The fate of refugees linked with Paris attacks
‘Perfect storm of extremely high refugee numbers and awful Islamist atrocities’
Two shocking images have fixated the world in recent months.
First, the lifeless body of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach when the boat carrying his family capsized in an attempt to reach Greece: a picture that turned the tide for millions who had ignored the massive refugee crisis.
Then, the bloodstained floor of the Bataclan concert hall after a terrorist attack that killed 129 people in six locations across Paris. A seismic event that has rippled across Europe’s political landscape.
Now the two have come together, with potentially dire consequences for thousands of refugees clamouring to reach the safety of Europe before winter sets in.
Reports that French prosecutors have confirmed that the fingerprints of one of the suicide bombers in the Paris attacks matched those of a mi- grant who arrived in Greece last month prompted European politicians to call for tighter border controls — and some for a complete halt to the flow of refugees into Europe.
“You have a massive influx of refugees, which would inevitably increase political support for the far right,” said Randall Hansen, who heads the University of Toronto’s Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies.
“Secondly, terrorist attacks will be associated with Muslims, and refugees are viewed as Muslims. It’s a perfect storm of extremely high refugee numbers and awful Islamist atrocities.”
Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Front, demanded a halt, saying that “fears and warnings” about jihadists slipping through the stream of refugees had come true. Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Soder tweeted that Europe must not allow “illegal and uncontrolled immigration.” And Polish European Affairs Minister Konrad Szymanski said that Poland could not accept a European-forged agreement on taking in refugees without security guarantees, “in the face of the tragic acts in Paris,” according to Reuters.
Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch’s emergencies director, one of the first to send out images of Alan Kurdi, said it was “not surprising that the Paris attacks led to a backlash on the refugee front.”
“But through summer and fall, there was the sense that Europe was losing control of the refugee situation. Without a coherent policy you end up with chaos,” he said in Toronto Monday.
More than 800,000 refugees have arrived in Europe by sea this year, many of them heading for Germany. But efforts to make European countries take in quotas of refugees have largely failed. Now the situation is set to worsen.
“The problem is that the flow will not stop,” said Philippe Fargues, director of the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute. “There is still a war in Syria, the environment for refugees in Turkey is deteriorating, not to speak of Lebanon and Jordan. In the coming hours or days, decisions will be taken to tighten controls.”
With floods of refugees moving toward Europe, he added, “one possible scenario is that Turkey will have a bigger role in filtering people.” That could mean those with unlikely prospects of being accepted in Europe will be kept in Turkey. Others could be screened at “hot spots” in Malta, Greece and Italy.
Tighter screening could also mean more illegal refugee movements, says Mattia Toaldo of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “If there is a security threat, it’s that people are forced to come illegally, without border checks.”
The effect of the Paris attacks on refugees is still unclear.
European far right parties who fiercely oppose immigration lost support immediately after the story of Alan Kurdi’s drowning broke in August. But earlier in the year their backing surged, with at least nine nationalist parties gaining ground on Facebook, according to a social media analysis by Vocativ.
“Paradoxically, the anti-immigration factions and Islamic State share one goal,” Toaldo said, “to keep Muslims within Muslim lands. If you read their website you see that they used the picture of Alan Kurdi in a totally different way — to say ‘look what happens to those who leave Islamic lands.’
“The tragic irony is that the refugees are fleeing one kind of fundamentalism, and are being pushed back in the name of another.”