Migrants seek to move on from Serbia ‘limbo’
Europe readies riposte to Trump
BELGRADE, Jan 21, (RTRS): After traversing several countries en route to the rich West, Najibullah, a former policeman from the Afghan town of Kholm, his pregnant wife and four children, got stuck in Serbia.
Now they spend days of relative normalcy in a drab refugee camp in Krnjaca, an industrial area on the outskirts of the Serbian capital Belgrade, hoping they will ultimately move to Germany where 30-year-old Najibullah has relatives.
If they get their wish, they would join more than a million other migrants who have arrived in Germany since 2015, when Chancellor Angela Merkel offered sanctuary to those fleeing war and poverty. Although lauded in some quarters, Merkel’s actions meant she paid a political price in German elections in 2017, where the far right surged on anti-migrant sentiment. In that light, the challenges of migration remains high on the agenda of western states, not least those gathering at Davos this month, under the banner of “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World”.
The path many took to Germany, the so-called ‘Balkan route’, was shut in 2016 when Turkey agreed to stem the flow of people in return for EU aid and a promise of visa-free travel for its own citizens.
But migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia continued to arrive in Serbia, mainly from Turkey, via neighbouring Bulgaria, attempting to enter the EU through bloc members Hungary and Croatia.
Merkel
Scattered
According to officials there are as many as 4,500 migrants in government-operated camps in Serbia. Rights activists say that hundreds of others are scattered in the capital Belgrade and towns along Croatian and Hungarian borders. In Krnjaca, Najibullah’s eightyear-old daughter Sonya, started attending school and soon excelled in Serbian, enough to serve as an interpreter with her father in an interview on Tuesday.
“It is not bad here, I am going to school, I have good friends there, they invite me to parties ... my father wants to go to Germany, he has friends, sister there,” Sonya said pointing to Najibullah.
Sonya is one of 95 children in the Krnjaca camp that are currently attending 11 elementary schools in Belgrade. Their numbers vary as while some families leave camps to enter Hungary and proceed further to Europe, others arrive.
Meanwhile, European leaders will be out in force at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week to defend multilateralism before US President Donald Trump arrives to deliver his “America First” message.
Politicians, business chiefs, bankers and celebrities will meet in the Swiss Alps under the banner “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World” for the fourday gathering against an unsettling global backdrop.
A decade after the bankruptcy of US investment bank Lehman Brothers helped trigger a global financial crisis, economic growth has returned and stock markets are hitting record highs.
Yet there is a nagging fear among many in Davos that the brighter economic outlook could turn out to be little more than a mirage if the daunting array of geopolitical threats — from protectionism and climate change to cyber attacks and outright war — gather pace in 2018.
“Not all geopolitical threats are threats to financial markets,” Axel Weber, the chairman of Swiss bank UBS and former president of the German Bundesbank told Reuters. “But I agree that there may be a disconnect, which has been going on for some time already and may well continue for some time.”
The Global Risks Report published by the WEF last week showed that many see a heightened risk of political and economic confrontations between major powers this year. Trump, the first sitting US president to attend the forum since Bill Clinton in 2000, is a source of much of this anxiety after a volatile first year in office in which he has turned American foreign policy on its head.