There will never be another year like 2016, when the EU, led by Germany, let more than a million refugees in out of pity over their plight
Turkey has opened the floodgates and soon Europe will be drowning in immigrants. “Hundreds of thousands have crossed and soon it will reach millions,” Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently claimed on television. And it must be true because you can see it live on your medium of choice.
Look at a clip of Greek frontier guards firing tear gas canisters into angry, stone-throwing crowds of refugees, who are right up against the border fence. Look at a shot of other Greek paramilitary troops shooting into the water right beside a rubber raft filled with refugees. Millions and millions of refugees. The migrant Armageddon is at hand.
It’s ugly but it’s not really what it seems. Erdogan says he has opened Turkey’s border with the West because the country has already taken in 3.6 million refugees, mostly from Syria. There’s just no room for the several million more now trying to get out of Idlib, the last Syrian province held by jihadi rebels. So he’s sending them West. That is not true. There are no more Syrian refugees coming into Turkey from Idlib because Turkey has closed the border against them. Indeed, most of the people now trying to storm the borders of Greece and Bulgaria — 13,000 at last count, not “hundreds of thousands” as Erdogan claims — are not Syrians at all. They are Afghans, Eritreans, Iraqis, West Africans, some genuine refugees and others “economic migrants”, who are already living safely in Turkey but would rather be in some country in the European Union (EU).
They didn’t walk 800 km from Idlib, either. The Turkish Government is bussing them to Greece’s land and sea frontiers from wherever they have been living in Turkey, telling them (falsely) that the Europeans will let them in. Erdogan just wants to put pressure on the EU.
Pressure to do what? Good question. He may not know himself but he is desperate because his bluff in Syria has been called and he was facing a potential military confrontation with Russia till he reached an agreement with the Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 5 for an immediate cease-fire in northwestern Syria. For now he has averted a crisis on that front as escalating fighting had threatened to put forces from the two countries into a direct military conflict. However, it is not clear how putting the Europeans into play will change that, but he is definitely at the “do something! anything!” stage of desperation.
Erdogan’s problem is that for the last three months, the Syrian Army has been taking Idlib province back from Turkey’s Syrian jihadi allies, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly an al-Qaeda franchise), in a slow, grinding offensive. Turkey has troops in Idlib and has gradually been committing them to combat to help the jihadis but still, the Syrian advance continues. Erdogan threatened to launch a full-scale war. However, the Syrian regime hasn't even blinked. More than 50 Turkish soldiers have already been killed, so what does he do now? I don’t know and I suspect he doesn’t know either. The whole refugee thing may just be a displacement activity, not part of a cunning plan. We’ll probably know more soon enough now that Turkey and Russia have come to an understanding, weakening Syria in the process. But in the meantime, look at those clips again because that’s what the future, or at least a big part of it, will look like.
This is the first time that we have documented evidence of European border guards shooting at, or at least very near, illegal migrants. Yes, there are special circumstances, the migrants are being sent as part of a political ploy — but it will not be the last time. The Syrian civil war is stumbling to an end but migrants from all the other countries south and east from Europe will keep coming and their numbers will swell.
All of the Middle East and West Africa is going to be hit early and very hard by global warming, which will cause a steady fall in food production. The rule of thumb is that you lose 10 per cent of food production for every rise in average temperature of 1°C.
To make matters worse, these regions also have the highest population growth rates in the world: Doubling times for most countries are 25 years or less. Now it’s poverty and war that drives the migrants; in the future it will be actual hunger (and war, of course). They will head for Europe in ever-increasing numbers because there’s no other safe haven in reach. But it will not remain a safe haven. There will never be another year like 2016, when the EU, led by Germany, let more than a million refugees in out of sheer pity for their plight.
In fact, the political backlash to that act of generosity has already driven politics sharply to the right all over the continent. Europe’s external borders are already closing down. However, in years to come, the dirty little secret that everybody refuses to acknowledge will finally become public knowledge. It’s quite easy to shut borders, really. You just have to be willing to kill people who try to cross them without permission.
(Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy and Work)
