Refugees’ futures remain unclear following EU-Turkey deal

Mohammed dragged a hoe through the thick mud of Idomeni, trying to stop his family's tent sinking into the mire along with their hopes of reaching Germany.

His wife sat with head bowed nearby, and his tiny brother slept in a cocoon of blankets, four days after spending his first birthday here on Greece's border with Macedonia, where some 14,000 people are stuck in an increasingly squalid camp.

“I’m making ditches to drain the water from around our tents,” Mohammed said, pausing in the warm sunshine that had followed an overnight deluge.

"I studied engineering in Syria, but had to leave before finishing my course – they want men my age to fight in the army, and I couldn't do that," he added, explaining how he became one of more than 1.5 million people to seek a new life in Europe over the last year.

As Mohammed worked to improve his family’s tiny patch of the sprawling camp, his thoughts travelled far beyond the razor-wire fence that blocked their path into Macedonia, to European capitals where his family’s fate may have been decided.

“If they say the borders are closed, and we cannot go on to Germany or somewhere else, I don’t know what we will do,” he said.

“It is impossible to go back to Syria now – it has been destroyed.”

Controversial plan

The Balkan route linking

Turkey

to Germany and beyond was declared “closed” this week, after the EU and

Ankara

unveiled a controversial plan to deter migrants and refugees from crossing the Mediterranean to

Greece

.

A follow-up summit next week could confirm a deal for the EU to resettle one Syrian refugee from camps in Turkey in exchange for every Syrian that Turkey takes back from Greece; for its part, Ankara wants €6 billion in aid, visa-free access for Turks to the EU and an acceleration of its halting bid to join the bloc.

The scheme is supposed to reunite a fractious EU and mark a turning point in Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since the second World War.

But in all its most crucial aspects – humanitarian, moral, practical, legal, political and financial – the plan faces major and immediate problems.

Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, warned that the proposed deal raised "a number of very serious concerns", including "the potential for collective and arbitrary expulsions, which are illegal".

Major international rights groups also denounced the deal, and what some called the EU’s attempt to “outsource” its commitment to protect refugees to Turkey.

“EU and Turkish leaders have today sunk to a new low, effectively horse trading away the rights and dignity of some of the world’s most vulnerable people,” said Iverna McGowan, head of Amnesty International’s European institutions office

“Turkey has forcibly returned refugees to Syria and many refugees in the country live in desperate conditions without adequate housing.

“Hundreds of thousands of refugee children cannot access formal education.

“By no stretch of imagination can Turkey be considered a ‘safe third country’ that the EU can cosily outsource its obligations to,” she added.

Several EU states baulk at the demands of the Turkish government, made just days after it seized Zaman, the country’s biggest newspaper.

“It is highly questionable that Turkey, which puts a newspaper critical of the government under its own control, presents a wish list three days later and is rewarded by discussions about earlier visa liberalisation,” said Austrian interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner.

“I ask myself if the EU is throwing its values overboard,” she added.

The deal has also done nothing to unite EU states.

Austria and Balkan members boldly declared the migration route permanently closed, earning a public expression of thanks from EU president Donald Tusk.

Greece and Germany sharply criticised the border closures, however, with chancellor Angela Merkel saying the move "puts Greece in a very difficult situation.

“And this situation is not durable and sustainable . . . the problem is not solved by one [EU member] making a decision; it must be a decision that is right for all 28.”

Merkel is still pushing for a mechanism to share refugees among members, but central European states continue to reject such a system.

It is also unclear how migrants reaching Europe will be returned to Turkey, given the deep reluctance of most to go back; and it remains to be seen whether a new Nato mission to stop people smugglers operating between Turkey and Greece will have a major effect on the number of arrivals.

Most pressingly, what is to become of tens of thousands of people, many fleeing the Syrian bloodbath and life-threatening situations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, who are now trapped on the Balkan route in Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Croatia?

Swap limitations

Turkish officials say they have no intention of taking these people back, and that any “swap” deal with the EU will only apply to future arrivals in Europe.

Migration experts and police warn that the Balkan route could now "fragment" and go underground, with people smugglers earning huge profits from opening covert new paths towards western Europe, potentially through Albania, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Romania.

Traffickers are easy to find around Idomeni, but many people stuck there cannot afford to pay them and have no way of going home, if they still have a home to go to.

“Syria is in ruins,” said Mohammed. “We thought Europe would help refugees – if it won’t help us, who will it help?”