Valentina Pop and Martin Sobczyk : Migrants Move Faster than the EU
http://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-migration-crisis-refugees-move-faster-than-the-eu-1443127840
BRUSSELS—While the European Union overrode the bitter objections of four members this week to establish a plan to relocate 120,000 migrants around the continent, most asylum seekers are deciding for themselves where they want to go—and more quickly than officials can respond.
The plan to resettle 120,000 asylum seekers now in Italy, Greece and other front-line countries and an earlier plan to resettle another 40,000 migrants affect just a fraction of the more than half a million people who have sought refuge in Europe this year.
The plans are meant in part to ease pressure on Germany, the refugees’ destination of choice. The relocation is expected to take place over two years, and is tied to bolstering efforts to register migrants in Italy and Greece as they arrive on those countries’ shores.
But most of the people landing there are moving on swiftly, even the relatively few whom local authorities do manage to register, some officials say.
According to more than a dozen people who have trekked across the continent in the past few weeks, it takes an average 10 days to get from Turkey to Germany, with usually just a few days in Greece.
Greece, from which a total 66,400 refugees are to be relocated to other EU countries, has so far registered fewer than 10,000 of the arriving people, several diplomats involved in the talks said.
“And of those 10,000, most of them are probably in Germany already,” one EU official said.
Supporters of the redistribution plans—namely officials in Western Europe and Brussels—say it was important to establish procedures whereby all countries would accept that they have to take in refugees from EU countries under particular strain from the arrivals. Once the experiment with a relatively small number of migrants succeeded, the thinking was it would be replaced by a more permanent redistribution system to spread the burden of the crisis more equitably.
Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite said Wednesday that the EU governments had “started wrongly” in trying to solve the refugee crisis, by “clashing about the redistribution of 120,000 people when we have millions of refugees coming.”
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Hungary, which has counted nearly 250,000 people who have entered its territory since the beginning of the year, has taken the most forceful approach in trying to stem the tide by erecting fences on its southern borders.
But it has still failed to block what has become a corridor to Germany through it and neighboring countries: Overwhelmed authorities continue to ship tens of thousands of migrants who have crossed into Hungarian territory to the Austrian border.
Budapest refused to be part of the redistribution effort, even as the EU offered to take 54,000 people out of Hungary and spread them across the bloc. The Hungarian government argued that the EU should focus on stemming the tide in Greece first, rather than starting to redistribute people who are on the move anyway.
Even bilateral efforts by France and Belgium to alleviate the burden on Germany and recently take in some of its refugees are starting to crumble: Dozens who have been moved to those countries have, after a few days, simply returned to Germany, according to Belgian officials and aid workers in France. Bottom line: It is hard to force people to move to a country where they don’t want to live.
Germany insists that refugees can’t choose where they want to settle. Speaking at a news conference in Brussels on Wednesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that all EU member states were safe for refugees. “A person fleeing war and misery cannot demand to go to a particular country in the European Union,” she said. “We are all countries that are part of the same asylum system. There is no freedom to choose the country.”
But this hardly reflects the reality on the ground, where despite border controls, fences and tougher rules, people keep coming in by the thousands every day.
EU leaders are warning that the refugees who eventually arrive could number in the millions. European Council President Donald Tusk said Wednesday that eight million people are displaced within Syria alone, and another four million are already in refugee camps outside the country.
“The greatest tide of refugees and migrants is yet to come,” he said.
ENLARGE Meanwhile, the potential for more discord among neighboring EU countries was illustrated Thursday as tensions escalated between Croatia and its non-EU neighbor Serbia over border crossings and Austria announced that it was sending back asylum seekers to other EU countries.
Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said that authorities had begun sending back those who had registered in another EU country, where they should await asylum decisions. More than 5,000 have already been sent back, primarily to Bulgaria and Romania, and more people will be moved back to Croatia and Serbia, she said.
The migrant route via Croatia has now led to a rift between Croatia and Serbia, bringing relations between the two countries to one of their lowest points since the end of the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
On Wednesday night, Croatia temporarily refused entry to all Serbian cars and citizens trying to enter the country at the Croatian border town of Bajakovo.
The government later allowed people to move, but maintained its ban on vehicles, and extended the ban to another border crossing at the town of Tovarnik. The measures are a direct response to Serbia’s decision on Wednesday to ban Croatian cargo traffic, itself a retaliation for Croatia’s closure of seven of its eight road border crossings last week.
Serbia called Croatia’s latest move discriminatory. Ratcheting up the rhetoric, the country’s foreign minister likened the measure to rules enforced when Croatia had a puppet government controlled by Nazi Germany and Italy. Serbia’s Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic called Croatia’s steps “irrational and stupid.”
—Margit Feher in Budapest and Noemie Bisserbe in Paris contributed to this article.
Write to Valentina Pop at valentina.pop@wsj.com
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