Dubai: German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy urged the European Commission on Tuesday to come up with proposals to help Europe cope with its refugee crisis, including defining countries of safe origin.
“There are two things we must say clearly — the European Commission must say, identify what are the safe countries of origin ... and we need to work towards a certain harmonisation in future,” Rajoy said in a joint press conference with Merkel in Berlin.
They spoke as hundreds of refugees, many fleeing war in Syria, arrived in Germany after police in Hungary and Austria allowed them to travel on international rail routes.
More than 500 people reached Munich late on Monday and early Tuesday from Vienna. Another 1,000 are expected to arrive later on Tuesday in the Bavarian capital, Ines Schantz, a local government spokeswoman, said by phone. Staff have been working around the clock to deal with the influx.
“We’re closely monitoring the situation and are taking some special measures,” she said. “We’re in close contact with the city of Munich and aid organisations.” Steps include handing out food to the arrivals and giving medical assistance.
In scenes reminiscent of the flight of eastern Germans before the fall of the Berlin Wall, thousands of refugees crowded on to trains in Budapest, bound for Vienna and Germany, a favoured destination for many. European governments are struggling to formulate a response to the flow from countries including Syria and Afghanistan through the Balkans and the Mediterranean. Hungary and most former communist nations refuse to admit migrants, while Germany and France lead a group of governments emphasising the need for a humanitarian response.
Chancellor Merkel called on Monday for European Union states to take a united stance on the bloc’s refugee crisis and urged Germans to reject xenophobia, after a spate of attacks on refugee homes in Europe’s biggest economy.
“If Europe fails on this question of refugees, its close association with the rights of citizens threatens to fall apart,” Merkel told reporters in Berlin. “Europe as a whole must move on this. The current situation is not satisfactory.”
The EU is struggling to forge a common policy. Hungary on Monday blamed Germany’s decision to not send back Syrian refugees to other EU countries for undermining European immigration rules. Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto reiterated that any system of quotas is “mistaken” and urged the 28-nation bloc to halt migration outside its borders, the state-run MTI news service reported.
While there has been some intolerance by the right-wing element of German society, overall, Merkel and the German government is leading the way in generosity in the largest refugee crisis since the end of the Second World War. Mindful of its shameful conduct during that war, when the Nazis tried to exterminate whole classes of people they deemed undesirable, Germany is taking the opposite tack now by opening its arms to more refugees than any other country in Europe. In the process, it’s becoming what one British commentator called the continent’s unlikely moral beacon as other nations scramble to shut their borders and the European Union dithers on a collective approach to the crisis.
The German government now says it expects a staggering 800,000 asylum requests this year, more than double its forecast at the beginning of 2015. The figure amounts to 1 per of Germany’s entire population; the equivalent in the US would be 3.2 million people. Most of the requests are expected to be approved.
In a major departure from normal EU procedure, Berlin announced that it would allow Syrians streaming into Germany to apply for asylum here rather than ship them back to the country where they first entered Europe. The gesture sparked an outpouring of gratitude on social media from Syrians who tweeted images of Chancellor Angela Merkel and the words “We love you.”
“It will be the largest influx in the country’s postwar history,” Thomas de Maiziere, the German interior minister, said recently. “We can master this challenge. I don’t think this will overwhelm Germany; we can handle this.”
But Germany has also warned that it won’t shoulder the burden alone, and called on its neighbours to step up to the plate.
Germany has pledged to take in 800,000 refugees, Hungary and Bulgaria are building walls to keep migrants out. Last year, Sweden welcomed more asylum seekers — 81,000 — on a per capita basis than even Germany, while Britain resettled just 187 Syrians under a programme to protect those considered the most vulnerable to persecution at home. Slovakia says it will accept 200 Syrians, but only if they’re Christians.
“The European Union cannot and should not be blamed for the [refugee] crisis, but we need to do more at European level to solve it,” EU President Donald Tusk said during a visit to Slovenia on Monday. “This is a very complex problem and requires a complex set of actions. There are no quick fixes. Had there been, they would have been used [a] long time ago.”
Whether the countries can agree on anything — even at the prodding of Germany, Europe’s biggest economy and the most powerful player within the EU — remains to be seen. A refugee quota system suggested recently by some European officials met with immediate and vociferous resistance by nations such as Britain and France, whose governments are worried about losing votes to right-wing anti-immigration parties opposed to any system that gives migrants a path into their countries.
“If we take past experiences as any sort of indication, then the hopes are not necessarily high,” said Astrid Ziebarth, a migration expert in Berlin with the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “Germany is fully behind the quota plans. I don’t know what sticks and carrots they will use” to try to get other countries to accede.
The two big political parties in Germany are in agreement over embracing the hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers expected this year.
Polls show that 60 per cent of Germans support taking in refugees, and there has been an outpouring of assistance across the country from volunteers who have donated food and clothing, set up websites to match refugees with employers and even housed some of the newcomers in their own homes.
Even Germany’s most populist tabloids have joined the chorus, running stories trying to dispel misperceptions about refugees and condemning violence against them.
“We’re helping,” the mass-circulation Bild said in a front-page headline on a story on the altruistic efforts of ordinary Germans.
Attitudes toward foreigners have become more liberal in recent years with the increasing visibility and political activism of the millions of “guest workers” whom Germany invited, from countries such as Turkey, to help build its economy in the 1960s and ‘70s.
“Twenty years ago, nothing of that [voluntarism] could have happened. So Germany is in a learning process,” said Hajo Funke, a political scientist at Free University Berlin.
The backlash against migrants has largely surfaced in parts of the former East Germany, which remain economically behind the western part of the country.
— Compiled from agencies
