48 Syrians stopped at sea

Rome citizens defy law to help migrants

ISTANBUL, March 11, (Agencies): Turkey’s coast guard says it has prevented 48 Syrian migrants from reaching Greece.

In a statement on its official website, the Turkish Coast Guard said the migrants on a rubber dinghy were stopped after a tip early Friday. Aerial footage accompanying the statement shows the dinghy at sea followed by the rescue operation off the coast of Kusadasi in western Turkey.

According to coast guard statistics, 1,812 migrants have been stopped at sea and 19 smugglers apprehended this year. The number of migrants making the illegal crossing to Greece dropped dramatically since the EU-Turkey migrant deal last March.

Meanwhile, Hungary’s prime minister on Friday defended a new refugee law that was criticized by the United Nations and human rights groups.

The new rules allow for the detention of all asylum-seekers, including unaccompanied minors older than 14, in shipping container camps on the Serbian border.

UNHCR said the detention of asylum-seekers “will have a terrible physical and psychological impact on women, children and men who have already greatly suffered.”

But Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that the law was in line with European Union legal standards.

Orban disputed the idea that asylum-seekers in the border transit zones, which he compared to those at airports, were being locked up against their will.

“No one is under arrest, so anyone who believes they don’t want to wait in the transit zone for the closure of their case can leave toward Serbia,” Orban said in Brussels after an EU summit. “We are not locking anyone up anywhere.”

Orban, an early supporter of President Donald Trump, also said that while no national leaders attending the EU summit objected to the new Hungarian rules, he expected a debate on the matter with the European Commission.

In related development, volunteers served macaroni in marinara sauce to dozens of migrants outside one of Rome’s biggest train stations this week, offering help to travellers largely ignored by institutions on the frontline of Europe’s migrant crisis.

While other European cities including Milan have set up information centres and shelters for migrants, Rome has repeatedly cleared out impromptu camps citing security concerns.

Evictions

“We’ve had 13 evictions,” Andrea Costa, director of the Baobab Experience group of volunteers, said before the migrants settled in for a cold night.

To keep from being cleared out yet again, volunteers cook meals at home and bring them to a bare plaza outside Tiburtina station where tents are set up at 9:00 pm and taken down in the early morning.

There are now 50 migrants staying here, mostly from Africa, as they attempt to reach other European countries. That number is expected to soar this summer with sea arrivals to Italy up 60 percent already this year after setting a record last year.

“With boat arrivals at this pace, in a little while we’ll have hundreds of people to take care of,” Costa said.

Baobab saw between 500 and 1,000 migrants per day last summer, and volunteers have helped almost 63,000 migrants over the past two years with no state funding — only donations.

Meanwhile, that Duindorp has no immigrant community to speak of is part of its charm for Willem van Vliet, who runs the “Willem and Toet” fish bar in the neighborhood’s small parade of shops, serving crispy homemade shrimp croquettes and other Dutch snacks.

When Van Vliet, a friendly bear of a man, leaves the quiet confines of Duindorp, with its neat brick houses, fresh sea air and cackling gulls wheeling overhead, and travels the few miles (kilometers) into the center of The Hague to the city’s more culturally diverse neighborhoods, the cook sees a Netherlands not enriched by immigration, but ravaged by it.

“In the last years, too many people have come to Holland with no education, no work experience, and they are coming here only for money from the government, and enough is enough,” he said. “We lost our country.”

Such views make this corner of the Netherlands one of the epicenters for the disruptive wave of populism sweeping across Europe, gate-crashing its politics, testing its institutions and clouding its future. European populist leaders are exploiting the concerns of people like Van Vliet that immigration, particularly Muslim immigration, threatens to swamp them and their traditions, with the eventual risk of them or their children becoming strangers in their own lands.

Of the Netherlands’ 17 million people, just over one in five now has a foreign background. That number rises to roughly half-and-half in the four largest melting-pot cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague.

The specter of uncontrolled floods of migrants from countries that don’t share Europe’s Christian heritage is a principal selling point for the extremist, far-right brand of politics promoted by firebrand populists Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France.