No direction home
The great refugee divide
The kitchen is a rusty metal grill resting on two bricks. The toilet is a patch of waste ground nearby. Just a few hundred metres from Rome’s futuristic-looking Tiburtina railway station, about 300 refugees and migrants live in an encampment of tents and shanty structures made of scavenged timber and plastic. Known as the Baobab Centre, this old car park is one of the main nodes in the underground migration networks that have sprung up across Europe.
Baobab hosts the final trickle of a wave of migration from Africa and the Middle East that swept northwards through Europe in 2015, setting off a political chain reaction whose consequences for European unity are only now fully being realised.
The chaos of 2015 led to deep East-West splits, as Hungary and Poland rejected Brussels-imposed resettlement quotas and responded to calls for EU solidarity with metal fences.
These long-standing ideological fissures have deepened, reawakening the hard right in Germany and Austria and — most seriously of all for Europe — installing a populist anti-immigrant government in Rome.
In three short years, the migration crisis has set off a domino effect that left Angela Merkel, the continent’s main advocate of liberalism, weakened at home, and the voices of eurosceptic populism in the ascendant.
For as long as these were confined to the “usual suspects” — Britain, Hungary and Poland — the EU could to some extent rationalise the dissent. But the transformation of Italy, a founder member, changed all that.
Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League, the anti-immigrant party that rules Italy in coalition, surged to power in a country that has absorbed 600,000 migrants from the other side of the Mediterranean in the past two years. Around 75,000 came through the volunteer-run Baobab Centre.
Somali Cumar Abdirahman Jamac, 30, said. “This is no life. I’m strong, I want to work, but our permits don’t allow it. The only things that are left are to beg or to steal, and I don’t want to steal.”
Within days of taking office, Salvini, Italy’s interior minister, launched an unprecedented crackdown on migration from Libya. He closed Italy’s ports to the NGO vessels that had for years rescued people at sea, and said the days of Italy acting as “Europe’s refugee camp” were at an end. “The party is over, the music has changed,” he said, sending shock waves through Europe.
Resistance to what some call unauthorised migration but others call the right of people to flee war, persecution and poverty, has spawned a plethora of populist movements and exposed deep political and cultural divisions within Europe. Hungary, Slovakia and Poland are bitterly opposed to taking in migrants, while Spain, Italy and Greece say they are unfairly shouldering the burden.
In 2015, Europe’s Western liberal powers took the unprecedented step of using a majority vote to overrule the Eastern states and force them to accept migrant resettlement quotas. The Visegrad states — Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia — never accepted the quotas. Instead, populist leaders used them to whip up antimigrant sentiment and deliver election victories.
By then, the rebellion had spread. Austria elected a coalition including the far-right Freedom Party, Merkel was under assault from her Bavarian sister party and the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party, and Rome fell too.
Critics say Europe’s migration model — if it ever existed — is broken. While thousands drowned, those who made it to Europe remained either jobless or were exploited for their labour.
The EU responded with messy, ad hoc solutions, doing legally and morally questionable deals with Turkey and Libya to stem the flow. To the relief of governments — and the despair of humanitarian organisations — the problem was outsourced.
“The deals with Turkey and Libya can be said to be working,” said Jeff Crisp, a migration expert and a research associate at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre. “But Europe has sold its soul.”
The deals are looking increasingly fragile. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, has in the past threatened to pull out of his country’s à6bn (R104bn) aid deal.
Turkey is home to 3.7-million Syrian refugees and more than 300,000 Iraqi refugees. More could be on the way. “It [Turkey] controls what has been called a ‘weapon of mass migration’,” said Crisp, suggesting the EU would find it hard to say no to demands for billions more euros.
At least with the Turkey deal, Europe has been able to talk to a relatively stable government. Libya, by contrast, is split between rival governments and dozens of competing militias. Last year’s deal between Rome and the UN-recognised government in Tripoli has led to a sharp drop in the number of boats leaving Libya, by bolstering the Libyan coastguard and buying off militias.
But that has raised deep moral and ethical issues for Europe as migrants are returned to detention centres where they risk rape, torture and enslavement. If the money stops, trafficking will return.
Closing one migration route often leads to the opening of another. Blocking passage from Libya to Italy has led to an upsurge in migrants crossing from Morocco to Spain.
Adam Osman, 20, from Ethiopia, was rescued in the Mediterranean by the Spanish coastguard. He landed in Sicily and moved to Belgium, but was caught and sent back to Italy under regulations that confine refugees to the country they arrived in.
Baking in the heat in the Baobab Centre in Rome, he is determined to get back to Belgium.
“I cannot go back to Ethiopia,” he said. “I’m gay. You can be put in prison for 15 years, or the community will try to kill you.”
Some argue the numbers of migrants and refugees who make it to Europe are manageable. Around 61,500 have arrived so far this year — half that of 2017, and a trickle compared with the million who came in 2015.
Andrea Costa, a co-ordinator for volunteers at the Baobab Centre, said the numbers need to be put into perspective. “In the last few years around 2-million migrants have arrived. But the EU has a population of 550-million. It’s nothing. It’s not a crisis, it’s not an emergency and it’s not an invasion … we should see migration as an opportunity, not as a threat.”
Pumping aid and investment into poor countries in Africa and Asia could create jobs and dissuade people from leaving. But it will take generations, and in the meantime war, poverty, persecution and climate change will continue to force people to migrate.
Said Costa: “They may not find a welcome in Europe, but after all they have been through, it’s paradise.” —