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Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey: The Syrian refugees at Europe’s gateway

A letter from the border.

BY REBECCA OMONIRA-OYEKANMI

A Syrian women and her son wait for help to erect their tent at a refugee camp in Bab al-Salam on the Syria-Turkey border. Photograph: Getty Images

A question for the European politicians thrashing out a plan to provide“assistance” to Syria: if a bedraggled Syrian escapes the war, if he escapes the chaos of the refugee camps in Iraq or Jordan or Turkey, if he arrives tired but hopeful on your doorstep, what will happen to him?

Reporting at the European Union’s most porous borders where Greece and Bulgaria merge with Turkey I was struck by the story of a Syrian refugee who risked drowning to avoid the clasp of the EU’s tortuous asylum and immigration system.

After relating the story of how he was deposited on the banks of Turkey by border patrol officers in Greece, I assumed my interview with Farouk, a Syrian refugee, was finished. It was twilight, and the shabby cafe on the edge of the tiny Bulgarian village was empty. I sat at the head of a small wooden table scribbling into the silence as a dozen pair of striking eyes, various shades of green, watched me curiously. They were all Syrian, thrown together by the war. The two teenage boys were awkward, goofy grins even as they imitated the sound of bombs. The old man, stooped and pot-bellied, eyed me suspiciously. Farouk’s friend spat furiously in Arabic, insisting that he keep quiet. They ate from a large dish of sunflower seeds. I swallowed the remains of a thick, bitter Bulgarian coffee, clumps of sugar clung to the tiny shot-sized glass. “So after that you travelled from Turkey to Bulgaria? How did you cross the border?” I asked.

“No, that’s another story.” We ordered more coffee and Farouk told me about his second “push-back”.

Following his encounter with the border police on River Evros in Greece, Farouk went back to his smuggler, who sent him to the Aegean Sea. He was packed into a large wooden boat bound for Italy with more than 100 other people. Very soon they lost control of the boat, and could do little as it spun in the middle of the ocean between Turkey and Greece. “After three or four hours people started to throw up,” he said. “There was a problem inside the boat, the water started to enter. Everyone was scared and thinking about dying. We had suffered too much.”

On this occasion the Greek maritime police tried to rescue them, but the appointed captain of the boat, another Syrian refugee, deliberately thwarted the attempt. “He had a problem with Greece because he had been caught in Greece before,” said Farouk. Rather than find himself back in Greece, the desperate captain threw an anchor into the sea, which caught on something solid, so even as the Greek officers tried to pull the boat to safety it would not budge and looked certain to capsize. Farouk’s rising terror was compounded by the screams of his fellow passengers, among them young children.

It was the Turkish maritime police that eventually saved them. One of their officers jumped aboard the boat, wrested control from the captain, and steered the boat back to Turkey. All the while the refugees cheered, clapped and sang, “Long live Turkey”.

What made the Syrian captain risk the lives of everyone on the boat to avoid Greece?

The fingerprints of any non-European person who has travelled “unofficially” across borders are taken on arrival in any European Union country. If you want to make a claim for asylum, under the EU’s Dublin II regulations you must do so in the first EU country you enter. There is a European database containing the fingerprints of all irregular migrants and refugees (Eurodac) to track their movements. If you try to make a claim in another EU country, your fingerprints will pop up on a central database indicating the country of entry, and you will be deported back there.

Dublin II could only work if each and every EU country operated an efficient, fair and humane asylum and immigration system. Most EU countries appear to have coherent structures in place, but in reality all over Europe there are hundreds of genuine refugees and children detained in prisons or holding centres, sometimes for months, living in extreme poverty, and stuck in limbo for years while their applications are processed.

From the signing of the European Convention on Human Rights more than 60 years ago to the first tentative steps towards a common asylum system in Dublin in 1990, every piece of EU legislation on asylum and immigration policy has reiterated the continent’s commitment to freedom and justice for all. Indeed when the European Council met to discuss a common asylum system at Tampere in 1999, it was said that to deny those from less free and democratic societies would be to betray Europe’s liberal traditions. But the poor implementation of the current system means Europe is edging toward the betrayal of those traditions, and why a terrified Syrian refugee would rather drown than go back to Greece.

Greece is a tragic example of where Europe’s common asylum system is failing. Up to November last year 26,000 refugees and irregular migrants entered Greece illegally, with Syrians the largest group after Afghans. Around 90 per cent of all migrants and refugees entering Europe unofficially enter through Greece, which embodies the worst of the differing national asylum and immigration systems across the European Union’s 27 member states. Greece’s system had already collapsed before its financial problems hit. By 2010 the backlog for asylum claims had crept towards 70,000; Médecins Sans Frontières declared the state of immigration holding centres “medieval”; and a quarter of a million undocumented migrants and refugees haunt the city of Athens alone trapped in various states of destitution, unable to leave legally because of the Dublin II regulations.

Najib tried to escape his Greek nightmare several times. The 25-year-old Afghan made it as far as Germany, where he lived for one year before he was caught and told to leave within 10 days. He went to the Netherlands; they sent him back to Germany, where he spent a month in prison before being deported back to Greece, the country of his first fingerprint. Confined to Athens, Najib contends with daily harassment from the police and Golden Dawn. When a Golden Dawn supporter beat him up, he went to the police, who asked for his ID, and on seeing his temporary residence permit was out of date, jailed him for 10 days.

I don’t know what happened to the captain who panicked, but others on the boat were forced to go back to the Aegean Sea. Many could not afford to find a safer passage. They drowned when their boat sank killing 60 people on 6 September last year.

Shaken, Farouk decided to stick to land for the rest of his journey, and hoping for a warmer European reception elsewhere, he crossed the border into Bulgaria.

March 10, 2013
Turkey to Become Europe’s Strongest Economy by 2050

Baku-APA. Turkey will emerge as the strongest economy in Europe by 2050, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said on Saturday, APA reports quoting RIA Novosti.

Turkey is similar to Sweden, while many economic indicators, such as growth, unemployment and budget deficit are better than in the EU, Gul said in an interview with Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, two day before his official visit to Stockholm.

Gül will visit Sweden at the invitation of King Carl XVI Gustaf in the first ever state visit by a Turkish head of state to the country.

According to Anatolia News Agency, Gul will attend the opening ceremony of the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies. During his two-day visit, he will address the Swedish parliament.

Gül will be accompanied by a delegation of more than 100 businessmen.

via APA – Turkey to Become Europe’s Strongest Economy by 2050 – President.

March 10, 2013
Greece backs Istanbul’s 2020 Olympic bid

ISTANBUL — Greece has offered its support to regional rival Turkey’s bid to host the 2020 Olympics.

The prime ministers of both countries signed an agreement pledging to cooperate on Istanbul’s latest bid for the games.

The accord was signed by Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras following meetings in Istanbul on Sunday and Monday.

In a joint declaration, the leaders said they are committed to “engage in cooperation with regard to the technical and related aspects in the organization of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games.”

The agreement said the two sides will “explore ways of enhancing the benefits of the Olympics for the two countries as well as for the entire Balkan and Black Sea region” if Istanbul wins the bid.

Greece, the home of the ancient Olympics and birthplace of the modern games, last hosted the Olympics in Athens in 2004.

Istanbul, bidding for a fifth time, is competing against Tokyo and Madrid for the 2020 Games. The International Olympic Committee will select the host city in Buenos Aires on Sept. 7.

“The ties between Turkey and Greece have been strengthened today, thanks to the power of the Olympic movement to build bridges,” Istanbul bid leader Hasan Arat said. “The closer cooperation between our countries will be a valuable and lasting legacy of our bid.”

Greece and Turkey mounted a joint bid for soccer’s 2008 European Championship, which was awarded to Austria and Switzerland.

Turkey and Greece nearly went to war three times between 1974 and 1996. Relations between the uneasy NATO allies have improved greatly since the late 1990s, but Athens and Ankara remain at odds over a broad range of issues, including war-divided Cyprus, Aegean Sea boundaries, and illegal immigration.

Copyright 2013 by The Associated Press

via Greece backs Istanbul’s 2020 Olympic bid – ESPN.

March 10, 2013
Greek Maritime Claims Rock Boat With Turkey

By ALKMAN GRANITSAS and STELIOS BOURAS

ATHENS—Greece has renewed its territorial claims over a broad swath of disputed waters in the eastern Mediterranean where the indebted country hopes to find vast oil and gas deposits—a plan that risks sparking a confrontation with Turkey.

Over the past several weeks, senior government officials have made a series of public statements—both at home and abroad—pointing to an almost two-decade-old international treaty granting those rights, one Greece hasn’t asserted until now. Athens also has been building support in other European capitals and stepping up a diplomatic campaign at the United Nations.

This week, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras broached the topic with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a meeting in Istanbul where he called on Turkey to respect Greece’s rights under international law. So far, Ankara, which says those resources belong to Turkey and has warned for almost 20 years that any effort to draw new boundaries could lead to war, has called for further dialogue.

Mr. Erdogan told Greek state television on Monday that “we’re approaching the issue with hope and without prejudices as we continue to work on territorial waters and Aegean-related matters. So long as the sides approach this matter with goodwill, there’s no reason not to get results.”

For Greece, the stakes are enormous. An estimated €100 billion ($130 billion) of undersea hydrocarbon reserves—if proven—could ease the country’s crippling debt burden and make Greece a significant energy supplier for Europe, which wants to reduce its dependence on Russia. Mounting evidence of those reserves, along with recent moves by Cyprus to assert its own claims, have raised the stakes even further.

Those reserves “will mean, clearly, wealth for Greece, wealth for Europe, a significant improvement in Europe’s energy security and a significant enhancement in Greece’s geopolitical role,” Mr. Samaras said in a recent speech to a business conference.

For now, Greece is proceeding cautiously to avoid confrontation and is using U.N. procedures to gradually build its case. Athens’s end goal is clear: Greece hopes to gain international recognition for the exclusive use of a 200-nautical-mile zone around the country, basing its claims on the fact that it is a signatory to the U.N.’s Law of the Sea treaty and Turkey isn’t.

To date, 165 nations and territories—including the European Union—have ratified the treaty. The U.S., which helped negotiate the pact in the 1980s, hasn’t ratified it but generally recognizes its provisions. Last summer, the Obama administration attempted to pass the treaty through the Senate, but fell one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed.

Athens “is eager to assert its rights, but we don’t want to do anything that creates turbulence in the region,” said a senior Greek government official. “For now, we are proceeding slowly” through legal channels.

One such step came in late January, when Greece’s foreign minister lodged a formal complaint at the U.N. after Turkey said in April that it would issue exploration licenses in a disputed area south of the Greek island of Rhodes.

Turkey has said Greece’s counterclaims “have no basis in international law” and said it would take reciprocal steps at the U.N.

In an interview with a Turkish newspaper this week, Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said energy issues shouldn’t be a source for tension in bilateral relations and said Ankara had no imminent plans to issue those licenses. “Don’t we know any exploration creates a controversy? Of course we know,” he told the Hurriyet newspaper.

The next move for Greece, government officials said, would likely be another submission to the U.N. formally delineating Greece’s nautical coordinates. That would be a prelude to declaring an exclusive economic zone under the provisions of the sea treaty.

Under terms of the 1994 treaty, Greece is entitled to extend its territorial rights to as many as 12 nautical miles from shore—double the six it now claims—and an exclusive economic zone of as many as 200 miles. Athens has refrained from doing so. In 1995, the year Greece ratified the treaty, Turkey’s parliament declared that any unilateral move to assert such claims would constitute a cause for war.

At issue is the complex geography in the Aegean Sea that separates Greece from Turkey. After the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, Greece was given sovereignty over most of the islands that dot the Aegean and form a continuous archipelago between mainland Greece and Turkey.

Under the present limit, Greece claims more than 40% of the Aegean as its own, compared with less than 10% for Turkey. By widening the limit to 12 miles, more than 70% of the Aegean and its seabed would be in Greek territory. A 200-mile exclusive economic zone would mean Greek claims also stretched far into the Mediterranean—enveloping Turkey—and reaching as far as Cyprus in the southeast.

Geologists believe there are oil and gas deposits in the north Aegean, where drilling first began on a small scale in the early 1980s. More recently, a bonanza gas find off Israel’s coast in 2010, a second find off Cyprus since then, and various surveys have indicated that oil and gas is to be found in the eastern Mediterranean.

Encouraged, Greece began hunting for hydrocarbons late last year in less-contentious areas west and south of the country. The government, which is struggling under a €300 billion debt burden, aims to auction off exploration licenses for those areas toward the end of this year.

In February, French President François Hollande, during a visit to Athens, appeared to back Greece’s position by referring to the country’s legal rights under the Law of the Sea treaty.

“The presence of gas deposits that can, first, be found, and then subsequently exploited, represents an opportunity for Greece and for Europe; and I believe that here, international law, the Law of the Sea, will prevail,” he said.

—Emre Peker in Istanbul contributed to this article.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323978104578332352776971978

March 9, 2013
Why Turkey is giving up on the European Union

And it’s no longer wedded to following America’s lead, explains Pitt professor RONALD H. LINDEN

By Ronald H. Linden

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Turkey’s formal association with what is now the European Union, and it has been more than 25 years since Ankara formally applied to join. Since that first approach, 21 other countries have become members, including fellow NATO states, such as Greece, and the former communist countries of Europe, including some that were once republics of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Turkey waits.

The formation of a customs union with the EU in 1996, Turkey’s designation as a “candidate member” in 1999 and the beginning of negotiations in 2005 indicated that membership would come, eventually. But “eventually” turned into “not soon” and, perhaps, “not ever.”

Turkey’s prime minister, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, like a spurned suitor, has declared that “the EU is not a must for Turkey. It is not the apocalypse if they do not let us in the EU.”

With Turkey’s robust economic growth compared to Europe’s anemia and its young labor force compared to Europe’s aging population, he is not wrong. Mr. Erdogan went on to suggest that Turkey should seriously consider joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a loose grouping of Central Asian states backed by Russia and China. Originally set up to try to limit the influence of separatist or religious threats, this group now aims mostly to challenge the influence of the West.

While sentiments born of frustration — “I’ve been thrown out of better bars than this” — might be written off as the product of an impulsive and occasionally emotional leader, they do echo public views in Turkey. Where once three-quarters of Turks supported joining the EU, the latest polls show that two-thirds now feel Turkey should abandon the effort, according to EDAM, a leading Turkish think tank.

EU officials have raised entirely legitimate concerns about Turkey’s readiness for membership, which include issues of minority rights, freedom of expression and the continued non-recognition of (not to mention a Turkish military presence in) an EU member state, Cyprus. Still, many Turks, including the prime minister, suspect that the holdup has more to do with Turkey’s 99 percent Muslim population.

And they take it personally. It rankles Turkey’s extraordinarily successful businessmen, for example, that citizens of virtually all the states of the former Yugoslavia — whether candidate members or not — can now travel to Europe visa-free while they must wrestle with forms and delays to enter the border-free area.

The Turks are not waiting around for a warmer welcome. Those same business travelers can — and do — go to Russia without visas. Russia has become Turkey’s largest trading partner, surpassing the EU, and hosts more than $17 billion in Turkish investment projects. Russia is also Turkey’s major energy supplier, sends 3.5 million tourists a year to Turkey and will soon begin construction on Turkey’s first nuclear power plant. In 2010 the two countries signed a “strategic partnership,” which has produced cooperation at the Cabinet level, including between foreign ministries.

With the second-largest military in NATO, Turkey is hardly a perfect alliance partner for Russia. The two countries hold quite different views on several pressing issues, most immediately how to handle the impending collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. Turkey also has irritated Moscow by agreeing to host a sophisticated NATO radar system designed to counter a possible Iranian nuclear arsenal and, more recently, Patriot missiles to protect the border with Syria. Last fall, Turkey forced a passenger jet headed to Syria from Russia to land in Ankara so it could be inspected for possible weapons smuggling

Such episodes have not prevented Turkey and Russia from making clear their shared hostility to military action against Iran or a more muscular NATO presence in the Black Sea. Ankara has repeatedly blocked NATO efforts to expand Operation Active Endeavor, an anti-terrorism effort in the eastern Mediterranean, into its Black Sea neighborhood. Turkey, like Russia, sees this region as its own responsibility and prefers to police it with its own forces — with Russian participation.

In 2010 Turkey agreed to let Russia build its South Stream pipeline through Turkish waters — offering a direct route from Russia to Europe — a project in direct competition with Europe’s own Nabucco pipeline. With supplies uncertain and gas prices falling, it is not clear if both pipelines are economically viable, but true to its own plan to become an “energy hub,” Turkey signed on to both South Stream and Nabucco.

As these moves indicate, the Turkish government is pursuing policies in accordance with its own strategic vision, which has been outlined explicitly by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, often described as “the Turkish Henry Kissinger.” Under his guidance and with the strong backing of the ruling Law and Justice Party, Turkey has reversed years of relative isolation from its neighbors and strict adherence to policies preferred by Washington to undertake active, even aggressive diplomacy.

Turkey now has full embassies in nearly 100 countries and representation in more than 200. State-owned Turkish Airlines flies to more countries from a single airport (Istanbul) than either Lufthansa or Air France. In Africa and the Balkans, Turkish companies are building roads and airports and, in former Ottoman areas, facilitating cooperation, such as between Bosnia and Serbia, refurbishing mosques and supporting Turkish communities.

Like ambitious powers before them, the Turks have discovered — most recently in the Middle East — that their involvement is not always effective or welcome. Former close allies, like Bashar Assad in Syria, do not take kindly to Turkey’s willingness to host rebel groups — a posture for Turkey that is especially tricky considering that it occasionally bombs the territory of its neighbors, as in Iraq, where anti-Turkish groups operate.

As it searches for a new role in the post-post-Cold War world, Turkey is learning what another influential international power learned in its day. “Britain,” Lord Palmerston said in 1848, “had no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies, only interests that were eternal and perpetual.”

In a rapidly changing, post-ideological age, the Turks are applying that lesson. Their once and future friends in the West might want to take notice.

Ronald H. Linden is professor of political science and director of the European Union Center of Excellence/European Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh (linden@ pitt.edu).
First Published March 3, 2013 12:00 am

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/why-turkey-is-giving-up-on-the-european-union-677683/#ixzz2Mz1ikOym

March 8, 2013
Dual citizenship in Germany

The Economist March 2nd 2013

Jus sanguinis revisited

BERLIN

How not to treat people with more than one passport

THE case of a woman from Hanau, in Hesse, shows why Kenan Kolat, leader of Germany’s Turks, calls the German citizenship law “absurdity cubed.” Born in Germany to Turkish parents, she was a dual citizen. According to the law, she had to relinquish one passport between her 18th and 23rd birthday. She chose to forgo the Turkish one. But the Turkish bureaucracy was slow, her birthday came and her German citizenship went instead.

International law has never fully embraced multiple citizenship. Many countries frown on it, though others take a more relaxed attitude. Germany, however, manages to make it especially complicated for citizens of foreign origin. Its traditional approach goes back to a law passed before the first world war. Based on jus sanguinis (“right of blood”), it gave citizenship to anybody of German descent, but not to foreigners born in Germany, as countries such as America and France that practise jus soli (“right of soil”) do. Then, in 1999, a centre-left government added the two notions together. This would have let a woman born in Germany to Turkish parents be simultaneously German and Turkish. But that law coincided with a regional election in Hesse, where the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (cdu) seized on the issue to mobilise its conservative base in opposition. The cdu won the state and took control of the upper. house, where it blocked the new law.

A compromise was reached in 2000. Children born in Germany to foreign parents after 1990 can get two passports but have to choose one citizenship before they are 23. This year, the first cohort of such children, about 3,300, reach that age. From 2018 the number will reach 40,000 a year or more. There are about half a million such cases all told, more than two-thirds of them of Turkish descent.

Yet not all young dual citizens must choose. A child born to a German parent in America, say, retains both passports for life. So does a child born to a Greek or Spanish parent in Germany, because dual citizenship is allowed for members of the European Union and Switzerland. This seems unfair to the Turks. This week Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, said as much to Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, during her visit to Turkey. (Mrs Merkel also explained that, though happy for Turkey’s eu accession talks to continue, she retained her “scepticism” about its ever becoming a member.)

Besides being unjust and creating two classes of citizens, the law is a nightmare to administer, says Ulrich Kober at Bertelsmann Stiftung, a think-tank. Because countries like Iran do not let citizens renounce their citizenship and others make it costly or difficult, German law in theory grants exceptions. But the rules are not clear, reckons Kay Hailbronner, a lawyer. To make the decisions even more arbitrary, the 16 German states process the paperwork, and each uses different forms.

Backing Turkey and Germany together

What better way to irritate those citizens whom Germany’s politicians say they want to integrate? Mr Kober thinks Germany should simply allow dual citizenship. So do the centre-left parties hoping to replace Mrs Merkel’s government in September’s election, as well as the cdu’s coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party. It may yet happen. •

March 7, 2013