Tag Archives: Migrants

Give us EU visa freedom in October or abandon migrant deal, Turkey says

urkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu speaks during a news conference with the Adviser to Pakistan's Prime Minister on National Security and Foreign Affairs,

By Michelle Martin and Humeyra Pamuk

BERLIN/ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkey could walk away from its promise to stem the flow of illegal migrants to Europe if the European Union fails to grant Turks visa-free travel to the bloc in October, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told a German newspaper.

His comments in Bild’s Monday edition coincide with rising tension between Ankara and the West following the July 15 failed coup attempt. Turkey is incensed by what it sees as an insensitive response from Western allies to the failed putsch in which 240 people, many of them civilians, were killed.

Europe and the United States have been worried by the crackdown following the coup. Some Western governments are concerned this could affect stability in the NATO member and suspect that President Tayyip Erdogan is using the purges as an excuse to quash dissent.

Asked whether hundreds of thousands of refugees in Turkey would head to Europe if the EU did not grant Turks visa freedom from October, Cavusoglu told Bild: “I don’t want to talk about the worst case scenario – talks with the EU are continuing but it’s clear that we either apply all treaties at the same time or we put them all aside.”

Visa-free access to the EU – the main reward for Ankara’s collaboration in choking off an influx of migrants into Europe – has been subject to delays due to a dispute over Turkish anti-terrorism legislation, as well as Ankara’s crackdown.

Brussels wants Turkey to soften the anti-terrorism law, which Ankara says it cannot change, given multiple security threats which include Islamic State militants in neighboring Syria and Kurdish militants in its mainly Kurdish southeast.

European Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has said he does not see the EU granting Turks visa-free travel this year due to Ankara’s crackdown after the failed military coup.

Cavusoglu said treaties laid out that all Turks would get visa freedom in October, adding: “It can’t be that we implement everything that is good for the EU but that Turkey gets nothing in return.”

A spokesman for the European Commission declined to comment on the interview directly but said the EU continued to work together with Turkey in all areas of cooperation.

THOUSANDS DETAINED

Selim Yenel, Turkey’s ambassador to the EU, said last week that efforts were continuing to find a compromise with the EU on visa liberalization and he thought it would be possible to handle this in 2016.

Since the coup, more than 35,000 people have been detained, of whom 17,000 have been placed under formal arrest, and tens of thousands more suspended. Turkish authorities blame the failed putsch on U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen and his followers.

Amid rising tension with the West, Turkey has sought to normalize relations with Russia, sparking fears in the West that Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin might use a rapprochement to exert pressure on Washington and the EU and stir tensions within NATO.

Asked if Turkey would leave NATO, Cavusoglu told Bild that while Turkey remained one of the biggest supporters of the 28-nation Western alliance, it was also looking at other options.

“But it’s clear that we also need to cooperate with other partners on buying and selling weapon systems because some NATO partners refuse to allow us to sell air defense systems for example or to exchange information,” he said.

Over the weekend, Turkey summoned Austria’s charge d’affaires in Ankara over what it said it was an “indecent report” about Turkey on a news ticker at Vienna airport.

“Turkey allows sex with children under the age of 15,” read a headline on an electronic news ticker at the airport, images circulated on social media showed.

In a statement, Turkey’s foreign ministry said it was “regrettable” that an international airport at the heart of Europe was used as “a tool … in spreading such irresponsible, twisted and inaccurate messages”.

It said the publication of such “slandering” news reports were encouraged by recent comments from Austrian politicians.

Cavusoglu this month referred to Austria as the “capital of radical racism” after Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern suggested ending EU accession talks with Turkey.

(Additional reporting by Julia Fioretti in Brussels; writing by David Dolan; Editing by Paul Carrel and Richard Balmforth)

Out of sight, out of mind? Europe’s migrant crisis still simmers

A woman sits and looks on outside a building covered up with sheets to protect the dwellers from the strong summer sun outside of the disused Hellenikon airport, where stranded refugees and migrants are temporarily accommodated in Athens, Greece,

By Michele Kambas and Antonio Bronic

ATHENS/ZAGREB (Reuters) – A year after hundreds of thousands of refugees snaked their way across southeastern Europe and onto global television screens, the roads through the Balkans are now clear, depriving an arguably worsening tragedy of poignant visibility.

Europe’s migrant crisis is at the very least numerically worse than it was last year. More people are arriving and more are dying. But the twist is that, compared with last year, a lot of it is out of sight.

Take the border between Greece and Macedonia. Summer crops have replaced the city of tents at the border outpost of Idomeni, even if some locals are convinced there is an unseen population hiding in the surrounding forests, waiting for smugglers to assist them on their onward journey.

The tiny Greek village was a focal point of the migrant flow north toward Germany and other wealthy countries, with thousands of refugees squatting for months waiting for sealed borders with Macedonia to open

Elsewhere in the Balkans, a Reuters photographer, revisiting the people-packed locations where he and his colleagues captured last year’s diaspora, found empty roads, unencumbered railway tracks and bucolic countryside.

The comparison is stark.

More than one million people fleeing conflict in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan made their way to Europe last year, with the majority of them crossing the precarious sea corridor separating Greece and Turkey, the temporary home for more than 2 million refugees displaced from Syria.

They came carrying their worldly belongings in plastic bags and hauling babies on weary shoulders, a visual exodus of the kind not seen in Europe since the end of World War Two.

Many have since reached their destination in northern Europe, but with the borders closed and the European Union now attempting to contain the numbers, thousands are stuck at holding centers in Greece and Italy.

They are not so nearly visible there – nor are the ones still coming.

VISIBILITY DOWN, ARRIVALS UP

According to data from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), arrivals are up 17 percent on last year, stoked mainly by a spike at the start of the year through Greece.

Deaths among those trying to get to Europe, mainly due to drowning, are up more than 15 percent.

“This is not a blip,” said David Miliband, a former British foreign minister who now heads the International Rescue Committee, an aid group set up by Albert Einstein – himself a refugee – to rescue Europeans before the outbreak of World War Two.

“The forces that are driving more and more people from their homes – weak states, big tumults within the Islamic world, a divided international system .. None of these things are likely to abate soon.”

Some of the mantle of accepting huge migrant flows that was carried by Greece last year and the beginning of this one has been taken up by Italy.

This follows a resurgence of migrant flows from northern Africa. More than 140,000 asylum seekers are now housed in Italian shelters, a seven-fold increase on 2013, with the migrant crisis in its third year.

In Greece, where arrivals plunged in the wake of an accord between Turkey and the EU to stem the flow in March, an estimated 57,000 migrants were still stuck in the country by Aug.8.

Campaigners say the accord has lulled policymakers into a false sense of accomplishment by allowing them to believe that Europe’s migration problem has been solved.

“By outsourcing the responsibility to Turkey and to Greece, European governments are basically saying ‘we have solved the crisis because we don’t see it, and we can’t smell it and we can’t hear it,” said Gauri van Gulik, deputy Europe director at Amnesty International.

“The crisis is as big as ever, and as yet unsolved by governments,” she told Reuters.

IOM data says that 258,186 people arrived in Europe by the end of July, compared with 219,854 over the same period in 2015. There were 3,176 fatalities by Aug. 7, outpacing the 2,754 who died in the first eight months of last year, a slightly longer period.

“Its absolutely incredible because if you think about the panic this caused last year and the incentive there was to really get some policy changes in place, nothing has happened,” Van Gulik said.

(Additional reporting by Steve Scherer in Rome, Lefteris Papadimas in Athens Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

Germany has curbed open-door policy for migrants

German Chancellor Angela Merkel addresses a news conference in Berlin, Germany

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany appears to have drastically curtailed its open-door policy for migrants in 2016, turning away 13,000 people without valid documentation in the first six months, already 4,000 more than in the whole of 2015, official data showed on Tuesday.

Around 117,500 migrants were admitted in the same period, compared to a record of more than one million migrants entering the country last year, mainly across the border from Austria.

The bulk of the rejections happened at land entry points and Afghans, Syrians and Iraqis made up the three largest groups of the total, the Interior Ministry data published at the request of the hard-left Die Linke party showed.

Chancellor Angela Merkel last month interrupted her summer break to defend her government’s migration policy after two Islamist attacks by asylum seekers, saying that those fleeing conflicts and persecution have the right to asylum in Germany.

More than 2,500 Afghans, 1,300 Syrians and 1,000 Iraqis were declined entry at border crossings in the January-June period, the ministry said. Iranians, Moroccans, Nigerians, Pakistanis, Gambians, Somalis and Algerians made up the rest of the top 10.

The number of people seeking asylum in Germany dropped drastically this year as a result of border closures in the Balkans, an EU-Turkey deal to stop sea arrivals in Greece and tougher asylum rules in Germany.

In July, 4,500 migrants arrived in Germany, less than half of the daily arrivals at the peak of the crisis in the fall of last year, German police said earlier this month, bringing the number of arrivals in the first seven months of the year to 122,000.

Migrants who arrive in Germany are first registered at reception centres where they have to wait for months before they can officially file an asylum application, creating a huge backlog and putting strain on civil servants.

The influx has dented the popularity of Merkel’s ruling conservatives and prompted the rise of an anti-immigration party.

Turkey has threatened to suspend its migrants agreement with the European Union if there is no deal to grant visa-free travel to Turks. The number of migrants reach Italy in boats from Libya has also been rising.

(Reporting by Andreas Rinke; Writing by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

Tempers flare as temperatures soar at Rome’s migrant center

Migrants queue for food at a makeshift camp in Via Cupa (Gloomy Street) in downtown Rome, Italy,

By Steve Scherer

ROME (Reuters) – Tempers are flaring between increasingly frustrated residents and boat migrants mostly from Africa using a well-known transit camp in central Rome as temperatures soar this summer.

Italy is taking in thousands of boat migrants every week for a third year in a row, and friction is common between them and those who live along the path many take on their journey toward northern Europe.

Set up by volunteers, the Baobab center, by Rome’s Tiburtina train station, was shut down by police in December in the wake of the Paris attacks and because the European Union wants Italy to stop migrants from moving on, not help them to do so.

But Baobab volunteers quickly set up a camp on the street in front of the old shelter with tents and chemical toilets, serving three meals a day, and migrants have flocked there in their thousands.

“We can’t open our windows because of the stench,” said Valeria, who lives with her six-year-old son and husband next to the camp in Via Cupa – Gloomy Street in English.

“The chemical toilets are never cleaned and dirty water leaks onto the street. It’s inhumane for them and for us.”

Baobab organizers estimate 40,000 have come through in the past year. Last week, about 300 men, women, children and teenage boys slept on mattresses laid out on the road, and the numbers are expected to rise as the summer wears on.

On one afternoon last week, a mother bathed her baby in a plastic tub, young men played table football, and women braided each other’s hair on a wicker couch – all in under the hot sun.

Residents and Baobab volunteers alike have been calling on Rome’s city government to provide a more suitable location, but after more than seven months none has been found.

The administration of Rome’s new mayor Virginia Raggi, elected in June, is working with institutions and humanitarian groups to come up with a plan by Aug. 15 to get the migrants off the road and into a more adequate location, the city’s social affairs office said in a statement.

Italy has been on the front line of Europe’s immigration crisis, taking in more than 420,000 boat migrants since the start of 2014, official figures show.

The state provides shelter to some 140,000 asylum seekers – seven times more than it did in 2013 – in centers up and down the Italian peninsula.

POST-ATTACK FEARS

Volunteers argue that shelters for migrants in transit are needed not only for humanitarian reasons, but also to keep them out of the hands of criminal people smugglers.

During one afternoon in late July, two Baobab volunteers escorted four young Eritreans to buy bus tickets for Milan. Their final destinations were Germany, Norway and Holland.

“Had we not helped them, they could have fallen prey to people smugglers,” said Sergio, a retired civil servant and Baobab volunteer.

Residents and businesses are also worried about security.

At the end of July, in the wake of violent attacks in Europe that killed hundreds of people, an insurance office that employs 19 people relocated to another part of Rome from Gloomy Street, saying both clients and employees no longer felt safe there.

“Everyday there are attacks around Europe,” said Gianluca Fasano, owner of the insurance office. “We have no idea who is staying there. We hope they’re all good people, but we don’t know.”

Eritrean, Somali and Sudanese are the most common nationalities found at Baobab because they often have family members already living in other countries. Typically they stay no longer than two or three days before moving on.

Baobab is fully operated by volunteers – doctors, retired civil servants, designers and others – and funded by donations. Each week its Facebook page asks for specific items, such as small-size men’s shoes or Ibuprofen. Someone donated a car battery so migrants can charge their phones.

“We’re the first to say that the situation is inadequate,” said Francesca Del Giudice, a Baobab founder. “We don’t think it’s a dignified shelter for them. We want to take them off the street; instead they’re sleeping on the street.”

(Editing by Louise Ireland)

Support for Germany’s Merkel plunges after attacks

German Chancellor Merkel leaves a news conference in Berlin

BERLIN (Reuters) – Popular support for Chancellor Angela Merkel has plunged according to a poll conducted after attacks in Germany, with almost two-thirds of Germans unhappy with her refugee policy.

The survey for public broadcaster ARD showed support for Merkel down 12 points from her July rating to 47 percent. This marked her second-lowest score since she was re-elected in 2013. In April last year, before the migrant crisis erupted she enjoyed backing of 75 percent.

Merkel’s open-door refugee policy has come under attack from critics after five attacks in Germany since July 18 have left 15 people dead, including four assailants, and dozens injured.

Two of the attackers had links to Islamist militancy, officials say.

Support for one of Merkel’s fiercest critics, Bavarian Premier Horst Seehofer, who has called for restrictions on immigration to increase security, jumped 11 points to 44 percent.

Over a million migrants have entered Germany in the past year, many fleeing war in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.

Merkel repeated her claim that Germany could manage to successfully integrate the influx of refugees last week and vowed not to change her refugee policy.

In a poll of 1,003 people conducted Aug. 1-2, just 34 percent of people said they were satisfied or very satisfied with Merkel’s refugee policy. This was the lowest level since the question was first asked last October.

Some 65 percent were dissatisfied with the policy.

The next test of support for Merkel will be state elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on Sept. 4, where her Christian Democrats (CDU) are expected to face a strong challenge from the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

A separate poll this week showed that most Germans do not blame the government’s liberal refugee policy for the two Islamist attacks last month.

(Reporting by Caroline Copley)

Bodies found off coast of Libya as migrant toll climbs: IOM

Migrants await rescue in dinghy

GENEVA (Reuters) – The bodies of 120 migrants believed to have been trying to reach Italy by boat from Libya have been found off the Libyan coast over the past 10 days, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Tuesday.

“We are getting this information from Libyan authorities that we are collaborating with,” said IOM spokesman Joel Millman. The bodies had been discovered near Sabratha and had not come from previously known shipwrecks in the Mediterranean.

Mainly African migrants are taking often unseaworthy boats from Libya to Italy, gateway to Europe. Nearly 8,000 were rescued at sea between Friday to Monday on that central Mediterranean route, Millman told a briefing.

It is a longer and more perilous journey than that from Turkey to Greece, largely shut down since a deal was struck between the European Union and Turkey in March, although 174 migrants did make it by sea to Greece over the weekend, IOM said.

More than 257,000 migrants and refugees have already entered Europe by sea this year through July 27, and for the third straight year, at least 3,000 others have died, the agency said.

A total of 4,027 migrants or refugees have perished worldwide so far this year, three-quarters of them in the Mediterranean, Millman said.

The figures represents a 35 percent increase on the global toll during the first seven months of 2015, he said.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

Hungary’s PM says ‘obvious connection’ between terrorism and migration

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban arrives on the second day of the EU Summit in Brussels, Belgium,

WARSAW (Reuters) – Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Thursday there was a clear link between illegal immigration to Europe and terrorist attacks on the continent.

“It is clear as two and two makes four, it is plain as day. There is an obvious connection,” Orban told reporters after a meeting of the Visegrad Four group of central European leaders in Warsaw.

“If somebody denies this connection then, in fact, this person harms the safety of European citizens,” he said through an interpreter.

(Reporting by Marcin Goettig; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

Republicans, Democrats sharply divided over Muslims in America

Muslim men attend Eid al-Fitr prayers to mark the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan in the Queens borough of New York

By Emily Flitter and Chris Kahn

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Many Americans view Islam unfavorably, and supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are more than twice as likely to view the religion negatively as those backing Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, according to a Reuters/Ipsos online poll of more than 7,000 Americans.

It shows that 37 percent of American adults have a “somewhat unfavorable” or “very unfavorable” view of Islam. This includes 58 percent of Trump supporters and 24 percent of Clinton supporters, a contrast largely mirrored by the breakdown between Republicans and Democrats.

By comparison, respondents overall had an equally unfavorable view of atheism at 38 percent, compared with 21 percent for Hinduism, 16 percent for Judaism and 8 percent for Christianity.

Spokespeople for Trump and Clinton declined to comment.

The poll took place before an attacker on Thursday drove his truck into a holiday crowd in Nice, France, killing more than 80 people in what President Francois Hollande called a terrorist act. Police sources said the driver, while linked to common crimes, was not on a watch list of intelligence services and no Islamist militant group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

The race for the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election has put a spotlight on Americans’ views of Muslims with Trump proposing a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. He repeated the proposal after Omar Mateen, a New York-born Muslim armed with an assault rifle, killed 49 people in an attack on a Florida gay nightclub last month.

The ideological divide between Trump and Clinton supporters is set against a backdrop of increasing violence and discrimination against Muslims in the United States.

The poll shows 78 percent of Trump supporters and 36 percent of Clinton supporters said that when compared to other religions, Islam was more likely to encourage acts of terrorism. Trump supporters were also about twice as likely as Clinton supporters to say that Islam was more encouraging of violence toward Americans, women and gay people. Polling on none of the other belief systems and their perceived connection to terrorism or violence came close to matching those numbers.

Clinton has called for a more inclusive environment within American society and for a joint effort between the U.S. government and Muslim countries to battle the spread of Islamist militancy.

She has criticized Trump’s harsh statements about Muslims and Mexicans while Trump has bemoaned what he calls American society’s devotion to political correctness.

TRUMP, REPUBLICANS ALIGNED

Party affiliation accounted for the deepest division among Americans where their views on Muslims were concerned. Respondents’ status as rich or poor, young or old, or male or female did not offer as pronounced an overall view as did their identification as Democrats or Republicans.

“If it was true that Trump did not represent Republicans broadly defined, you would think Republicans would look different; they don’t,” said Douglas McAdam, a sociology professor at Stanford University who studies American politics.

“It goes against the claims of the (former presidential candidate) Mitt Romneys of the world, that Trump is not really a Republican, that he doesn’t represent the Republican party. He seems to be resonating with Republicans generally.”

According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group, attacks on American Muslims and on mosques in the United States rose in 2015 to their highest level ever recorded.

The group said 31 incidents of damage or destruction of mosques were reported; there were 11 incidents in which a Muslim person was the target of a slur or another kind of harassment.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll ran in all 50 states from June 14 to July 6. It included 7,473 American adults and has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 1 percentage point.

(Reporting By Emily Flitter; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Howard Goller)

EU proposes new asylum rules to stop migrants crossing Europe

Migrants who will be returned to Turkey demonstrate inside the Moria registration centre on the Greek island of Lesbos,

By Gabriela Baczynska

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Commission proposed more unified EU asylum rules on Wednesday, in a bid to stop people waiting for refugee status moving around the bloc and disrupting its passport-free zone.

In an unprecedented wave of migration last year, 1.3 million people reached the EU and most ignored legal restrictions, trekking from the Mediterranean coast to apply for asylum in wealthy Germany, prompting some EU countries to suspend the Schengen system that allows free passage between most EU states.

“The changes will create a genuine common asylum procedure,” said EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos. “At the same time, we set clear obligations and duties for asylum seekers to prevent secondary movements and abuse of procedures.”

The proposal would standardize refugee reception facilities across the bloc and unify the level of state support they can get, setting common rules on residence permits, travel papers, access to jobs, schools, social welfare and healthcare.

It would grant prospective refugees swifter rights to work but also put more obligations on them, meaning if they do not effectively cooperate with the authorities or head to an EU state of their choice rather than staying put, their asylum application could be jeopardized.

The five-year waiting period after which refugees are eligible for long-term residence would be restarted if they move from their designated country, the Commission said.

The plan, which will now be reviewed by national governments and the European Parliament, comes after the Commission proposed in May a system for distributing asylum seekers around the bloc, an idea that angered eastern EU states which refuse to take in refugees.

Only 3,056 people have so far been relocated under the scheme that was meant for 160,000 people, the Commission said. Hungary and Slovakia have challenged the quotas for receiving asylum-seekers in the courts.

Asked whether Brussels would punish countries, that also include Poland and the Czech Republic, for not complying with the relocation quotas, Avramopoulos said: “Were not here to punish, we are here to persuade. But if this persuasion doesn’t succeed, then yes, we’re thinking of doing that. But we’re not there yet.”

SAFE LIST

Last year’s record arrivals triggered bitter political disputes in the EU, where the wealthier states that ended up hosting most of the people accused the newer members in the east of showing no solidarity.

A deal with Turkey in March has since cut the arrivals to Greece to a trickle but has prompted concerns about human rights.

Unlike the Turkey route, however, which mainly brought Syrians and other people with a strong cases for asylum into Europe, the bloc is now worried over a rise in arrivals from Africa through Libya. Most people on that route do not qualify for asylum and, under the EU rules, should be sent back.

The Commission wants to draw up lists of “safe countries” outside the bloc, which would help EU states return people, after Athens’ refusal to recognize Turkey as such a place hindered deportations from the Greek islands back to Turkey.

To discourage chaotic flows by facilitating legal migration, the Commission also proposed an EU-wide system for resettlement directly from refugee camps. It said Brussels would pay 10,000 euros for each person EU states bring in.

But Slovakia, the current holder of the EU’s rotating presidency, was skeptical on chances for unified asylum system.

“We can only talk about real burden-sharing when the quality of life is the same in all EU states,” said Bernard Priecel, head of Slovakia’s migration service. “Otherwise we will always have secondary movements. How can you force them to stay?”

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Terrorists smuggled into Europe with refugees, Merkel says

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel attends a working session at the NATO Summit in Warsaw, Poland July 9, 2016.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Militant groups smuggled some of their members into Europe in the wave of migrants who have fled from Syria, German Chancellor Angela said on Monday.

“In part, the refugee flow was even used to smuggle terrorists,” Merkel told a rally of her Christian Democrats in eastern Germany.

More than 1 million migrants arrived in Germany last year, many of them Syrians.

(Reporting by Noah Barkin and Paul Carrel)