One in, one out. That was the unexpected compromise occupying EU and Turkish leaders in Brussels as they sought a means of managing Europe’s refugee crisis.
Details were still being hammered out on Monday as the talks reached witching hour, and the plan may yet fold. But at one point European top brass were at least considering the orderly resettlement of one Syrian directly from Turkey in exchange for each asylum seeker it readmits after they land on the shores of neighbouring Greece.
For some, it felt like progress. Such a scheme could see an end to the chaos in the Aegean, while ensuring that Europe lived up to its humanitarian obligations. Syrians could still have a future in Europe, while being discouraged from trying to get there haphazardly. Suddenly the hubristic claims made at the start of the day by Donald Tusk, the European council president, seemed to make more sense.
“With that,” he said, with an energy that seemed to belie the severity of the situation, “we will close the western Balkans route.”
Closer inspection suggests Tusk may have spoken too soon. For a start, it is unclear whether a readmission agreement with Turkey will have a legal or moral basis. An Amnesty International spokesman said the deal was “worth exploring” in principle, but added that the concept of returning people to a country that does not respect human rights – in particular, the rights of refugees – was “exceedingly problematic”. It also risks contravening the UN’s refugee convention, which wasone of the seminal achievements of the post-Holocaust era.
In practical terms, a one in, one out proposal also encourages people to make the Aegean crossing – and discourages the Turkish government from stopping them. If the EU will accept only as many refugees who reach Greece and are then returned to Turkey, then both the refugees and the Turks have even more incentive to make sure as many migrants reach Greece in the first place.
And even if such a deal emerges, it may take months before Turkey is able to reaccept the large numbers of asylum seekers who continue to land on the Greek islands. Turkey must in turn arrange readmission agreements with the countries where the non-Syrian asylum seekers come from, and this kind of wrangling is bound to take time.
In the interim, increasing numbers of asylum seekers will continue to reach Greece. If Tusk’s plan to seal the Macedonian border is upheld, then Greece faces a dystopian nightmare. It will become a cage for hundreds of thousands of people, with the local authorities lacking the resources needed to house or process them.
But that’s only if the Balkans can be sealed off from Greece.
“With that”, Tusk says, the Balkans can be shut. Yet past experience suggests it cannot. In the early 90s, following the collapse of the dictatorship in Albania, at least 250,000 Albanians made the perilous crossing over the mountainous border with Greece. Aid workers say a few Syrians, 25 years later, are beginning to try the same route . Some may reinvigorate the Albanian-Italian maritime smuggling route, which was once a major thoroughfare for asylum seekers.
Then there is the Greek-Bulgarian border, which was still impregnated by about30,000 people in 2015, despite the construction of a fence along parts of its length. Finally, some analysts expect a spike in illegal crossings of the Black Sea from northern Turkey towards Ukraine and the eastern Balkans. Where there is a wall, there is usually a way of getting round it.
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