The pope is right: Europe should be ashamed

Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, 560,000 refugees (or about 9% of the Jordianian population) have crossed into Jordan and asked for asylum. The cost of providing shelter, food, water (Jordan is a desert state) and assistance for all these refugees has cost the government of this upper-middle income country 1.53 billion USD since the beginning of the refugee crisis. Commenting on the refugee situation, Jordan's interior minister said

Jordan is a safe haven; even if we have to share some of our livelihood we will not deprive anyone of the privilege to be here. This is the nature of Jordanians and their leadership, and I pray to God that we are never in a position where we would make a different decision. I want to emphasize Jordan’s moral, humanitarian and political commitment.

Meanwhile, 6,400 Syrian refugees have reached the European Union through Bulgaria. Others come into the EU through Greece or Italy. Two boats carrying African refugees capsized at Lampedusa this week, killing hundreds of them. At the Council meeting of Interior Ministers this week, some of these countries asked for help from their richer, northern European neighbours. They find that the 2003 Dublin II regulation – which obliges asylum seekers to file their asylum request in the EU country of arrival – does not respond to the challenges of today any more.

But the richer north European partners refused to move an inch away from the Dublin II regulation. A representative survey conducted in Germany last week revealed that a majority (52%) of the Germans believe the EU should accepted more refugees, but the same majority (51%) thinks that these refugees should go to a country other than Germany.

For a bloc of the most developed countries in the world, but especially for a union that prizes itself for being a value-community, this is completely unacceptable. The pope put it a bit more bluntly: This a shame.

The EU not only has the economic resources and cultural diversity to accept a far greater number of refugees, but it has also proclaimed to the world that it promotes humanitarian values and human rights.

But the picture that it gives of itself in the African and Syrian refugee crisis is a club of wealthy countries, busy with itself, ignoring the rest of the world.

Leaving a European country in the lurch

At the European Council in Tampere, October 1999, European Head of States agreed to establish a Common EU Asylum and Migration Policy. “The European Union needs a comprehensive approach to migration addressing political, human rights and development issues in countries and regions of origin and transit,” they said. “The European Council calls for closer co-operation and mutual technical assistance between the Member States' border control services, such as exchange programmes and technology transfer, especially on maritime borders, and for the rapid inclusion of the applicant States in this co-operation.”

At today’s Home and Justice Ministers Council, nothing of that European spirit was left. Today it was politics, dirty bargaining at its best. Germany and France rejected Italy’s demand for a European solution and told the country to deal with its Tunesian migrants on its own. Yesterday, Bavaria’s home minister had already said that Italy is large enough to accommodate 23000 Tunesian migrants, threatening border controls at the German-Austrian border.

Certainly, both countries have accepted more migrants than Italy in the past (Germany from Afghanistan, Iran and the Balkans, France from the Maghreb) and therefore have powerful arguments against Italy. And there is a thing called the Dublin II Regulation stipulating that migrants have to ask for asylum in the country through which they enter the European Union (a debate for another time). Still, all this doesn’t justify leaving a European country in the lurch. There are many more ways to deal with the problem than allowing Tunesians into French or German social systems. Providing technical support, ships or equipment to Italy to deal with migratory flows, for example. But ministers today chose confrontation over cooperation.

We pride ourselves with an integrated European market, with free flow of goods, with a high standard of living that is achieved through cheap imports from abroad. We pride ourselves with the possibilities of investing and withdrawing millions of Euros from companies all over the world. We gladly take the benefits that globalization has to offer. But when it comes to people entering into Fortress Europe, every country has to deal with migration on its own.

What we need is a common European effort, a common European approach to the challenges. The Home Ministers Council was a step in the wrong direction.

Update: The Council Conclusions are here (but I haven't had time to have a look yet)


Update (10 May 2011): Everybody sometimes heads in the wrong direction and my viewpoint has changed with more information. I maintain that we need a European migration policy and a European response to North African migrants, but I see Italy's role far more critically now. While other European countries have dealt with far more than 25,000 migrants, Italy is creating a problem where there shouldn't be a problem. And Sarkozy is happy to blow up the migrant issue to a security question. To get a better idea of the issue, I can only recommend today's debate in the EP (from 15h25), and there in particular Mr Weber, Mr Schulz and Mr Verhofstadt.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali back in the Netherlands - and the Islam debate comes back with her

A few years ago the Somalian refugee Ayaan Hirsi Ali caused a major political uproar in the Netherlands. Within a few years, she went from being a refugee to becoming a member of parliament and she spoke out fervently against the - then - tabou topic of Muslim integration. Based on a pillar system in Dutch society in which Catholics, Protestants, secularists and Muslims live in parallel and without interference to one another, the Dutch state long turned a blind eye on mistreatment of Muslim women in the Netherlands, as Ali argues in her autobiography Infidel. After she long believed in Islam during her adolescence, the treatment of women led her to become atheist and she's fought today's interpretation of Islam ever since. Her film "Submission" led to many discussions and triggered the violent murder of her director Theo van Gogh in the middle of Amsterdam - stabbed multiple times in the chest by a radical Muslim, who attached to the knife a life threat for Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She subsequently left the country and fled to the US.

Now Ali came back to the Netherlands for a week to present her second book, Nomad. Like Infidel, it carries a lot of autobiographic traits, arguing that Islam is slowly croaching upon Europe and that Christians (led by the Vatican) and secularists have to join forces to push it back. "We have to bring Muslims away from Islam", she says in this interview regarding her book. I have not read the book yet, but the comments I read suggest that she is hitting a nerve again, and polarizing without wishing to polarize. With her former liberal ally Geert Wilders campaigning for the national elections, the atmosphere in the Netherlands is tense; fear comes up that Wilders may actually win the elections in June with his anti-immigrant propositions. Ali may have distanced herself from Wilders, but the tide of the time is absolutely unfavorable to immigrants and especially Muslims.
On the other hand, in a heavily secured television debate in her former university Leiden, female Muslim students took Ayaan Hirsi Ali under fire for her criticism of Islam. "Have you ever even bothered to read the Qur'an?" was the questions she was asked most of all. To polarize matters further, during her brief stay in the Netherlands Ali also accepted an award from the youth wing of the ultra-orthodox protestant SGP party which certainly drove Christians and Muslims further apart.

News coverage doesn't suggest that there is a completely new debate in the Netherlands - but the publication of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book at this time certainly has an impact upon political thinking and the elections. If it it will be for the better or for the worse - that remains to be seen.

The Lega Nord goes beyond any political decency

Recently traveling to Italy I was shocked about the posters that the racist Lega Nord (Northern League, party for the promotion of an independent Italian north) put up in the regional election campaign. The campaign posters show a native American next to the words "They also underwent immigration - now they live in the reservations".

André Feldhof/CC-BY

In my opinion, notwithstanding the usual populist nature of the Lega Nord, this goes beyond any political decency and I hope that Italians will cry out against these posters and in favor of more integration of immigrants. On the first of March, a social initiative called Primo Marzo (first of March) organizes events and marches all across Italy for the cause of the migrants. I dearly hope that many Italians will participate in these demonstrations!

Update: Please also see the video on my travel blog, which puts the posters into the context of recent immigrant riots in Milan.
Update(2): This article in the Saturday edition of Le Monde is absolutely worth reading for everybody with an interest in Italy. English version: http://bit.ly/cjlQa3