Merkel admits migrant crisis mistakes

Now patience needed in dealing with refugees in Europe, says German chancellor

GERMANY and other EU countries turned a blind eye to the refugee crisis building on its borders, Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a German newspaper interview to be published today.

Merkel also told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that Germany and the EU would need endurance in dealing with the migration of people to Europe. “There are political issues that one can see coming but don’t really register with people at that certain moment and in Germany we ignored the problem for too long and blocked out the need to find a pan-European solution,” she said.

Merkel made the comments in an unusually self-critical analysis that appeared to be timed to the oneyear anniversary today of her nowfamous statement “wir schaffen das”, or “we can do this”, when asked about the rising tide of refugees.

Her conservative party is expected to take a beating in two regional elections next month in part due to her refugee policies.

She said Germany, which had taken in most of the more than 1 million refugees from the Middle East and Asia who arrived in the EU in the past year, had let Spain and other EU border countries deal with the refugees on their own.

“Back then, we also rejected a proportional distribution of the refugees,” she said.

Merkel said Germany had not supported models such as the Frontex European border agency that would have impinged on the sovereignty of the EU member states. “We said we would deal with the problem at our airports since we don’t have any other external EU boundaries. But that doesn’t work.”

The three-term chancellor said refugees would be a long-term issue.

“We didn’t embrace the problem in an appropriate way,” she said. “That goes as well for protecting the external border of the Schengen area,” she said, referring to the EU’s passport-free and frontier-free zone.

Merkel said the EU needed to improve co-operation with and dramatically increase development aid to countries in Africa as well as Turkey and other troubled regions.

Merkel said Germany had long been content to focus on other problems after years of welcoming refu- gees from the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. “I cannot deny that,” she said.

She asked German politicians not to participate in the current ratcheting up of rhetoric about threats.

A number of Germans had always had a certain racism towards foreigners and were willing to commit violent acts for that cause, but that tendency had grown over the past year, she said.

The German leader also cautioned against equating all migrants with terrorists. “It’s simply incorrect to say terrorism came only with the refugees,” she said.