Senior European officials are embracing the so-far taboo idea of cutting off the migrant trail in Greece, a step that they acknowledge could create a humanitarian crisis in the country, says a report in the Wall Street Journal.
This so-called Plan B, floated until now only by Europe’s populist leaders, is a sign of rapidly waning confidence in other European Union policies to deal with the migration crisis—in particular in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s game plan of relying mainly on Turkey to stem the human tide.
The paper reports that during fractious talks among interior ministers in Brussels on Thursday, several people present said the Greek migration minister made an impassioned plea to EU counterparts not to ringfence Greece as nationalist leaders in Central and Eastern Europe, notably Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Slovakia’s Robert Fico, have long demanded.
But the ringfencing is already happening, as Austria and the Balkan countries over the past week have coordinated a tightening of their borders and started to send back Afghan migrants, resulting in more than 10,000 people being stuck in Greece, says the Wall Street Journal.
Some European officials are now looking to a March 7 summit of EU and Turkish leaders as a deadline for the bloc’s existing migration strategy, particularly the cooperation with Turkey and a NATO sea-monitoring mission, to yield fruit.
If it doesn’t, it will become more imperative, they warn, to stop migrants from traveling farther north and to speed up preparations for assisting Greece with a possible humanitarian emergency.
“Greece wouldn’t be the worst place to have a humanitarian crisis for a few months,” one EU official said.
“Greece wouldn’t be the worst place to have a humanitarian crisis for a few months,” one EU official said, adding that the population there was much more refugee-friendly than those in the Balkans or Eastern Europe.
Sealing off Greece won’t become declared EU policy as it would run counter to its oft-proclaimed values of human rights and equality among its 28 governments.
The European Commission in Brussels, which is preparing contingency plans for what it considers an imminent humanitarian crisis in Greece, has publicly condemned the Austrian decision. But several EU officials said privately that such a crisis in Greece would have a beneficial side effect of deterring Europe-bound economic migrants.
They also argue that bottling up the migrants in Greece would be more manageable than having them stranded in poorer, non-EU neighboring countries in the Balkans, through which they currently travel to get to Germany and other northern European countries.
Four senior EU officials said that Greece, as an EU member state, could receive more bloc funding and other practical help to cope with the stranded migrants than its Balkan neighbors, where ethnic conflicts could flare up anytime. Once the message trickles through that migrants are stuck in Greece, the officials said the hope is that fewer people would attempt to come in the first place.
Source: Wall Street Journal
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