Tag Archives: Refugee Crisis

Cologne attacks show Germany unprepared for migration challenge

COLOGNE, Germany (Reuters) – The crowds of drunk young men had been gathering for hours outside the main railway station in Cologne on New Year’s Eve when city police finally told the office that coordinates forces for the region that they wanted to clear the square.

The police coordinating office says it offered to send reinforcements. A report from the city police says the officer in charge decided there was no point asking for help because reinforcements would arrive too late.

Cologne, a city of more than 1 million people, had added just 142 extra police for the holiday. Most had only come on duty at 10:00 p.m.

As every German now knows, the small police force would prove incapable of preventing the crowd on that square from committing hundreds of assaults on women, stealing their valuables, groping and even raping them.

The incidents have caused profound soul searching in a country that allowed in an unprecedented 1.1 million migrants last year in what its leaders described as an act of historic generosity toward refugees.

Germans, who have prided themselves for generations in an orderly society that requires only gentle policing, are beginning to come to terms with change on a vast scale.

“In the past, the police’s softly-softly approach and focus on de-escalation was cherished. But there have been warning signs in recent years that this may not be appropriate now,” said Wolfgang Bosbach, a lawmaker from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) whose constituency is near Cologne.

Cologne prosecutors say 945 complaints have been made to police over the events of that night, including 434 for sex crimes.

Four weeks on, prosecutors have 35 suspects, mostly for pick pocketing and robbery while just three are suspected of sexual crimes. Only nine of the suspects are in custody. Most of the suspects come from northern Africa – Morocco, Algeria or Tunisia.

One of the victims, Henrike, 18, told Reuters she was pestered, groped and sexually assaulted by a group of young men of north African appearance outside the station when she went to watch the city’s firework display.

She feared she was going to be raped when a group of about 25 men encircled her and two friends and tried to pull down their skirts: “They were like animals … It felt like 20,000 hands were touching me all at once,” she said.

German media reported similar sex attacks and robberies on a smaller scale in 12 of Germany’s 16 states.

“THE EUROPE WE WISH FOR”

It wasn’t what politicians promised last year. When hundreds of thousands of migrants were arriving in the European Union last year on the shores of Italy and Greece, Germany made a bold decision: all refugees from the civil war in Syria would be welcome, regardless of where or how they entered the EU.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany was a rich country that could afford to do its part to take in some of the world’s most vulnerable people fleeing war.

“If Europe fails on the question of refugees … then it won’t be the Europe we wish for,” said Merkel in August.

But refugees were not the only people who arrived. In addition to thousands of families fleeing Syria and other war zones, Germany also let in hundreds of thousands of people from other countries with no valid claim for asylum.

The behavior of the groups has been starkly different. The Syrian refugees intentionally welcomed by Merkel have so far proven overwhelmingly law abiding. According to a Jan. 8 police report from North Rhine-Westphalia, the western German state that includes Cologne, only 0.5 percent of Syrian migrants in the city were caught committing crimes within a year.

By contrast, among migrants from North Africa, as many as 40 percent were caught committing crimes within a year, the report says.

Virtually none of the North Africans arriving in Germany have proven to be genuine refugees: last year Germany granted some form of protection to just 0.19 percent of Tunisian migrants, 3.74 percent of Moroccans and 1.6 percent of Algerians.

Many arrive not as families, but as single young men who are not legally permitted to work. Slightly more than twice as many males as females claimed asylum in Germany last year.

“What we experienced at New Year was not only a police problem – it is (a result of) a lack of integration of about 300,000-500,000 young men who have arrived without families in Germany and are sitting around without much to do and who come from a male-dominated culture,” said Christian Pfeiffer, a criminologist and former justice minister of Lower Saxony state from the center-left Social Democrats (SPD).

Ingo Westen, vice-president of the German Moroccan society based in Dortmund an hour’s drive from Cologne, said young North African men arrive with high hopes for lives in “paradise” but quickly become disillusioned by life with just a bed and a small stipend.

“That easily results in people who are not particularly strong getting corrupted by ringleaders who say: ‘let’s rob the department store over there or steal a mobile phone or clothes, and then we’ll have a little bit of money when we sell them.'”

His organization worries that longer-settled migrants who have long been integrated into German society are increasingly falling under blanket suspicion too. It called for the German government to declare North African countries like Morocco to be safe and rigorously deport people who commit crimes.

FEWER SECURITY CAMERAS THAN A GROCERY STORE

Police unions say their forces are simply not adequately staffed and funded for the changing environment. What happened in Cologne was “a result of the savings that have destroyed the police in the last 10 years,” said Arnold Plickert, deputy chairman of the GdP police union.

The number of officers in the federal, state and criminal police has been cut by around 13,000 since 2000 to 260,713, according to the latest figures from GdP, although some federal states, including NRW are now boosting recruitment again.

A survey by regional newspaper Rheinische Post showed NRW has one of the lowest ratios of police officers to inhabitants of all of Germany’s states, with 228 police offers per 100,000 residents compared with the national average of 304. France, by comparison, has 356.

Sebastian Fiedler, head of NRW’s branch of the BDK union for Germany’s criminal police, made up of plain-clothes officers that investigate crimes, said officers had been worried about offenses committed by north Africans for some time.

“But to combat such a criminal phenomenon we need sufficient qualified staff to investigate the gang structures and then destroy them … And that’s where we have a problem,” he said.

In part because of its totalitarian history, Germany has been reluctant to deploy the police surveillance tools used in other European countries. Police cameras, ubiquitous in, say, Britain or France, are virtually unseen, and none were on the square outside Cologne station.

NRW state police operate only two cameras in the entire state of 18 million people, and neither of them is in the city of Cologne, according to Erich Rettinghaus, head of the NRW branch of the DPolG police union.

“The concentration of cameras in a Lidl store is greater than that of the NRW police,” he said, of a grocery chain.

Cologne – with a longer history of a migrant population than many other German cities – sees itself as a tolerant liberal city. Around a third of its population has a migrant background.

Still, the New Year’s events were beyond anything police could imagine: “We only knew about sexual attacks on this scale from abroad, from places like Tahrir Square and India. But it had never happened in Germany before,” Fiedler said.

In a Jan. 8 report, Cologne police said there had been no indications that such a high number of “dangerous people” would gather, and there had been no need for special police measures in the area around the cathedral and station in previous years.

Police in NRW say they have been studying crime among north Africans. In Duesseldorf, NRW’s state capital, police are doing a study known as “Casablanca” looking into groups that carry out robberies using a technique called “Antanzen”, in which criminals dance up to or hug victims to distract them before picking their pockets.

A police project in Cologne called NAFRI has been exploring the workings of possible groups of North African criminals since Jan. 2013. Three analysts have analyzed data on more than 21,000 criminal offences and 17,000 people of northern African origin.

But NRW state Interior Minister Ralf Jaeger said the suspects from New Year’s Eve were not part of the Antanzen scene. In a report dated Jan. 19, the NRW interior ministry said of the 29 New Year’s Eve suspects just one had turned up as part of the NAFRI project.

HARD QUESTIONS

In the wake of the Cologne assaults, Germans have been forced to confront questions that some politicians say were deliberately buried last year while migrants poured in.

The reluctance to confront the issue has itself become part of the debate. Public broadcaster ZDF apologized for initially failing to report the New Year’s Eve assaults. There was widespread criticism of the Cologne police for saying on Jan. 1 that the New Year’s Eve celebration had been peaceful.

Gregor Golland, an NRW state lawmaker from Merkel’s CDU, said the state government, led by the Greens and SPD, “more or less laughed” at his party’s attempts to get the problem of north African criminals on the agenda in 2014 and 2015. “They acted as if it did not exist,” he said.

Hans-Willi Koerfges, an SPD lawmaker in NRW’s parliament, denied his party had ignored the Antanzen phenomenon among north Africans, saying SPD members had expressed concern and it was already being looked into by the time the CDU raised it.

A consensus is growing that, in order to make Merkel’s generosity to refugees work, Germany is going to have to do more to distinguish between those genuinely in need of protection and migrants from safe countries. Merkel’s coalition government backed a new law this week to make it easier to deport migrants who commit crimes.

Former German interior minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, of Merkel’s CDU, said whitewashing by the media and politicians keeping quiet about problems related to the refugee crisis had “led to an illusion about an idyllic world that never existed”.

“Now Germany is getting closer to reality,” he added.

(Additional reporting by Madeline Chambers and Tina Bellon in Berlin, Matthias Inverardi in Duesseldorf, Gerard Bon and Matthias Blamont in Paris, Michael Holden in London; Writing by Madeline Chambers and Michelle Martin; Editing by Peter Graff)

Frustrated with Germany’s asylum red tape, some Iraqis return home

BERLIN (Reuters) – The first thing that Leith Khdeir Abbas, a 27-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker who arrived in Germany four months ago, plans to do after he makes the return journey on Wednesday is to kneel down and kiss the soil that he calls home.

“I fled to Germany to build my future. But I realized I can’t build it on fake promises,” he said at Berlin’s Tegel airport where he and some 50 similarly disenchanted young Iraqi men were about to board an Iraqi Airways plane to Erbil in northern Iraq.

A growing number of Iraqi refugees in Germany are choosing to return to their war-torn country, frustrated with a slow asylum process in a country overwhelmed by the influx of 1.1 million asylum seekers last year, most still living in shelters.

“I feel homesick and humiliated,” said Abbas, waving his arms in frustration as he recalled the poor conditions at a Berlin shelter with unhygienic toilets and bland food.

The trip to Germany from his home city of Baghdad cost him $4,000, including a fee for smugglers who put him on a boat from Turkey to Greece, where he and hundreds of asylum seekers embarked on a weeks-long trek to Germany via the Balkans and Austria.

German Interior Ministry data show that the number of Iraqis choosing to return home began rising in September, when 61 left, up from about 10 in each of the first seven months of the year. In December the number of Iraqi returnees topped 200.

That is still a fraction of the almost 30,000 who applied for asylum in Germany last year, accounting for the fifth largest group after Syrians, Albanians, Kosovars and Afghans.

But the trend highlights the harsh reality for asylum seekers fleeing conflicts in the Middle East. They come to Germany dreaming of a better future only to find out that a host country known for its efficient bureaucracy and wealth is struggling to accommodate a large number of newcomers.

“It is sad to see so many young men going back to a war zone,” said Andesha Karim, an Iraqi Airways representative at Tegel. The airline operates three weekly flights to Iraq from Berlin, Duesseldorf and Frankfurt.

“EUROPE IS NOT NICE”

The reasons for returning seem to have more to do with down-and-out conditions in Germany rather than the improving situation on the ground in Iraq, where government forces have made advances against Islamic State.

Both Erbil – in northern Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region – and Baghdad are outside the territory under Islamic State control and have not seen heavy conflict, although militant bomb attacks occur regularly in the Iraqi capital.

“Europe is not nice. They gave me no residency permit, no money. I will return to Kurdistan, to Iraq. I could join the Peshmerga and fight Daesh,” said Hassan, 19, an Iraqi Kurd, referring to Western-backed militiamen fighting Islamic State.

Most of the young men waiting to board the five-hour, $280 a seat flight to Erbil were traveling on one-way travel documents issued by the Iraqi Embassy in Berlin.

Many had either lost their passports or destroyed them at the German-Austrian border, hoping this would make it harder to deport them if their asylum applications were rejected.

The embassy has since the end of October issued 1,400 such documents, an almost tenfold rise from the 150 issued in the first 10 months of last year, the German Foreign Ministry said.

Iraqi embassy officials could not be reached for comment.

Those who cannot pay for the journey back can apply for financial assistance from the International Organization for Migration.

Not everyone is keen to give up on Germany. Abdallah al-Alagi, another Iraqi, came to Tegel to bid farewell to his friend Abbas, and still hopes to be granted asylum soon.

“I am staying. If there is no progress with my application I will leave for another European country. I don’t have to stay in Germany,” he said.

Abbas tried to hold back tears as he bid farewell to al-Alagi and walked to the check-in desk. “Tell Mom to send me nice food,” al-Alagi shouted, bringing a smile to Abbas’s face.

(Reporting by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Noah Barkin/Mark Heinrich)

EU warns Greece to fix border ‘neglect’

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The EU executive concluded on Wednesday that Greece could face more border controls with other states of the free-travel Schengen zone in May if it does not fix “serious deficiencies” in its management of the area’s external frontier.

EU countries have been increasingly critical of Athens’ handling of the continent’s worst migration crisis since World War Two, with more than a million migrants reaching Europe last year, mainly through Greece.

“If the necessary action is not being taken and deficiencies persist, there is a possibility to … allow member states to temporarily close their borders,” European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis told a news briefing.

He was speaking after the executive accepted a report saying cash-strapped Athens had “seriously neglected” its obligations to fellow Schengen states.

The use of that phrase could pave the way for EU governments to exercise the option of reinstalling controls on their national borders for up to two years once short-term measures currently in place expire in May.

Several EU member states have instituted emergency controls on their borders and warned they may effectively suspend Athens from the passport-free zone. Most of the irregular migrants arriving in the EU have come from Turkey via Greece and trekked northward to Germany.

Dombrovskis said Greece was not identifying or registering people arriving effectively, not uploading fingerprinting data to relevant bases systematically, and not checking travel documents properly and against key databases.

EU border agency Frontex says its latest mission to the Greek island of Lesbos in January showed improvements in registration procedures.

But EU officials carried out an assessment in Greece in November that lead to Wednesday’s conclusion that there were “serious deficiencies” in Greek frontier control.

SEALING GREECE OFF

The step of imposing border controls, under the as yet unused Article 26 of the Schengen code, can be taken for up to six months and can be renewed up to three times for a total of two years.

Dombrovskis said the Commission was intent on preserving Schengen, one of the EU’s key achievements, and said Greece had improved its border controls since November – but not enough.

The next step in the process would be for Schengen member states – 26 countries, most of which are also in the EU – to confirm the Commission’s conclusions in a majority vote. The executive would then recommend remedial measures and assess by May whether Athens had complied.

Greece has no land borders with the rest of the Schengen zone, so installing new frontier checks would affect only air and sea ports.

Diplomats and officials described the move to penalize tourism-dependent Greece as a way to raise pressure on Athens, which is already mired in a financial crisis, to better implement EU measures intended to identify and register all those arriving from Turkey.

The EU is also looking into using Frontex more to help guard the border between Greece and Macedonia, which is not a member of the EU or Schengen. Some Frontex personnel are already at Greece’s northern border, but the agency’s mandate does not allow for interventions in third countries.

Some diplomats said countries could send more police or border guards to Macedonia on the basis of bilateral agreements.

Frontex has a precedent from 2006, when it ran a naval mission in territorial waters off Senegal and Mauritania to prevent African migrants reaching Spain’s Canary Islands. That operation was carried out on the basis of bilateral agreements between Spain, Dakar and Nouakchott.

“Details would need to be worked out but there seems to be very little opposition to this idea, apart, of course, from Greece,” said one EU diplomat involved.

Athens says the influx is impossible to control and its migration minister, Yannis Mouzalas, warned this week that sealing his country off from Schengen would create a humanitarian crisis with thousands of people trapped in Greece.

(Editing by Hugh Lawson)

German Jews fear rising antisemitism during Mideast refugee influx

BERLIN (Reuters) – When Judith G. helped out at a refugee center near Frankfurt last October and identified herself as Jewish, she was spat on and insulted.

German Jews say the case of Judith G., a 33-year-old optician who asked not to be fully named, isn’t isolated and underlines concerns many have about the record arrivals of asylum seekers, largely from Muslim countries in the Middle East.

Official figures show German-born far-right supporters commit the vast majority of antisemitic crimes in the country, and Muslim leaders say nearly all asylum seekers – who can be targets of hate crime themselves – are trying to escape conflict, not stir it up.

Nevertheless, Jews across Germany are hiding their identity when volunteering at refugee shelters for fear of reprisals, adding another layer of complexity to a social, economic and logistical challenge that is stretching the fabric of German society.

“Among the refugees, there are a great many people who grew up with hostility toward Israel and conflate these prejudices with hatred toward Jews in general,” Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews, told Reuters in an interview conducted in October.

Chancellor Angela Merkel stressed last week that antisemitic attitudes among some young people arriving from countries where “hatred toward Israel and Jews is commonplace” needed to be dealt with.

The safety of Jewish communities is particularly sensitive in Germany due to the murder of over 6 million Jews by Hitler’s Third Reich, which is marked on Wednesday by the international Holocaust Memorial Day. Today, the German Jewish community numbers around 100,500.

According to a 2013 study by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, 64 percent of German Jews avoid the public display of symbols that would identify them as Jewish. It also found that only 28 percent of them report antisemitic incidents.

Such incidents, as recorded by the Interior Ministry, dropped in 2015 but Jews still remember chants by young Muslims proclaiming “Jews to the gas” on German streets in protests against the 2014 Israeli-Palestinian Gaza War.

Concerns rose earlier this year when two suspected asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan attacked and robbed a man wearing a skullcap on the northern island of Fehmarn, a crime the local prosecutor treats as antisemitic.

“We don’t approach the issue of refugees with negative expectations in general,” said Walter Blender, head of the Jewish community in Bad Segeberg, a town on the mainland about 60 miles from Fehmarn. “But we are very worried and skeptical, and anecdotal evidence so far showed that we have reason to be scared.”

Preliminary Interior Ministry figures show that far-right supporters were responsible for well over 90 percent of the antisemitic crimes recorded last year up to the end of November. People with a foreign background were blamed for little more than four percent, although this category does not reveal their country of origin or immigration status.

Starting from this month, however, the ministry will produce a breakdown that includes a refugee category.

FINGER POINTING

Germany, which took in 1.1 million asylum seekers from mainly Middle Eastern countries last year, saw crimes against refugee shelters quadruple to 924 incidents in 2015 and Muslim advocacy groups warn against finger-pointing.

“The vast majority of people coming here are fleeing war and terror themselves,” said Aiman Mazyek, president of Germany’s Central Council of Muslims. “All they want is peace and quiet.”

There is little research on the scale of antisemitism in Arab countries, but a Pew poll from 2011 shows a large majority of people there hold unfavorable opinions of Jews.

Researchers say too little effort is put into teaching Western and German values to asylum seekers, including the country’s relationship with Jewish communities.

“There is a lack of a deeper understanding of the culture in many Middle Eastern countries and this results in Western stakeholders being taken by surprise over the fervent antisemitism there,” said Wolfgang Bock, an expert in Islamism and Middle Eastern politics.

In Germany, refugees with recognized asylum claims learn about the country’s history and values alongside language tuition. But some experts say there is nothing about contemporary political issues, such as relations with Israel.

“Education can’t just be about the Holocaust and the Third Reich. Schools also need to talk about the Middle East conflict, antisemitism based on religious argumentation and conspiracy theories,” said Ahmad Mansour, an Arab-Israeli researcher with the European Foundation of Democracy.

But communities across Germany are overwhelmed with processing the hundreds of thousands of asylum applications and are struggling to provide shelter and food to the arrivals.

Some Jewish groups, such as the Berlin-based “Friends of the Fraenkleufer Synagogue”, have taken the cultural exchange issue into their own hands with around 40 volunteers helping out at a local refugee center.

“We want to send a message to all the Jews who sit at home and build big fences around their synagogues that it’s possible and necessary to approach one another, because if we don’t try, things can only turn for the worse,” said Nina Peretz, head of the initiative.

(Editing by David Stamp)

‘Running out of time’, EU puts Greece, passport-free region on notice

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – The European Union edged closer on Monday to accepting that its Schengen open-borders area may be suspended for up to two years if it fails in the next few weeks to curb the influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa.

After chairing a meeting of EU counterparts in Amsterdam, the Dutch migration minister said they expected an unprecedented prolongation of the time governments can impose border checks because the migrant crisis would not be under control before current, short-term dispensations expire in May.

Some ministers made clear such a — theoretically temporary — move would cut off Greece, where more than 40,000 people have already arrived by sea from Turkey this year despite a deal with Ankara two months ago to hold back an exodus of Syrian refugees. More than 60 have drowned on the crossing since Jan. 1 alone.

Greek officials noted that closing routes northward, even if physically possible, would not solve the problem. But electoral pressure on governments, including in the EU’s leading power Germany, to stem the flow and resist efforts to spread asylum seekers across the bloc are making free travel rules untenable.

“We are running out of time,” said EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos as he urged states to implement agreed measures for reducing and controlling movements of migrants across the continent — or else face the collapse of the 30-year-old Schengen zone, a major EU achievement.

But Dutch minister Klaas Dijkhoff said time has effectively already run out to preserve all of the passport-free regime that has allowed hundreds of thousands of people to trek from Greece and Italy to Germany and Sweden over the past year.

“The ‘or else’ is already happening,” he said. “A year ago, we all warned that if we don’t come up with a solution, then Schengen will be under pressure. It already is.”

The piecemeal reintroduction of controls by several governments under pressure from domestic opinion at national borders with fellow EU states should be better coordinated, said Dijkhoff, whose government last year floated the idea of a “mini-Schengen” that critics saw as a way for Germany and its northern neighbors to bar the influx from the Mediterranean.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who opened her country’s borders to Syrians fleeing civil war last summer, is under mounting pressure to halt the inflow after more than a million migrants entered Germany last year.

Without a clear drop in the numbers arriving before she meets fellow EU leaders at a summit in mid-February, some form of border closer by the bloc’s leading power, which would have a knock-on effect across Europe, would be increasingly likely — not least as Germans vote in key regional elections in March.

The Commission, the EU executive, is already conducting a review of whether Greece’s difficulty in processing constitute “persistent serious deficiencies” on the external EU frontier that would justify a historic move to allow states to reimpose controls on those arriving from Greece.

It is due to make recommendations next month and Athens would have three months to respond. Existing measures taken by some states under a different rule expire in mid-May. Minister Dijkhoff made clear that few expect the situation to be under control by then, so the longer-term suspension should be ready.

Under that measure, Article 26 of the Schengen code, states could reimpose controls on documents for six months, renewable three times, until May 2018. EU officials acknowledged, however, that no one knows what would happen after that if governments were not prepared to return to the status quo before last year.

“Everyone understands that the Schengen zone is on the brink,” Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said.

“If we cannot protect the external EU border, the Greek-Turkish border, then the Schengen external border will move towards central Europe … Greece must increase its resources as soon as possible and accept help.”

The Schengen zone comprises 26 states, most of which are also EU members. Germany, France, Austria and Sweden are among several countries that have introduced temporary border checks as they struggle to control the flow of people.

“Speaking about timetables, it’s already too late. We have seven countries with border controls,” Sweden’s interior minister Anders Ygeman told Reuters.

He said migrant registration centers need to start functioning in Greece and Italy as planned: “In the end, if a country doesn’t live up to its obligations, we will have to restrict its connections to the Schengen area.”

Appearing anxious to calm a confrontation with the radical leftist government in Athens that already clashed with Berlin last year over its demands of bailout loans to keep Greece in the euro zone, his German counterpart was more reserved.

“Blaming people in public doesn’t help,” Thomas de Maiziere said.

The EU has taken various steps to give cash-strapped Athens financial assistance to deal with the crisis, but many member states believe Athens is not using that enough. Of five registration “hotspot” centers due to be set up for migrants arriving in Greece, only one is running so far.

(Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

U.N. seeks Syrian peace talks this week, opposition threatens boycott

BEIRUT/GENEVA (Reuters) – The United Nations said on Monday it would issue invitations for marathon Syrian peace talks to begin this week, but opposition groups signaled they would stay away unless the government and its Russian allies halt air strikes and lift sieges on towns.

The first talks in two years to end the Syrian civil war were meant to begin on Monday but have been held up in part by a dispute over who should represent the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad. U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura said he was still working on his list, and expected to issue the invitations on Tuesday for talks to start on Friday.

The aim would be six months of talks, first seeking a ceasefire, later working toward a political settlement to a war that has killed more than 250,000 people, driven more than 10 million from their homes and drawn in global powers.

The ceasefire would cover the whole country except parts held by Islamic State militants and al Qaeda’s Syrian branch, the Nusra Front, de Mistura told a news conference in Geneva.

De Mistura, whose two predecessors quit in apparent frustration after holding failed peace conferences of their own, acknowledged the going would be difficult. Delegations would meet in separate rooms in “proximity talks”, with diplomats shuttling between them. Threats to pull out should be expected.

“Don’t be surprised: there will be a lot of posturing, a lot of walk-outs or walk-ins because a bomb has fallen or someone has done an attack…. You should neither be depressed nor impressed, but it’s likely to happen,” he said. “The important thing is to keep momentum.”

The spokesman for one of the rebel groups in the opposition High Negotiating Committee (HNC) said it was impossible for the opposition to attend as long as rebel territory is being pounded by air strikes and besieged towns are being starved.

“It is impossible to give up any of our demands. If we attend, it’s as if we are selling our martyrs,” said Abu Ghiath al-Shami, spokesman for Alwiyat Seif al-Sham, one of the groups fighting against Assad’s forces in the southwest.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he expected clarity within a day or two over who would attend, and expressed support for de Mistura’s decision to take time to draw up the list.

“We don’t want to decide and have it crumble on day one. It’s worth taking a day or two, or three, or whatever,” Kerry said during a visit to Laos.

The outcome was up to the Syrian parties, he added: “They have to be serious. If they are not serious, war will continue. Up to them. You can lead a horse to water; you can’t make it drink.”

RUSSIAN INTERVENTION

Years of high-level diplomacy have so far yielded no progress toward ending or even curbing the fighting. Since the last peace conference was held in early 2014, Islamic State fighters have declared a caliphate across much of Syria and Iraq, and the war has drawn in world powers.

The United States has led air strikes against the militants since 2014, and Russia launched a separate air campaign nearly four months ago against enemies of its ally Assad.

Russian firepower has helped the Syrian military and its allies achieve military gains, including a major push in the northwest of the country in recent days, with rebels acknowledging a turn in momentum.

The rise of Islamic State and Russia’s entry into the war have given new impetus to diplomacy, leading to a Dec. 18 U.N. Security Council resolution, backed by Washington and Moscow, that called for peace talks.

But world powers remain at odds over who should be invited. Russia says opposition figures it calls terrorists must be excluded, and wants to include groups like the Kurds who control wide areas of northern Syria. Regional heavyweight Turkey opposes inviting the Kurds.

The main Sunni Arab opposition groups, who are supported by Arab governments and the West, say they will not attend unless they can choose their own delegation. Spokesman Salim al-Muslat said the opposition HNC would discuss its position on Tuesday.

The HNC, formed in Saudi Arabia last month and grouping armed and political opponents of Assad, has repeatedly said talks cannot begin until air strikes are halted, government sieges of rebel-held territory lifted and detainees freed, steps outlined in the U.N. resolution.

“Unfortunately, it is not possible to sit and talk to anyone without the suffering being lifted first,” Muslat said on Arabic news channel Arabiya al-Hadath.

SUICIDE BOMBING

The peace conference, if it takes place, will be the third since the war began and the first convened by de Mistura, a veteran diplomat with dual Swedish and Italian nationality.

All previous diplomatic efforts foundered over the future role of Assad, with the opposition refusing to back off its demand that he leave power and the president refusing to go.

A suicide bomber driving a fuel tank truck blew himself up at a checkpoint run by the Islamist rebel group Ahrar al-Sham in the northern city of Aleppo on Monday, killing at least 23 people, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.

Rebel forces lost the town of Rabiya in Latakia province over the weekend, their second major setback near the Turkish border in northwestern Syria in recent weeks as the government and Russia seek to cut rebel supply lines to Turkey.

“It’s a major pullback for us, but it is not over. We have 17 martyrs and 30 wounded. And none of the injuries are from bullets: it is all due to shrapnel from missiles, proof of how we are struggling to fend off Russian air strikes,” Firas Pasa, a leader of an ethnic Turkmen rebel group told Reuters in Gaziantep, Turkey, near the border.

“If the West wants us to defeat Syrian government forces then we urgently need anti-aircraft capabilities,” he said.

A member of Ahrar al-Sham, Abu Baraa al-Lathkani, said the rebels had abandoned the strategy of trying to hold territory and were shifting to guerrilla tactics.

The Syrian military, its morale running high, is planning the next phase of its offensive in northern Syria. The coming target is Idlib, a rebel stronghold, said a military source.

(Additional reporting by Lisa Barrington and Tom Perry in Beirut, Suleiman Al-Khalidi in Amman, David Brunnstrom in Vientiane, Humeyra Pamuk in Turkey and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

Hungary’s prime minister seeks fence to help reduce migrant flow

BRDO PRI KRANJU, Slovenia (Reuters) – Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that a fence should be erected on the Macedonian and Bulgarian borders with Greece to curb the inflow of migrants into Europe.

“If we cannot secure the outer border (of the EU), regardless of how costly or demanding that is, we will destroy the Schengen regime by ourselves,” Orban said, referring to Europe’s free-travel area.

He was speaking during a one-day visit to Slovenia.

Slovenian Prime Minister Miro Cerar told the same news conference the European Union needed a joint solution within weeks to the migrant crisis to avoid possible conflicts between countries.

“We do not have time until spring to find a solution. We need a solution within weeks … if not, we can expect conflicts between countries,” Cerar said.

“The (migrant) situation is entirely out of control and has nothing to do with humanitarianism, integration and help,” Cerar added.

Over 411,000 migrants have entered Slovenia since Hungary fenced off its borders in October and pushed the migrant flow to the west through Slovenia. Almost all of them continued on their way to Austria and further north to Germany and other EU states.

Slovenia on Thursday followed Austria with an announcement that it will reject all migrants apart from the ones seeking asylum in Austria or Germany.

Over the past months Slovenia, too, has erected about 156 kilometers of fence on its southern border with Croatia to ensure that migrants can only enter the country through official border crossings.

Cerar said Slovenia would pull the fence down as soon as a joint EU solution to the migrant crisis is found.

Orban said Bulgaria, which lies north of Greece, should also join the Schengen area as it has shown that it is ready to secure its borders.

(Reporting By Marja Novak; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

At least 43 migrants drown as boats capsize off Greek islands

ATHENS (Reuters) – At least 43 people, including 17 children, drowned when their boats capsized off two Greek islands near the Turkish coast on Friday, coastguards said, marking one of the deadliest days for migrants risking the perilous route to Europe from Turkey.

According to survivors’ testimonies, dozens were on board a wooden sailboat which went down off Kalolimnos, a small island in the Aegean Sea close to Turkey’s coast, one coastguard official said.

Twenty six people were rescued and at least 35 migrants drowned in one of the worst incidents in months, the official said. It was not clear why the vessel capsized, but witnesses said strong winds were blowing at the time.

Fishing vessels assisted the search and rescue operation which lasted hours.

“They weren’t wearing life jackets, I don’t understand. They couldn’t swim,” Michalis, a local fisherman, told Reuters.

He rescued three migrants but one of them, a 50-year old man, later died in his small fishing boat. “The hospital is now full of dead people.”

Survivors said that more people were missing, he said. “There must have been a lot of people on board. It was one of those closed yachts with a small hatch. You can imagine what happened if it had a lot of people on board,” the fisherman said.

In the sinking at Farmakonisi, another small island also close to the Turkish coast, six children and two women drowned when their wooden boat crashed on rocks shortly after midnight. Another 40 migrants on the vessel managed to swim to the shore.

“Once again, last night ruthless human smugglers at the Turkish coast crammed dozens of refugees and migrants in risky and unseaworthy vessels and led innocent people, even young children to perish,” the shipping ministry said in a statement.

The International Organization for Migration said the deaths of migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean already make this “the deadliest January on record”.

The latest incidents bring the number of people killed on the eastern Mediterranean route in the past year to at least 900, said IOM spokesman Joel Millman in Geneva.

The total number of arrivals in Europe by sea rose to about 37,000 in January, more than six times the combined figures for the same month in 2014 and 2015, usually a slow month due to the bad weather.

Fleeing war, thousands of mainly Syrian refugees have braved rough seas this year to make the short, but precarious, journey from Turkey to Greece’s islands, from which most continue to mainland Greece and northward into wealthier western Europe.

Winter conditions make the journey even more dangerous.

(Reporting by Renee Maltezou, George Georgiopoulos and Theodora Arvanitidou in Athens and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

Senate blocks bill for tighter Syrian refugee screening

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Senate Democrats narrowly blocked legislation on Wednesday that would slow the entry of refugees from Syria and Iraq into the United States in a contentious vote cloaked in presidential election-year politics.

The vote was 55-43, with “yes” votes falling short of the 60 needed to advance the Republican-backed measure in the 100-member Senate. No Republicans voted against the bill, and only two Democrats backed it.

Among other things, the bill would have required high-level U.S. officials to verify that each refugee from Iraq and Syria posed no security risk before being allowed into the United States.

Republicans said the tighter screening was essential to ensure the safety of Americans and prevent attacks within the country by Islamic State and other militant groups.

Democrats called the legislation an attack on people who are fleeing war. They accused Republicans of holding the vote to allow their 2016 presidential candidates in the Senate to back legislation touted as tough on security.

All three of the Senate Republican 2016 presidential hopefuls, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, backed the bill.

Democrats had also sought to play politics. They tried and failed to reach a deal with Republicans that would have set up a vote on an amendment establishing a religious test for would-be immigrants.

That vote was planned to see if Republicans would side against 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has advocated barring Muslims from entering the United States.

The Syria refugee bill passed the House by a large, bipartisan margin in November days after the Nov. 13 Islamic State attacks in Paris, supported by dozens of Democrats who broke from their party despite Democratic President Barack Obama’s threatened veto.

“We need to talk about efforts to defeat ISIS, not creating more paperwork for cabinet secretaries,” Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, told reporters before the vote.

It currently takes 18-24 months for Syrian refugees to be screened before they can move to the United States.

The United States has offered refuge to far fewer of the millions fleeing war in Syria and Iraq than many of its closest allies in Europe and the Middle East.

Obama announced last year that he would admit 10,000 Syrians, a plan opposed by many Republicans as a potential threat to U.S. security.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Eric Beech and Cynthia Osterman)

Austria to slash asylum claims, strengthen border checks

VIENNA (Reuters) – Austria declared on Wednesday it would cap the number of people allowed to claim asylum this year at less than half last year’s total, and its chancellor said border controls would have to be stepped up “massively”- but how that would be done was unclear.

Germany said on Wednesday Austria’s decision was “not helpful” to German efforts to negotiate a European Union-wide solution with the support of Turkey, from which most migrants reach the European continent.

Hundreds of thousands of people have streamed into Austria, a small Alpine republic of 8.5 million since September, when it and Germany threw open their borders to a wave of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The vast majority of arrivals simply crossed the country on their way to Germany, but a fraction have stayed. Roughly 90,000 people, or more than 1 percent of Austria’s population, applied for asylum last year.

Public fears about immigration have fueled support for the far right, and calls for a ceiling on the number of migrants by members of the centre-right People’s Party within the coalition government have grown.

“We cannot take in all asylum seekers in Austria, or in Germany or in Sweden,” Werner Faymann, a Social Democrat who has resisted calls to cap immigration, told a joint news conference, referring to the countries that have taken in the most migrants.

The government plan announced on Wednesday provides for the number of asylum claims to be restricted to 1.5 percent of Austria’s population, spread over the next four years.

Breaking down the four-year cap, the statement said the number of asylum claims would be limited to 37,500 this year, falling annually to 25,000 in 2019.

Asked what would happen if the number of people who wanted to apply for asylum exceeded that figure, Faymann said only that experts were due to examine the issue.

“We must also step up controls at our borders massively,” Faymann told the joint news conference with Vice Chancellor Reinhold Mitterlehner and other officials, without explaining what that would involve.

Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said one option would be to accept asylum requests without processing them.

“The (other) option of not having to accept asylum requests at the Austrian border is now being checked, and to send these people back, to deport them back to our safe neighbor states,” she told public broadcaster ORF.

Slovenian police said later on Wednesday that Slovenia planned “the same action” as Austria on its southern border with Croatia if Austria, which lies north of Slovenia, took further steps to limit the inflow of migrants.

The Dutch prime minister, whose government currently chairs EU ministerial councils, said Austria’s move illustrated the kind of national action likely to multiply if the 28-nation EU did not start implementing a commonly agreed strategy on asylum before a likely “spike” in arrivals with spring weather.

Saying the EU had six to eight weeks to end division and inaction on managing immigration, Mark Rutte told reporters at the European Parliament in Strasbourg that if that failed “we have to think about a plan B”.

As Germany has firmed up border controls in recent months, Austria has often followed. Austria’s interior minister said last week it would start turning away people who were no longer being let into Germany, prompting a knock-on effect further down the main route into Europe.

Faymann said he had discussed his government’s plans in principle with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and their Slovenian counterpart.

Faymann referred to the measures as a second-best option while awaiting a European solution involving securing the EU’s external borders, setting up centers there for people to apply for asylum, and spreading them around the bloc.

(Additional reporting by Matt Robinson in Belgrade, Marja Novak in Ljubljana and by the Brussels bureau; Editing by Mark Heinrich)