Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Europe weighs freedom vs. security
Berlin attacker’s travel embarrasses nations
PARIS — Europe’s open borders symbolize liberty and forward thinking for many residents — but they increasingly look like the continent’s Achilles’ heel.
Europe’s No. 1 terrorism suspect crossed at least two borders this week despite an international manhunt, and was felled only by chance, in a random ID check in a Milan suburb. The bungled chase for Berlin market attack suspect Anis Amri is just one example of recent cross-border security failures that are emboldening nationalists fed up with European unity. Extremist violence, they argue, is too high a price to pay for the freedom to travel easily.
Defenders of the EU’s border-free zone say the security failures show the need for more cooperation among European governments, even shared militaries — not new barriers. Hidebound habits of hoarding intelligence within centuries-old borders, they contend, are part of the problem.
But their arguments are easily drowned out by the likes of far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who is hoping to win France’s presidency in May.
“The myth of total free movement in Europe, which my rivals are clinging to in this presidential election, should be definitively buried. Our security depends on it,” she said in a statement Friday, calling Europe’s free-travel zone a “total security catastrophe.”
That poses a dilemma for European Union devotees like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, facing a re-election battle next year.
Merkel’s defense of the EU, and the welcoming hand she extended to Syrian war refugees, were once seen as assets, signs of her moral authority. Today, with anti-immigrant, anti-establishment sentiment rising across Europe, they are threatening to become liabilities.
Millions of people cross borders in the 26-country Schengen travel zone every day, thanks to a 31-yearold system encompassing nearly 400 million people that has dramatically boosted trade and job prospects across the world’s largest collective economy.
It’s a pillar of a system designed to prevent new world wars — a system that’s under growing strain. While EU countries debated over how to manage an influx of migrants last year, eastern nations rebuilt fences and exposed EU weaknesses.
The German far right is insisting on closing the country’s borders. Merkel’s conservatives are suggesting “transit zones” to hold migrants at the borders while their identities are confirmed, and making it easier to hold people in pre-deportation detention.
Berlin truck attacker Amri is a painful example of how Islamic extremists have used Europe’s open borders to attack the principles of tolerance they’re meant to epitomize.
Germany, France and Italy have failed to explain how Amri escaped the dragnet. France is especially embarrassed.
MILAN — Investigators on Saturday worked to determine if the Berlin Christmas market attacker got any logistical support to cross at least two European borders and evade capture for days before being killed in a police shootout in a Milan suburb.
Tunisian fugitive Anis Amri’s fingerprints and wallet were found in a truck that plowed into a Christmas market in Berlin on Monday night, killing 12 people and injuring 56 others. Despite an intense, Europe-wide manhunt, Amri fled across Germany, into France and then into Italy, traveling at least part of the way by train, before being shot early Friday in a police stop outside a deserted train station.
The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the Berlin attack, but so far little is known about any support network backing up the 24-year-old fugitive.
Italian investigators were working to see if the Tunisian had any connections in the Milan area. Italy was his port of entry into Europe in 2011 and he spent more than three years in Italian jails on Sicily. But an anti-terrorism official said there was no evidence that he had ever been in or around Milan before Friday’s shootout.
In Tunisia, the Interior Ministry announced the arrest Friday of Amri’s nephew and two others suspected of belonging to the same extremist network. The ministry said in a statement that Amri, through an alias, had sent his 18-year-old nephew Fedi some money through the post office to join him in Europe and join the Abou Walaa network. Amir claimed to be the network’s emir.