "trapped" there have no idea when they will be able to leave or where they will be going next. The hope many of them had when they made it to the Greek shores in tiny dinghies appears to have been replaced with feelings of desolation.
  • Doctors without Borders calls Moria a place of medical and psychological emergency
  • Many of the camp's residents suffer from some form of PTSD. Some are suicidal. Children are suffering from what psychologists call "resignation syndrome", a rare psychiatric condition that presents as progressive social withdrawal and reluctance to engage in normal activities, such as school and play, in response to an intolerable reality. The most severe cases can result in a state of hibernation and even death. Mental health specialists working in the camp say they came across children as young as two who appear to have suicidal thoughts.
  • while they may be safe from mortars and missiles, they are still living with violence
Ed Webb

EU Policies Forced Refugees Back to War Libya. Now They're Stuck in Rwanda. - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...refugees-all-the-way-to-rwanda

Africa Libya Rwanda Eritrea refugees asylum migration migrants EU UNHCR borders mediterranean

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • the impacts of hardening European Union border policy, which forces refugees back to a dangerous country where they live at the mercy of Libyan militias
  • UNHCR said it had heard allegations of detainees being used as forced labor in the Gathering and Departure Facility, but it could not verify them.) In the months afterward, Alex returned to detention only for his meetings with UNHCR staff. He was interviewed and fingerprinted, and finally given good news: He would be evacuated to Rwanda.
  • 2,427 people last year got the option to go with UNHCR either directly to European countries or to a transit country where their cases can be considered for resettlement to Europe or North America. In contrast, nearly 1,000 refugees and migrants were returned to Libya in the first two weeks of 2020 alone.
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  • Over the past three years, the EU has allocated nearly 100 million euros, around $100 million, to spend on the Libyan coast guard, with the aim of intercepting and stopping boats of migrants and refugees who are trying to reach Europe. Tens of thousands of people who could have their asylum claims assessed if they managed to reach European soil have instead been returned to Libya to spend months or years in for-profit detention centers where sexual violence, labor exploitation, torture, and trafficking have been repeatedly documented. They wait, in the unlikely hope of being selected for a legal route to safety.
  • Both Niger and Romania have previously been used as transit countries, though the number of people going to Niger have slowed because of problems processing cases. This past September, Rwanda announced it will also begin to take evacuees, following negotiations and a deal signed with the African Union and UNHCR.
  • UNHCR is still appealing for funding, saying it hopes to evacuate 1,500 people to Rwanda by the end of 2020, with the program expected to cost nearly $27 million by then. So far, according to numbers provided by UNHCR, the EU has pledged 10 million euros, Norway just over 5 million euros, and Malta 50,000.
  • Though a relatively secure country with much-lauded economic development, Rwanda is also a dictatorship and police state with a tightly controlled media
  • in a small, bare room in a bar outside the camp that same month, a group of refugees gathered to tell me their stories. For more than a year, they had been sending me evidence of human rights abuses from a network of Libyan detention centers, using a series of phones they kept hidden throughout. Now they say they are grateful to be in Rwanda, but they also resent the time they spent locked up.
  • They witnessed deaths from medical negligence and suffered through deliberate food deprivation, torture, and forced recruitment.
  • “Most of our minds are completely spoilt. We’re afraid of motorbikes, of helicopters,”
  • Sonal Marwah, a humanitarian affairs manager with Doctors Without Borders, said survivors suffer from emotional and psychological problems, such as anxiety and depression.
  • They feel they can’t trust anyone anymore, convinced everyone around them has tried to profit from them: whether Libyan authorities, smugglers, the U.N., or the Rwandan government.
  • Some said that it was only when they signed documents on the night before they left Libya that UNHCR staff informed them they might have to stay in Rwanda for longer. There were consequences for backing out at that stage, too. UNHCR confirmed a “very small number” of refugees in Libya refused to go to Rwanda, meaning the agency will not consider them for resettlement or evacuation again.
  • In November, evacuees got another shock when UNHCR’s special envoy for the Mediterranean, Vincent Cochetel, tweeted that refugees in Rwanda have “wrong” expectations. “We have no obligation to resettle all refugees in/from Libya,” he wrote. “They can locally integrate in Rwanda if they want, [while] learning and mentally accepting that there is not just a ‘Europe option.’”
  • Others accused UNHCR of using their evacuations as a public relations coup to show the agency is doing something, while promoting the Rwandan government’s charity, instead of prioritizing evacuees’ welfare.
  • The evacuation program “risks exacerbating a situation where the vast majority of refugees continue to be hosted in developing countries, while richer ones spend their resources on keeping people out at any cost,”
  • UNHCR said it has received 1,150 resettlement pledges from other countries for refugees in Rwanda, with Norway alone pledging to take in 600 refugees (not all of them from Libya). Some Libya evacuees have already been accepted to go to Sweden. The number of available places is still “far outstripped by the needs,”
  • At what point does the EU become responsible for refugees it has forced from its borders through externalization policies? How much suffering can they go through before European officials recognize some obligation?
  • “Africa is Africa,” he has repeated throughout months of contact from both Libya and Rwanda, saying he’s worried about corruption, repression, exploitation, a lack of freedom, and a lack of opportunity in his birth continent. In Europe, Alex believes, refugees “can start a new life, it’s like we [will be] born again. All the suffering and all the torture, this only makes us stronger.”
Ed Webb

A foreign mafia has come to Italy and further polarized the migration debate - The Wash... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-b585-e36b16a531aa_story.html

Italy Nigeria crime Sicily

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Jun 19 - Cached
  • In a country that has fought for decades to weaken its homegrown mafia, a foreign crime group is gathering strength. The group’s members are Nigerian. They hold territory from the north in Turin to the south in Palermo. They smuggle drugs and traffic women, deploying them as prostitutes on Italy’s streets. They find new members among the caste of wayward migrants, illicitly recruiting at Italian government-run asylum centers.
  • For the far right’s opponents, the Nigerian mafia has proved to be a trickier case — a problem that is politically risky to play down but that they say is being exploited as a cudgel against all migrants. They note that the Nigerian mafia primarily occupies immigrant neighborhoods, preying on those residents in a way that may feel familiar to Italians who have lived under the mob.
  • the emergence of a new foreign mafia strikes at some of the most emotional chords in a country still traumatized by its so-called mafia wars
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  • the Nigerian mafia has built Italy into a European hub, smuggling cocaine from South America, heroin from Asia, and trafficking women by the tens of thousands
  • Italian investigators say the Nigerian syndicate meets the definition of a mafia, rather than a criminal gang, because it has a behavior code and uses the implied power of the group to intimidate and silence. Nigerian members have been sentenced on ­mafia-related charges that Italy drew up decades ago in its fight against the homegrown mob.
  • In the Sicilian city of Palermo, Mayor Leoluca Orlando, a 71-year-old who keeps a Koran in his office and calls Salvini a “little Mussolini,” said he refuses to distinguish one kind of criminal from the next on the basis of ethnicity or “blood.” Several Nigerians in Palermo have organized news conferences and rallies, holding signs that say not all Nigerians belong to the mafia. “Just like with the Sicilians,” said Samson Olomu, the president of Palermo’s Nigerian Association, “not all of them are mafia.”
  • The Nigerian mafia has had a presence across Europe since the 1980s. In recent years, it has not only expanded but also pushed into the one Italian territory where no foreign mob had dared to go. Sicily was conquered and raided by Greeks, by Byzantines, by Normans. But for much of the past century, the island’s overlords have been Mafiosi, members of the Cosa Nostra group who specialized in racketeering, gambling and killing, and who have not typically shared their turf. “In the 1980s, 1990s, this never would have happened. Never,” Giuseppe Governale, the head of Italy’s central anti-mafia agency, said of Cosa Nostra sharing territory with outsiders.
  • Investigators say they first saw signs of the Nigerian mafia presence here in 2013 with an uptick in violent assaults. Two years later, evidence emerged that the new group might be cooperating in the drug trade with Sicilian mafia: A taped conversation showed two Cosa Nostra higher-ups describing the Nigerians as “tough young’uns” who are dangerous but know their place. That peace between the groups has held ever since.
  • the Nigerian mafia has built much of its business on the one thing Cosa Nostra has never shown an interest in: prostitution.
  • “This, for Italy, is a new criminal phenomenon,” Del Grosso said. “But from my perspective, it changes nothing. They are criminals.” Criminals, he said, have always crossed borders. “When Italians went to America,” he said, “they brought crime, too.”
Ed Webb

In Libya, the U.N. and EU Are Leaving Migrants to Die as Civil War Rages - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...die-detention-center-civil-war

Libya migrants refugees migration UN UNHCR IOM EU militias

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • a seemingly endless series of scandals across a network of detention centers ostensibly run by the Libyan Department for Combating Illegal Migration, which is associated with the U.N.-backed, Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA). In reality, many of the detention centers are controlled by militias.
  • Tens of thousands of refugees and migrants have been locked up indefinitely in Libyan detention centers over the past two and a half years, after they were intercepted by the Libyan coast guard trying to reach Italy across the Mediterranean Sea. Since 2017, the Libyan coast guard has been supported with equipment and training worth tens of millions of dollars by the European Union. This money comes from the Trust Fund for Africa—a multibillion-dollar fund created at the height of the so-called migration crisis, with the aim of preventing migration to Europe by increasing border controls and funding projects in 26 African countries
  • EU’s deal with Libya—a country without a stable government where conflict is raging—has been repeatedly condemned by human rights organizations. They say the EU is supporting the coast guard with the aim of circumventing the international law principle of non-refoulement, which would prohibit European ships from returning asylum-seekers and refugees to a country where they could face persecution
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  • In January, dozens of migrants and refugees were sold directly to human traffickers from the Souq al-Khamis detention center in Khoms, soon after they were delivered there by the Libyan coast guard.
  • Since the latest conflict began in Tripoli in April, after eastern Gen. Khalifa Haftar ordered his self-styled Libyan National Army to advance on the capital, refugees and migrants say their lives have become even worse. Detainees in five detention centers told Foreign Policy they have been forced to assist GNA-associated militias by loading or moving weapons, cleaning military bases on the front lines, and even—in a few cases—fighting with guns.
  • In July, at least 53 detainees were killed in the Tajoura detention center, in eastern Tripoli, when a bomb dropped by Haftar’s forces directly hit the hall they were locked in, close to a weapons store. Survivors accused the GNA government of using them as “human shields.”
  • while UNHCR and IOM do some important work, they are actively involved in whitewashing the devastating and horrific impacts of hardening European Union policy aimed at keeping refugees and migrants out of Europe. “They are constantly watering down the problems that are happening in the detention centers,” said one aid official. “They are encouraging the situation to continue. … They are paid by the EU to do [the EU’s] fucking job.”
  • When asked about the European Union’s role in facilitating the exploitation, torture, and abuse of thousands of refugees and migrants in Libya, EU spokespeople regularly point to the presence of the U.N. in detention centers, saying the EU is trying to improve conditions through these means and would like the centers closed.
  • While the United Nations Support Mission in Libya and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights have been pointedly critical, UNHCR and IOM regularly thank the EU for funding through their social media accounts, without mentioning that the EU plays a central role in sending refugees and migrants to detention centers in the first place
  • According to Crisp, the problems include: “dependence on EU funding and inability to change EU policy; a government that is supported by both the UN and EU; weak government institutions that are closely linked to militias; desperate refugees who don’t understand why UNHCR can’t do more for them; irregular and limited access to the refugees; concerns over staff safety and security,”
  • it was clear the U.N. is “totally overwhelmed” with the situation, yet it has management who are always “on the defensive.” 
  • “In almost every country where there is an emergency there are always complaints, there are always issues and critics, but what we see in Libya is a complete mess,”
  • While UNHCR has helped 1,540 refugees leave Libya in 2019, this is only a small percentage of those stuck in a cycle between detention centers, smugglers, and the Libyan coast guard, some of whom have waited years to be considered for evacuation. In May alone, nearly as many refugees (1,224) were returned from the Mediterranean Sea and locked up in detention
  • the bombing survivor said he has lost hope in UNHCR and is ready to return to smugglers. “I will try the sea again and again. I’ve got nothing to lose,” he said, adding, “I want the world to know how people are suffering in Libya, because many people die and lose their minds here.”
Ed Webb

IRC: Numbers of immigrants returned to Libya in 2021 set a record | The Libya Observer - 0 views

www.libyaobserver.ly/...returned-libya-2021-set-record

EU Libya mediterranean migration NGO

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Sep 21 - Cached
  • The International Rescue Committee (IRC) said 23,000 immigrants have been intercepted at sea and returned to Libya after trying to reach safety in Europe - almost double the total for the whole of 2020 and the highest number on record since interceptions by the Libyan Coast Guard began in 2017
  • almost all survivors were sent to Libya’s notorious detention centres, where exploitation, abuse and multiple other violations of their human rights take place on a regular basis
  • without support from the international community to address the situations in Libya and other countries of origin that drive people to seek a better life - such as conflict, COVID-19 and climate change, as well as human rights abuses, food insecurity and economic constraints - the IRC is concerned that thousands more will continue to risk their lives at sea in search of safety
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  • For people in search of safety and protection, such as asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants, life in Libya is especially hard. They are at constant risk of a long list of abuses that can include kidnapping, sexual violence and even torture. They are not safe in Libya and they cannot go home or elsewhere - many having fled similar circumstances in their countries of origin or in transit. Often they will already have faced abuse and exploitation at the hands of smugglers on their journey to get here. It is no wonder that they want to leave, but since safe and legal ways are extremely limited, getting to Europe across the Med is often viewed as the only chance they have of reaching safety."
  • IRC urged for the EU to urgently review its approach to migration - particularly its support to the Libyan Coast Guard - and to relaunch its own search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean to ensure that survivors are disembarked at a place of safety, indicating that "Libya is not a safe port or a safe country, and people should not be returned there."
Ed Webb

Cargo ship carrying hundreds of migrants arrives safety on Greek island two days after ... - 0 views

english.alaraby.co.uk/...ndreds-migrants-arrives-greece

mediterranean Turkey EU migration Greece Afghanistan migrants shipping

shared by Ed Webb on 31 Oct 21 - Cached
  • A Turkish-flagged cargo ship carrying 382 mostly Afghan migrants docked safely at a Greek island's port early on Sunday, two days after losing power in the Aegean Sea and sending out a distress signal. Six people among what was the country's biggest single influx of migrants in years were detained after the vessel, the Murat 729, was towed into Kos port by a Greek coastguard ship, the migration ministry said.
  • On Tuesday, four migrants, three of them children, drowned after a boat in which they and 23 others were trying to cross from Turkey to Greece sank off the island of Chios.
Ed Webb

Tunisian authorities pick up 125 Europe-bound migrants - InfoMigrants - 0 views

www.infomigrants.net/...ck-up-125-europebound-migrants

Italy Tunisia migration

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Tunisia agreed to accept the return of those migrants not qualifying for asylum, in return for the potential for some more legal migration for Tunisians towards Italy
  • One of the reasons for the increase in the number of interceptions over the last year is the establishment in June of direct lines of communication between Rome and Tunis to help coordinate efforts to fight irregular immigration.
Ed Webb

Fortress Europe: the millions spent on military-grade tech to deter refugees | European... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...y-grade-tech-to-deter-refugees

EU migration politics tech technology borders policing military-industrial_complex

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Dec 21 - Cached
  • The EU is central to the push towards using technology on its borders, whether it has been bought by the EU’s border force, Frontex, or financed for member states through EU sources, such as its internal security fund or Horizon 2020, a project to drive innovation.In 2018, the EU predicted that the European security market would grow to €128bn (£108bn) by 2020. Beneficiaries are arms and tech companies who heavily courted the EU, raising the concerns of campaigners and MEPs.
  • “In effect, none of this stops people from crossing; having drones or helicopters doesn’t stop people from crossing, you just see people taking more risky ways,” says Jack Sapoch, formerly with Border Violence Monitoring Network. “This is a history that’s so long, as security increases on one section of the border, movement continues in another section.”
  • German MEP Özlem Demirel is campaigning against the EU’s use of drones and links to arms companies, which she says has turned migration into a security issue.“The arms industries are saying: ‘This is a security problem, so buy my weapons, buy my drones, buy my surveillance system,’” says Demirel.“The EU is always talking about values like human rights, [speaking out] against violations but … week-by-week we see more people dying and we have to question if the EU is breaking its values,” she says.
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  • The most expensive tool is the long-endurance Heron drone operating over the Mediterranean.Frontex awarded a €100m (£91m) contract last year for the Heron and Hermes drones made by two Israeli arms companies, both of which had been used by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip. Capable of flying for more than 30 hours and at heights of 10,000 metres (30,000 feet), the drones beam almost real-time feeds back to Frontex’s HQ in Warsaw.Missions mostly start from Malta, focusing on the Libyan search and rescue zone – where the Libyan coastguard will perform “pull backs” when informed by EU forces of boats trying to cross the Mediterranean.
  • Poland is hoping to emulate Greece in response to the crisis on its border with Belarus. In October, its parliament approved a €350m wall that will stretch along half the border and reach up to 5.5 metres (18 feet), equipped with motion detectors and thermal cameras.
  • In September, Greece opened a refugee camp on the island of Samos that has been described as prison-like. The €38m (£32m) facility for 3,000 asylum seekers has military-grade fencing and CCTV to track people’s movements. Access is controlled by fingerprint, turnstiles and X-rays. A private security company and 50 uniformed officers monitor the camp. It is the first of five that Greece has planned; two more opened in November.
  • The EU spent €4.5m (£3.8m) on a three-year trial of artificial intelligence-powered lie detectors in Greece, Hungary and Latvia. A machine scans refugees and migrants’ facial expressions as they answer questions it poses, deciding whether they have lied and passing the information on to a border officer.The last trial finished in late 2019 and was hailed as a success by the EU but academics have called it pseudoscience, arguing that the “micro-expressions” the software analyses cannot be reliably used to judge whether someone is lying. The software is the subject of a court case taken by MEP Patrick Breyer to the European court of justice in Luxembourg, arguing that there should be more public scrutiny of such technology. A decision is expected on 15 December.
Ed Webb

EU's Mediterranean, southern European leaders meet in Malta on migration | Migration Ne... - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...ers-meet-in-malta-on-migration

mediterranean migration EU Italy Greece France Tunisia Libya Spain Malta Cyprus

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • Paris is hoping Friday’s so-called Med9 summit, attended by the leaders of Malta, France, Greece, Italy, Croatia, Cyprus, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain, will offer a “clear message” that migration requires a response at the European level
  • EU is poised to agree a revamped Pact on Migration and Asylum, which will seek to relieve pressure on frontline countries such as Italy and Greece by relocating some arrivals to other EU states
  • Both Meloni and Macron also want to prevent boats departing from North Africa by working more closely with Tunisia, despite questions over the country’s human rights standards and treatment of migrants.
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  • Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi met with his Tunisian and Libyan counterparts in Sicily on Thursday for talks on stopping the boats
  • There are fears arrivals could spiral further if instability in the Sahel affects North African countries.
  • also discuss regional challenges posed by natural disasters following a devastating earthquake in Morocco, a flood disaster in Libya, and extreme weather events in Southern Europe
Ed Webb

The Post-WWI Migrations That Built Yugoslavia and Turkey Have Left a Painful Legacy - N... - 0 views

newlinesmag.com/...key-have-left-a-painful-legacy

Turkey Balkans Greece Yugoslavia Bulgaria Albania history migration nationalism Kosovo Serbia Romania minorities

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • the religious, ethnic and linguistic diversity that characterized their territories in the Middle East and Eastern Europe no longer chimed with the new world order being organized around nation-states
  • Designing measures such as the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923, the League of Nations legitimized demographic engineering policies and made migration an intrinsic part of nation-building. With international encouragement, the states with Muslim minorities in the Balkans devised multipronged policies to push out the citizens they saw as undesirable. Turkey became the only destination for Balkan Muslims, even when they were not Turkish.
  • in 1938 Belgrade and Ankara concluded a little-known agreement to transfer 200,000 Yugoslav citizens to Turkey. The transfer did not materialize because of the start of World War II, but the migrations did eventually take place and continued into the 1950s. For both Yugoslavia and Turkey, new states created in the aftermath of World War I, migration was an important part of nation-building.
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  • took as its model another such deal between Turkey and Romania in 1936 as well as the better-known Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923
  • During the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria invaded the remaining Ottoman territories in Europe. Within several months, an estimated 1 million Muslims vanished, murdered and expelled from the regions taken over by these states. The shocking magnitude of the violence, which continued into World War I, made many Muslims wary of their future in the new nation-states and incited migration to the Ottoman Empire, itself in the midst of conflict.
  • Focus on religious identity allowed for a formal incorporation of these rather diverse populations into the Turkish national body. The asylum policy and the settlement laws defined migrants as Turks and those “affiliated with Turkish culture” to encompass all the Slav, Albanian and Greek Muslims, making Turkey­­ a safe haven for Muslim minorities fleeing oppressive regimes.
  • Dispossession, expulsions and massacres of diverse Muslim populations were already a grim reality of nation-building in southeastern Europe in the 19th century, when Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria were carved out of Ottoman provinces. In fact, the conquests of Ottoman Europe after 1699 normalized expulsion and compulsory conversion of local Muslims in the lost territories
  • Forced processes of homogenization are still part of the repertoire of nation-state building, and continue to shape our understanding of world order. Muslim presence in the southeastern periphery of Europe likewise continues to be viewed as problematic and even dangerous: As Piro Rexhepi observed in the book “White Enclosures,” their integration continues to be desirable for security but impossible racially.
  • In the 1920s, Catholic missionaries working in neighboring Kosovo, a former Ottoman province inhabited by Albanian Muslim and Christian populations and similarly incorporated into Southern Serbia, sent reports of massacres, assassinations, imprisonment and forced labor in a memorandum to the League of Nations, receiving no response.
  • 19th-century definitions of South Slavic brotherhood envisioned Slav Muslims as potentially assimilable, distinguishing between “the Turks” as the non-Slavic Ottomans and “our Turks,” that is, Slav Muslims
  • so-called reform also included the vast properties of the Islamic pious endowments. Schools, mosques and Sufi lodges lost the land and incomes that were used to operate educational, religious and community services. Some land appropriations were symbolic: The 15th-century Burmali Mosque that visually defined Skopje’s main thoroughfare was simply torn down
  • Ivo Andric, an admired novelist and Yugoslav Nobel laureate, was also one of the highest-ranking Yugoslav diplomats in the interwar period. Eager to finalize the population transfer agreement with Turkey, he advised the government in Belgrade that Turkey was not only interested in the small group of ethnic Turks in Yugoslavia but also populations akin to Turks in their “mentality.” Repeating a constant theme in almost all of Andric’s novels, Muslims were described in his diplomatic correspondence as alien to the Balkans. For Andric, they were “Turks leftover in the territories of our Kingdom.”
  • over 2,000 Bosnians were settled along with Greek Muslims in the town of Izmir.
  • Turkish officials, faced with the constant influx of migrants, pursued agreements with the Balkan states that would offset the costs of migrant settlement. The 1934 Balkan Pact included minority clauses that allowed Turkish citizens to sell their properties in their former homelands. Turkish administrators also considered requesting an estimated payment from the Balkan nation-states to match the value of the properties that Balkan Muslims were forced to leave behind.
  • The Turkish Republic saw population growth as beneficial for economic development and national defense in the long term, as it worked to populate its eastern and western borderlands. Moreover, many of Turkey’s early administrators, as migrants and children of migrants themselves, understood these new waves of migration from a personal perspective.
  • Laws barred those speaking languages other than Turkish from settling in groups and limited the “foreign” presence to no more than 10% of a municipality, though the realities of the period frequently made these laws impossible to execute. The locals took on much of the burden of helping newcomers, begrudgingly sharing public resources. At the same time, the immigrants provided necessary manpower and introduced new methods in agriculture and certain industries. While Balkan languages largely disappeared with the following generation, enduring legacies, such as Balkan cuisine and music evoking the most personal memories of exile, acquired a place in the Turkish national heritage.
  • Today, no official recognition of the violent policies of “unmixing” exists, and barely anyone has heard of Yugoslavia’s attempted population transfer of 1939.
  • the international community’s preferred solutions to “ethnic conflicts” in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo remain equally tied to principles of nationalist homogenization and demarcation. A century after the foundation of modern Turkey and the first Yugoslavia, the legacies of that era’s mass migration and state violence persist.
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