Tag Archives: Greece

UNHCR condemns tear gas against refugees

A migrant catches his breath after inhaling teargas thrown by Macedonian police on a crowd of more than 500 refugees and migrants protesting next to a border fence at a makeshift camp at the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Idomeni

GENEVA (Reuters) – The United Nations’ refugee agency UNHCR condemned on Monday the use of tear gas by Macedonian police against refugees on the border with Greece and said such action damaged Europe’s image.

Dozens of migrants and refugees were wounded on Sunday when Macedonian police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at crowds on the Greek side of the border, aid workers said, an act Athens called “dangerous and deplorable”.

“Time and again in recent months we have seen tension unfolding at various European borders, between security forces on the one hand and people fleeing war and in need of help on the other,” UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said in a statement.

“People get hurt and property is damaged. Harm is done to perceptions of refugees and to Europe’s image alike. Everyone loses.”

About 11,000 migrants and refugees have been stranded at the Greek border outpost of Idomeni since February after a cascade of border shutdowns across the Balkans closed off their route to central and western Europe. They have been sleeping for many weeks in the open in dismal conditions.

Edwards said it was urgent to move people voluntarily to sites being put in place by the Greek government, a process that UNHCR was willing to help with.

A wider solution, a plan to relocate 160,000 people across Europe, was agreed many months ago but has still not been put into action, he said.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Turkey’s Erdogan “No Migrant Deal If EU Doesn’t Fulfill Pledges”

Presidential Palace handout photo shows Turkish President Erdogan addresses visiting police officers in Ankara

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkey will not go through with an agreement to take back Syrian migrants from Europe if the European Union does not fulfill its pledges, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday.

Under the deal, Ankara will take back all migrants and refugees who cross the Aegean Sea to enter Greece illegally. In return, Europe will take in thousands of Syrian refugees directly from Turkey and reward it with money, visa-free travel and progress in its EU membership negotiations.

(Reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley; Writing by David Dolan; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Migrants Sent from Greece to Turkey

Migrants are escorted by Turkish police officers as they arrive in the Turkish coastal town of Dikili, Turkey,

By Dasha Afanasieva and Karolina Tagaris

DIKILI, Turkey/LESBOS, Greece (Reuters) – The first migrants deported from Greek islands under a disputed EU-Turkey deal were shipped back to Turkey on Monday in a drive to shut down the main route used by more than a million people fleeing war and poverty to reach Europe in the last year.

Under a pact criticized by refugee agencies and human rights campaigners, Ankara will take back all migrants and refugees who cross the Aegean Sea to enter Greece illegally, including Syrians.

In return, the European Union will take in thousands of Syrian refugees directly from Turkey and reward it with more money, early visa-free travel and progress in its EU membership negotiations.

Two Turkish-flagged passenger boats carrying 136 mostly Pakistani migrants arrived from the island of Lesbos in the Turkish town of Dikili, accompanied by two Turkish coast guard vessels with a police helicopter buzzing overhead.

A third ship carrying 66 people, mainly Afghans, arrived there later from the island of Chios.

The EU-Turkey deal aims to discourage migrants from perilous crossings, often in small boats and dinghies, and to break the business model of human smugglers who have fueled Europe’s biggest influx since World War Two.

EU authorities said none of those deported on Monday had requested asylum in Greece and all had left voluntarily. They included two Syrians who had asked to return to Turkey.

“We didn’t see this morning unrest or riots. The operation was organized properly with the sufficient Frontex presence and with enough, very well organized security guarantees,” European Commission spokesman Margaritas Schinas told a news briefing in Brussels. He was referring to the EU border management agency Frontex, which has been reinforced by national police and migration experts.

Schinas said the first returns were legal, although Turkey has not yet made changes to its regulations that the EU said were necessary at the time of the deal.

The EU said at the time of the deal that Ankara would need to change asylum laws to give international protection to Syrians who enter from countries other than Syria, and to non-Syrian asylum seekers returned from Greece.

MIGRANTS KEEP COMING

A few hours after the first boat of returnees set sail from Lesbos, Greek coast guard vessels rescued at least two dinghies carrying more than 50 migrants and refugees, including children and a woman in a wheelchair, trying to reach the island.

Altogether, more people arrived on the Greek islands in the 24 hours to Monday morning than were transported to Turkey, Greek authorities said, putting total arrivals at 339, including 173 on Lesbos and 73 on Chios.

“We are just going to try our chance. It is for our destiny. We are dead anyway,” said Firaz, 31, a Syrian Kurd from the province of Hasakah who was traveling with his cousin.

Asked if he was aware that the Greeks were sending people back, he said: “I heard maybe Iranians, Afghans. I didn’t hear they were sending back Syrians to Turkey… At least I did what I could. I’m alive. That’s it.”

Two groups of mainly Pakistani men, totaling around 100 people, were also intercepted by the Turkish coast guard on Monday near Dikili, a coast guard official said.

Under the pact, the EU will resettle thousands of legal Syrian refugees directly from Turkey – one for each Syrian returned from the Greek islands.

German police said the first 32 Syrian refugees arrived in Hanover on two flights from Istanbul on Monday under the deal. The European Commission said more resettlement flights were due to Finland on Monday and the Netherlands on Tuesday.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said on Sunday that the “high point of the migrant crisis is behind us”, but many migration experts say the pressure to reach Europe will continue, possibly via other routes.

PROTESTS

A few dozen police and immigration officials waited outside a small white tent on the quayside at Dikili as the returned migrants disembarked one by one, before being photographed and having their fingerprints taken behind security screening.

The returnees from Lesbos were mostly from Pakistan and some from Bangladesh and had not applied for asylum, said Ewa Moncure, a spokeswoman for EU border agency Frontex.

Turkish EU Affairs Minister Volkan Bozkir said any Syrians returned from Greece would be sent to the southern city of Osmaniye, around 40 km (25 miles) from the Syrian border.

For non-Syrians, Turkey would apply to their home countries and send them back systematically, Bozkir said in an interview with Turkish broadcaster Haberturk.

Rights groups and some European politicians have challenged the legality of the deal, questioning whether Turkey has sufficient safeguards in place to defend refugees’ rights and whether it can be considered safe for them.

Amnesty International’s deputy director for Europe, Gauri van Gulik, visiting Lesbos to monitor the returns procedure, told Reuters: “It’s almost based on the assumption Turkey is a safe country for refugees, and we’ve documented very clearly that it is not right now.”

Amnesty last week accused the Turkish army of having turned back thousands of Syrians trying to flee their country in the last few months, sometimes using force.

“The most important thing we lose sight of is that these are individuals who are fleeing horrific scenes of war and we’re playing some kind of ping pong with them,” van Gulik said.

EU spokesman Schinas said Ankara had provided “assurances” and an amendment to its temporary protection regulation was in the works for Syrians returning from abroad. EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos was in Turkey on Monday to discuss outstanding issues, including rights of non-Syrians.

Turkey insists it is meeting its international obligations. The EU was determined to get the program under way on schedule despite such doubts because of strong political pressure in northern Europe to deter migrants from attempting the journey.

There were small protests as the returns got underway.

On Lesbos, a small group of protesters chanted “Shame on you!” when the migrant boats set sail as the sun rose over the Aegean. Volunteer rescuers aboard a nearby boat hoisted a banner that read: “Ferries for safe passage, not for deportation.”

The governor of Turkey’s Izmir province, Mustafa Toprak, told reporters that the returned migrants would be taken to Kirklareli near the Bulgarian border, well away from the coast.

“We will not build camps on the Aegean,” he said adding that those who wanted to stay in Turkey could apply to do so.

Each migrant was accompanied on Lesbos by a plainclothes Frontex officer. They had been transported in a nighttime operation from the island’s holding center to the port. Greek riot police squads also boarded the boats.

At the Moria holding center on Lesbos, where more than 2,600 are being held, a group of men gathered behind the barbed wire fence and shouted to journalists, who are barred from the camp.

One, who said he was from Iran, shouted: “Women just cry. All our children and women are sick (with the) flu epidemic.”

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and rights groups have said the deal between the European Union and Turkey lacks legal safeguards.

More than 3,300 migrants and refugees are on Lesbos. About 2,600 people are held at the Moria center, a sprawling complex of prefabricated containers, 600 more than its stated capacity. Of those, 2,000 have made asylum claims, UNHCR said.

(Additional reporting by Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels, Thorsten Severin and Michael Nienaber in Berlin and Nick Tattersall in Istanbul; writing by Paul Taylor; editing by Peter Graff)

How Europe Built A Fence

File photo of a migrant who is waiting to cross the Greek-Macedonian sitting in his tent by the border fence at a makeshift camp, near the village of Idomeni

By Gabriela Baczynska and Sara Ledwith

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – In early March, Europe’s migration chief Dimitris Avramopoulos squelched through a muddy refugee camp on Greece’s border with Macedonia and peered through the barbed-wire topped fence that stands between tens of thousands of migrants in Greece and richer countries that lie to the north.

“By building fences, by deploying barbed wire,” he said, “it is not a solution.”

But Avramopoulos has not always preached that message – and his changing views capture the tangle Europe has got itself into as more than a million migrants and refugees have floated in on Greek waters since the start of 2015.

In 2012, when he was Greek minister of defense, Greece built a fence and electronic surveillance system along its border with Turkey. The cement and barbed-wire barrier and nearly 2,000 extra guards were designed to stop a sharp rise in illegal immigrants.

The 62-year-old former diplomat was not directly involved in the project. But in 2013 he defended it, telling a news conference the wall had borne fruit. “The entry of illegal immigrants in Greece by this side has almost been eliminated,” he said.

The official European response to Europe’s migrant crisis – championed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel last August – is for member states to pull together and provide shelter for people, especially Syrians, fleeing war or persecution. But in reality, most members have failed to take their quotas of refugees and nearly a dozen have built barricades to try to keep both migrants and refugees out. The bloc is now trying to implement a deal which would see Turkey take back new arrivals.

The European Union was founded in the ashes of World War Two, in part on a principle of freedom of movement among member states. But since the fall of the Berlin Wall, European countries have built or started 1,200 km (750 miles) of anti-immigrant fencing at a cost of at least 500 million euros ($570 million), a Reuters analysis of public data shows. That distance is almost 40 percent of the length of America’s border with Mexico.

Many of these walls separate EU nations from states outside the bloc, but some are between EU states, including members of Europe’s passport-free zone. Most of the building was started in 2015.

“Wherever there have been large numbers of migrants or refugees trying to enter the EU, this trend has been followed up by a fence,” said Irem Arf, a researcher on European Migration at rights group Amnesty International.

For governments, fences seem like a simple solution. Building them is perfectly legal and countries have the right to control who enters their territory. Each new fence in Europe has sharply curbed the numbers of irregular immigrants on the route they blocked.

For at least one company, fences work. The firm which operates a tunnel between France and Britain says that since a major security upgrade around its French terminal last October, migrants have ceased to cause trouble.

“There have been no disruptions to services since mid October 2015, so we can say that the combination of the fence and the additional police presence has been highly effective,” Eurotunnel spokesman John Keefe said.

But in the short term at least, they have not stopped people trying to come. Instead, they have diverted them, often to longer, more dangerous routes. And rights groups say some fences deny asylum-seekers the chance to seek shelter, even though European law states that everyone has the right to a fair and efficient asylum procedure.

Forced to find another way, migrants and refugees often turn to people-smugglers.

CROWD CONTROL

Greece’s border fence was one of the first, and Avramopoulos still defends it. He says Greece built it to divert people towards official crossings where they could apply for asylum.

Much of Greece’s frontier with Turkey is delineated by a fast-flowing river, the Evros. But there is a 12 km stretch where people used to sneak through on land after making the river crossing in Turkey.

“The Evros river is a very dangerous river,” Avramopoulos told Reuters in his upper floor office suite in February. “Hundreds of people had lost their lives there.”

At least 19 people drowned in the Evros in 2010, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Neither the Greek authorities nor Europe’s border agency Frontex could provide more data.

In practice, rights groups say Greece’s barrier – and others including one built by Spain in Morocco – effectively turn everyone away, denying vulnerable people a chance to make their case for protection.

This is partly because some new barriers have passport controls like those at an airport. People need travel documents to exit one country and reach the checkpoint of the EU country where they want to seek asylum. Many refugees don’t have any papers, so they are automatically blocked.

With barriers come security guards, cameras and surveillance equipment, which all make it harder for people to make their asylum cases. Rights groups have documented many reports of border officials beating, abusing, or robbing migrants and refugees before dumping them back where they came from. This approach, known as push-back, has become an intrinsic feature of Europe’s external borders, according to Amnesty International.

As a solution, some migrants and refugees buy fake papers. Others stow away in vehicles. Or they turn to people-smugglers.

Greece’s fence had a knock-on effect that continues to ripple through Europe as more countries wall themselves off. More migrants moving through Turkey began to enter Europe across the Bulgarian border, or by sailing to Greece in inflatable dinghies. In the eastern Mediterranean, the International Organization for Migration has recorded more than 1,100 migrant deaths since the start of last year.

CULTURAL PURITY

The EU refuses to fund fences, saying they don’t work. As European Commissioner, Avramopoulos has tried instead to persuade fellow member states to show solidarity by offering homes to 160,000 refugees and migrants, mainly from Greece and Italy. As of March 15, just 937 asylum applicants had been relocated.

For Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the idea of quotas is “bordering on insanity.” Orban opposes a dilution of Europe’s “Christian values” by multicultural immigrants and started building fences along Hungary’s borders with Croatia and Serbia in late 2015.

Since the ethnic cleansing of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, Balkan states have been particularly sensitive to the risks of ethnic and religious conflict. Other countries followed Hungary with fences – even if most said they installed them to control the flow of people, rather than to preserve cultural purity.

When Austria started a barrier on its border with Slovenia in November 2015, it said it was necessary for crowd management. Then Austria capped the numbers of people it would admit, and how many it would allow through to Germany. By March, all these measures seemed to be having the desired effect: The number of migrants entering Germany from Austria had fallen more than sevenfold.

Even so, there were new signs the fences were simply reshaping, rather than closing, the migration routes. The numbers making the perilous crossing from Africa to Italy had increased. Austria said it would add soldiers to defend its border with Italy.

The fence Avramopoulos visited last month underlines the risks of such barriers. Built by Macedonia as part of a pact with states further north, it has sealed around 50,000 people into Greece.

More than 10,000 – a third of them children – are camped in flimsy tents near the fence. Many families have refused to leave the border, waiting instead for it to open, as respiratory infections spread and frustration mounts.

“All our values are in danger today,” Avramopoulos said. “You can see it here.”

(Ledwith reported from London; Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald in Brussels, Renee Maltezou in Athens, Tom Miles in Geneva and Himanshu Ojha in London; Edited by Janet Roberts and Simon Robinson)

UNHCR takes swipe at EU-Turkey migrant deal

GENEVA/LESBOS (Reuters) – The United Nations refugee agency dealt a blow to EU efforts to stem the biggest humanitarian crisis in generations on Tuesday, saying it would no longer assist in the transfer of migrants and refugees arriving in Greece to “detention centers”.

The European Union reached a deal with Turkey just four days ago aimed at halting the flow of migrants across the sea to Greece, but the UNHCR said the deal was being prematurely implemented without the required safeguards in place.

It said migrants were being held against their will at reception facilities in Greece, and it would not transport people there from the beaches. It will continue to provide other services including counseling to refugees, it said.

The accord crafted by EU leaders and Turkey specifically mentions the UNHCR’s involvement, although UN officials in Geneva said they were not consulted on that.

The deal, which took effect on Sunday, is aimed at putting new arrivals in Greece who seek asylum on a fast-track for processing. But it also means those migrants and refugees are kept in detention until their claims are assessed.

“Under the new provisions, these so-called hotspots have now become detention centers,” said the UNHCR’s Melissa Fleming.

“Accordingly, and in line with UNHCR policy of opposing mandatory detention, we have suspended some of our activities at all closed centers on the island.”

Those considered ineligible for asylum are to be sent back to Turkey from April 4. For every Syrian returned, another still in Turkey will be resettled directly in Europe, effectively penalizing those who have in many cases spent their life savings trying to flee conflict.

At least two EU officials said they hoped this shock therapy might work in ebbing the flow of migrants and refugees into Europe. One EU official said “ugly images” of forced detentions and deportations were something the EU would have to accept if it was to regain control of its own borders.

“Ethically we might have doubts. But legally we have no doubts,” another EU official said. Both made the remarks before the UNHCR said it was partially withdrawing its support.

DETENTION CENTERS

Until Sunday, arrivals to Lesbos had been free to leave the Moria migrant camp and head for ferries to the Greek mainland from where they would mostly head north via the Balkans in a bid to reach western Europe, particularly Germany.

Now, they are meant to be held in Moria or one of four other centers set up on the Aegean islands of Samos, Chios, Leros and Kos, pending the outcome of their asylum applications.

As of Sunday, just two buses were available to transport the arrivals to Moria, one belonging to the coast guard and one to the police, a senior port police official said.

Early on Tuesday, 129 refugees and migrants who had been rescued at sea by a coast guard patrol boat and taken to the port waited for some 40 minutes for the buses to arrive.

They sat on the dock shivering, men dressed in thin trousers and jackets and women wrapped up with scarves. Many were barefoot and soaked to their knees.

One, a young man named Zalmai, said he had left Afghanistan with his five-member family.

“(There are) a lot of problems in our country. We’re coming for a better life,” he said, putting on a jumper given to him by volunteers and wrapping a thick grey blanket around his waist.

Using his finger to imitate a knife across his throat, he said: “I’m not going back to Turkey, to Afghanistan. Please, I’ll stay here.”

CHILDREN NEED PROTECTION, UN SAYS

More than 147,000 people, many fleeing conflict in the Middle East and Asia, have arrived in Greece by sea this year, 59 percent of them women and children, according to UNHCR.

On Monday, Turkish monitors arrived on Lesbos to help put the deal into practice. On Tuesday, the Czech Republic offered 10 asylum experts and 30 police officers plus humanitarian aid to Greece, its state secretary for EU affairs said.

Under a timetable agreed with the EU last week, a task force of 4,000 people from asylum case workers and experts to arbitrators, interpreters and security staff should be in place by March 28. Of those, 2,300 should be deployed by other EU states.

A spokeswoman for the U.N. children’s fund UNICEF told a briefing in Geneva on Tuesday the fund was concerned about this new agreement and the implications for children.

“We see no mention of children despite the fact that children make up 40 percent of those currently stranded in Greece,” she said, adding 19,000 children are stranded in Greece and about 10 percent are unaccompanied.

(Additional reporting by Jan Lopatka in Prague and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

Greece asks EU partners for help to make migrant deal work

LESBOS, Greece (Reuters) – Greece asked its European partners on Monday for help implementing a deal with Turkey meant to stem an influx of migrants into Europe, as hundreds more – many unaware of the new rules – streamed from their boats onto Greek islands.

For months the epicenter of Europe’s biggest migrant crisis since World War Two, Greece is struggling to effect the logistics operation needed to process asylum applications from hundreds of migrants still arriving daily along its shoreline.

Turkish officials arrived on the island of Lesbos on Monday to help put the deal into practice. Anyone who arrived after March 20 must be held until their papers are processed and those deemed ineligible are to be sent back to Turkey from April 4.

Late on Monday, a first group of 150 migrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh were transferred – handcuffed and under police escort – from the island’s registration center to a passenger ferry that would take them to the mainland by early morning.

They had arrived on Lesbos on Sunday and would be taken to immigration offices in Athens, a police spokesman said.

Under the EU-Turkey roadmap agreed last Friday, a plan must be made by March 25 and some 4,000 personnel – more than half from other European Union member states – deployed to the islands by next week.

“We must move very swiftly and in a coordinated manner over the next few days to get the best possible result,” Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said after meeting EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos in Athens.

“Assistance in human resources must come quickly.”

Avramopoulos said France, Germany and the Netherlands had already pledged logistics and personnel.

“We are at a crucial turning point … The management of the refugee crisis for Europe as a whole hinges on the progress and success of this agreement,” he said.

However, on Monday, the day after the formal start of an agreement intended to close off the main route through which a million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe last year, authorities said 1,662 people had arrived on Greek islands by 7 a.m. (0500 GMT), twice the official count of the day before.

REFUGEES UNDETERRED

Just after 4:30 a.m. on Monday, one coastguard vessel rescued 54 refugees and migrants from the open sea and brought them to the port, some of the 698 arrivals counted in Lesbos.

They staggered down the ramp, women and children first, one elderly man bundled up in blankets.

“Where are we going?” asked one Syrian woman who was traveling with her husband and daughter.

The group were directed to a coastguard bus that would drive them to the Moria “hot spot”, a center where new arrivals are being registered and their asylum applications processed.

“We are very tired. I want to go to my family in Sweden,” said Ahmet Bayraktar, a 32-year-old unemployed accountant from Aleppo, Syria. “We’ll try, God willing.”

Like others, he was unaware of the new EU-Turkey accord.

“We don’t know about this,” Bayraktar said. “We’re coming directly from Syria. Everybody wants to go to the border. We don’t have the news, we don’t have electricity, we don’t have anything.”

Two hours later, just as the sun rose above the Aegean Sea, the same coastguard vessel pulled another 44 people from the water. One woman cradled a baby just a few months old.

They walked silently to the bus for Moria, a sprawling, gated complex of prefabricated containers and tents.

“IT’S BETTER THAN SYRIA”

Before Friday’s deal, migrants and refugees had been free to wander out of the camp and head to ferries to the Greek mainland, from where they would mostly head north through the Balkans towards wealthier western Europe, especially Germany.

Now, new arrivals are supposed to be held in centers pending the outcome of their asylum applications.

Under the deal, for every Syrian returned to Turkey, another would be resettled from Turkey within the European Union, a process which has already triggered alarm from human rights groups for being discriminatory, a violation of international law and one which could be challenged in court.

Some diplomats believe the accord could unravel within months because neither side looks able to deliver on its commitments, but that the need to get the migration crisis under control is so urgent that it was felt best to clinch a deal now and deal with shortcomings later.

The fate of the nearly 47,000 migrants, stranded in Greece when countries along the Balkan route shut their borders a few weeks ago, remains unclear.

Hundreds of migrants traveling from the islands to the Greek mainland disembarked on Monday at the port of Pireaus near Athens. They appeared free to leave because they had landed in Greece before Sunday, witnesses said.

Some migrants said they would try to reach Idomeni, a northern Greek frontier outpost where some 12,000 refugees and migrants remain stranded, hoping that Macedonia will reopen the border and let them pass through.

“I will try to go to the border with Macedonia within the next 10 days even if it’s closed. Maybe I will have to come back here, maybe not, but anyway it’s better than Syria,” said Hozefa Hasdibo, 23, from Idlib in Syria.

(Additional reporting by Lefteris Karagiannopoulos and Renee Maltezou; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Shaky EU-Turkey migrant deal faces tough reality checks

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – A deal between the European Union and Turkey meant to curb the flow of migrants into Europe in return for financial and political rewards could unravel within months because neither side looks able to deliver on its commitments.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and European Council President Donald Tusk wore relieved smiles on Friday as they sealed a pact for Ankara to take back all migrants and refugees who cross to Greece in exchange for more money, faster visa-free travel for Turks and slightly accelerated EU membership talks.

But for Turkey to halt the flow of migrants to Europe will require a major redeployment of its security apparatus to shut down a lucrative people-smuggling business at a time when President Tayyip Erdogan has more pressing priorities.

With impeccable timing, Turkish authorities announced they had detained 3,000 would-be migrants on Friday, but Greek officials say Ankara has done little to stop the flow since November, when the EU and Turkey made a first deal.

Yet Erdogan is more focused on extending his presidential powers, fighting Kurdish militants and preventing spillover from Syria’s civil war.

For Greece to be able to process and send back those migrants who continue to reach its islands would require a transformation of its threadbare asylum and justice systems with scant resources and uncertain EU assistance. The European Court of Human rights considers Athens’ system so poor that it ruled that sending migrants back there from other European countries was inhumane.

Yet the new arrangements are supposed to start from Sunday, with the first returns set for April 4. One EU diplomat said that was like expecting Greece to turn itself into the Netherlands over a weekend.

For the EU to resettle, as promised, thousands of legal Syrian refugees directly from Turkey – one for each Syrian returned from the Greek islands – will require most member states to take in more refugees than they have been willing to share out so far. In the current climate of anti-immigration populism in many countries, that may be a tall order.

The joint statement did not spell out who would return potentially unwilling migrants from Greece to Turkey, a task that may fall to the EU’s Frontex border agency under the critical gaze of the media and humanitarian groups. Greek officials say they are worried it could turn violent.

Images of Afghans, Iraqis or Syrians being removed against their will could lead to an international outcry.

In a foretaste, rights group Amnesty International posted a harrowing picture of refugees cowering behind barbed wire outside the EU summit center with the slogan “Don’t trade refugees. Stop the deal!”

LOGISTICAL CHALLENGE

Greece already faces a huge logistical challenge with 43,000 migrants bottled up in the economically ravaged country since its northern neighbors shut their borders, and more continuing to arrive daily, albeit at a slower pace.

And all this is before the summer weather and calmer seas that facilitated last year’s mass influx.

For the EU to give Turks visa-free travel by the end of June also requires a leap of faith, since Ankara has so far met fewer than half of the 72 conditions. European officials stress the ball is in Turkey’s court to pass the necessary laws and change its visa regime with other, notably Muslim countries.

The EU managed to sidestep a potential stumbling block over Cyprus by agreeing to limit Turkey’s progress in snail’s pace membership negotiations to one policy area – budget – which Nicosia has not blocked.

That got around a standoff over Ankara’s refusal to open Turkish ports and airports to Cypriot traffic. A late addition to the agreement also reminds Ankara of its commitments to the Turkey-EU customs union under which it should open its ports.

If both sides are lucky, the vexed Cyprus issue may not impinge on the migration deal for months, leaving time for peace talks now under way that may lead to the reunification of the east Mediterranean island after more than 40 years of division.

EU leaders desperate to stop the chaotic migration flow were willing to suspend their disbelief and swallow legal qualms – at least in public – because they had no better alternative.

But they have few illusions.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the deal’s co-architect, said there were bound to be setbacks and big legal challenges but she hoped the deal had “irreversible momentum”.

Tusk, who chaired the summit, said the deal was the best the EU could do for now. “A piece of something is better than a piece of nothing,” he said.

“There are many bits of this deal that clearly don’t add up,” a senior EU official acknowledged. “Much of the details will be left to be worked out at lower level later on.”

The optimistic version, voiced by Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders, is that some “intelligent synchronization” can be found between the Cyprus peace process and Turkey’s migration deal. Critics say that is just EU wishful thinking.

‘NO BETTER PLAN’

Some experts believe Turkish leaders don’t expect the EU to keep its word on visas, refugee resettlement or the membership talks and are planning to turn a predictable failure to domestic political advantage.

“Davutoglu and Erdogan know perfectly well that neither side will deliver,” said Michael Leigh, senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund think-tank and a former director-general of the EU’s enlargement department.

“What Erdogan wants is a constitutional power change … so he will present it at the right moment as a European betrayal and call a vote to get more powers,” Leigh said.

At most, he said, the EU could fulfill the financial part of the bargain if Germany pays the lion’s share of the extra 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) Ankara was promised to support Syrian refugees in Turkey.

Sidelined by Merkel when she drafted the outline deal with Davutoglu last week, French President Francois Hollande made clear he would hold Turkey to meeting EU visa standards in full.

“Visas can only be liberalized if all the conditions are met and I remind you there are 72 of them,” Hollande told reporters. A French diplomat said Turkey had only fulfilled 10 benchmarks fully so far and another 26 were under way.

EU diplomats are skeptical that Ankara will be able to meet all the required benchmarks in time, but such is the urgent need to get the migration crisis under control that they would rather clinch a deal now and deal with shortcomings later.

“It’s difficult but everyone has an interest in trying to make this work and no one has a better plan,” a senior EU diplomat said.

($1 = 0.8872 euros)

(Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Pravin Char)

EU, Turkey seal deal to return migrants, but is it legal?

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union sealed a controversial deal with Turkey on Friday intended to halt illegal migration flows to Europe in return for financial and political rewards for Ankara.

The accord aims to close the main route by which a million migrants and refugees poured across the Aegean Sea to Greece in the last year before marching north to Germany and Sweden.

But deep doubts remain about whether it is legal or workable, a point acknowledged even by German Chancellor Angela Merkel who has been the key driving force behind the agreement.

“I have no illusions that what we agreed today will be accompanied by further setbacks. There are big legal challenges that we must now overcome,” Merkel said after the 28 EU leaders concluded the deal with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

“But I think we’ve reached an agreement that has an irreversible momentum,” Merkel said, adding it showed that the EU was still capable of taking difficult decisions and managing complex crises.

Under the pact, Ankara would take back all migrants and refugees, including Syrians, who cross to Greece illegally across the sea. In return, the EU would take in thousands of Syrian refugees directly from Turkey and reward it with more money, early visa-free travel and faster progress in EU membership talks.

Migrants who arrive in Greece from Sunday will be subject to being sent back once they have been registered and their individual asylum claim processed. The returns are to begin on April 4, as would resettlement of Syrian refugees in Europe.

While many in Brussels hailed the agreement as a game-changer, Amnesty International decried it as a “historic blow to human rights”, saying Europe was turning its back on refugees.

“Guarantees to scrupulously respect international law are incompatible with the touted return to Turkey of all irregular migrants,” the rights advocacy group said, criticizing Ankara’s track-record on human rights.

“Turkey is not a safe country for refugees and migrants, and any return process predicated on it being so will be flawed, illegal and immoral.”

Turkey’s human rights record has drawn mounting criticism amid a crackdown on Kurdish separatists, arrests of critical journalists and the seizure of its best-selling newspaper.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte sought to reverse the narrative, saying the idea was to discourage illegal and perilous voyages across the Aegean and open legal paths to Europe instead.

“There is nothing humanitarian in letting people, families, children, step on boats, being tempted by cynical smugglers, and risk their lives,” he said.

DOABLE?

The EU would also accelerate disbursement of 3 billion euros already pledged in support for refugees in Turkey and provide a further 3 billion by 2018. It would help Greece set up a task force of some 4,000 staff, including judges, interpreters, border guards and others to manage each case individually.

“All new irregular migrants crossing from Turkey into Greek islands as from 20 March 2016 will be returned to Turkey. This will take place in full accordance with EU and international law, excluding any kind of collective expulsion,” the deal said.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said it would be a Herculean task for Greece to handle the returns and the chairman of the EU leaders’ summits, European Council President Donald Tusk, said the deal was not a silver bullet.

“Reality is more complex,” Tusk said, noting a broader EU strategy to control migration that included keeping the land route from Greece to Germany closed to irregular migrants.

Just as the deal was clinched, Turkey said it had intercepted hundreds of migrants trying to reach the Greek island of Lesbos.

“It’s a historic day today because we reached a very important agreement between Turkey and the EU,” Davutoglu said. “Today we realized that Turkey and EU have the same destiny, the same challenges and the same future.”

Turkey’s four-decade-old dispute with Cyprus had been a key stumbling block. Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades insisted there could be no opening of new “chapters” in Turkey’s EU talks until Ankara de facto recognizes the Cypriot state.

But the issue was sidestepped as EU leaders agreed to open a negotiating chapter that was not one of the five blocked by Nicosia. Anastasiades said he was “fully satisfied” after the sides agreed to swiftly open only chapter 33 on budget policy.

Ankara’s central objective — visa-free travel for Turks to Europe by June — would still depend on Turkey meeting 72 long-standing EU criteria.

Facing a backlash from anti-immigration populists across Europe, the EU is desperate to stem the influx but faced legal obstacles to blanket returns of migrants to Turkey.

EU partners would provide additional manpower and resources to help Athens cope with the new challenge and with a backlog of 43,000 migrants already bottled up on its territory.

While the talks were in progress, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan accused the EU of hypocrisy over migrants, human rights and terrorism, as supporters of the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) set up protest tents near the summit venue.

Erdogan said Europe was “dancing in a minefield” by directly or indirectly supporting terrorist groups.

“At a time when Turkey is hosting three million, those who are unable to find space for a handful of refugees, who in the middle of Europe keep these innocents in shameful conditions, must first look at themselves,” he said in a televised speech.

(Reporting by Renee Maltezou, Robin Emmott, Paul Taylor, Andreas Rinke, Gabriela Baczynska, Julia Fioretti, Jan Strupczewski, Humeyra Pamuk, Alastair Macdonald, Elizabeth Pineau, Tom Koerkemeir in Brussels and Ayla Jean Yackley in Istanbul, Writing by Paul Taylor and Gabriela Baczynska, Editing by Alastair Macdonald and Catherine Evans)

Desperate migrants’ hopes fade ahead of EU leaders’ meeting

IDOMENI, Greece (Reuters) – Refugees stuck at the closed border crossing between Greece and Macedonia have little hope that a summit of EU leaders on the migrant crisis this week will lead to any improvement in their desperate plight.

European Union leaders will hold talks in Brussels on Thursday with Turkey’s prime minister to try to hammer out a deal to end the continent’s worst migrant crisis since World War Two.

But the deal will entail returning the migrants holed up in Greece to Turkey, including more than 10,000 people living in the tent city near Idomeni on the Macedonian border who want only to be allowed to continue their trek northwards to Germany and other wealthier west European countries.

“Nothing will change (due to the summit),” said Hussam Jackl, a 25-year-old Syrian law student who fled to Lebanon two years ago and, after working there illegally as a photographer, sold his equipment to pay a smuggler to bring him to Europe.

He has spent more than two weeks in rain-soaked Idomeni, where migrants’ shoes have taken on the same muddy brown hue of the fields and children stand knee-deep in dirt.

“If the borders remain closed I’m thinking of killing myself,” said Jackl. “I’m thinking seriously of killing myself if there is no solution.”

He held up a piece of cardboard in protest: “Dear Sun, please shine on us, it’s very cold here. They are not going to let us in but we have nowhere to go back.”

“NO OTHER CHOICE”

Most of the migrants have fled conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. They are unable to continue their journey because Macedonia and other countries along the so-called Balkan route have shut their borders to the migrants.

“We have nothing – no money, no clean clothes, no clothes to face the bad weather,” said Mazari, 20, who traveled from Afghanistan with her three children. One of the children drowned as they crossed from Turkey to Greece in an inflatable boat.

“I’ll stay here as long as it takes to cross (into Macedonia),” she sobbed. “I have no other choice.”

Humanitarian organizations on the ground say several hundred people have moved to two petrol stations near the camp because of the bad weather, while others have returned to Athens.

Sanitary conditions have deteriorated and concern about the spread of infection has risen.

Waiting in line for clothes and shoes for his nephew, 18-year-old Ismail Sayed, who left Afghanistan in the hope of reaching Germany to study civil engineering, said all he could do was wait.

“I don’t have anything back in Afghanistan. I sold everything,” he said. “We want only one thing from European leaders: to open the borders. We want a proper future.”

(Writing by Karolina Tagaris; Editing by Gareth Jones)

‘It felt like a death machine,’ says migrant forced back to Greece

IDOMENI, Greece (Reuters) – It took Hassan Omar four long hours to cross into Macedonia, his wheelchair pushed by strangers across the muddy paths of Greece’s border – but a day later he found himself back at the squalid migrant camp he had left.

Like scores of people, many from war zones in Syria and Iraq, who streamed out of the camp near the Greek town of Idomeni on Monday and crossed into Macedonia, he was rounded up and sent back.

“We were surprised to see the army there,” said Omar, who fled fighting in Iraq, recounting how one man carried him for hours during their 8 km (5-mile) trek, up mountains and through valleys.

“They were very harsh with us. It felt like a death machine, not humans dealing with us,” he said.

An estimated 1,500 people left the camp on Monday trying to find a way past the razor-wire fence erected by Macedonia, on a route they hoped would take them to Germany and other wealthy European Union countries.

Most were picked up by Macedonian security forces, put into trucks and driven back over the border late on Monday or overnight, a Macedonian police official said.

The Macedonian action was part of a drive by Western Balkans states to shut down a migration route from Greece to Germany used by nearly a million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Asia over the last year in Europe’s biggest refugee influx since World War Two.

Greek authorities said they could not confirm the return as there had been no official contact from the Macedonian side, but those who arrived back at the camp recounted their experiences on Tuesday.

One man from the northern Syrian province of Raqqa, who gave his name as Abdo, said Macedonian authorities divided the detainees into groups of 25 to 50 people, put them in cars and dropped them off at the border.

“They told us to run, so we started to run,” he said.

CHILDREN

Authorities estimate at least 12,000 people, including thousands of children, have been stranded in the Idomeni camp, where sanitary conditions have deteriorated after days of heavy rain. Concern about the spread of infection grew after one person was diagnosed with Hepatitis A.

It was unclear why so many people made for the border on Monday, but Greek officials say leaflets that circulated at the Idomeni camp before the march showed it was a planned action.

Sixty-year-old Syrian Mohammad Kattan, who hoped to be reunited with his family in Serbia, said it had taken him six hours to trudge to the border.

“At my age it was very difficult,” he said, bundled up in a thick blanket. “My hope was to get to Macedonia … so that I could continue on to another country.”

Downcast and exhausted, he returned along with a second group of migrants, numbering about 600, who were prevented from even crossing the border by Macedonian security forces.

They waded back knee-deep through the icy river near the border on Tuesday, some barefoot, others weighed down by children and their worldly belongings on their shoulders.

On the riverbank, men and women stood around a fire drying their feet and clothes. One woman sobbed, her face framed by a pink headscarf. Others dragged their belongings across the dirt, and pulled along their children in fruit baskets.

A Syrian woman who gave her name as Nasreem described how she sheltered her children overnight with plastic bags and said she believed they would finally be “done with all the rain and the cold” when they arrived at the border.

“But they didn’t let us through.”

(Writing by Karolina Tagaris; Editing by Pravin Char)