Tag Archives: Migrant

EU Split One Year After Merkel Migrant Offer

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One year since Germany controversially opened its arms to Syrians fleeing war, the EU has tightened the borders of “Fortress Europe” but remains deeply divided over how to share the refugee burden.

Angela Merkel justified her decision at the time by saying that the biggest migrant crisis since World War II “did not reflect well on Europe”, yet other countries furiously accused her of opening the floodgates.

Since last year when one million migrants entered the continent, the EU has successfully shut the main Balkans route, while a deal with Turkey has massively reduced numbers reaching the Greek islands.

However the bloc’s flagship scheme to share out refugees around the bloc has been an embarrassing failure — meeting just two percent of its target — while deaths in the Mediterranean have actually risen this year.

Yves Pascouau, director of migration at the European Policy Centre think-tank, told AFP that the “idea of cutting migration routes, in terms of realpolitik, has worked effectively.”

But the deal with post-coup-bid Turkey is “fragile” and “we have still not succeeded in overcoming the divisions between member states” on sharing out migrants and on reforming asylum rules.

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http://guardian.ng/news/eu-split-one-year-after-merkel-migrant-offer/

Syrian Migrant Killed By Own Bomb In Germany

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A Syrian migrant set off an explosive device near an open-air music festival in southern Germany that killed himself and wounded a dozen others, authorities said Monday, the third attack to hit the region in a week.

The 27-year-old had spent time in a psychiatric facility, but the authorities said an Islamist motive for the attack on Sunday night in the city of Ansbach appeared “likely”.

Germany is reeling after nine people died in a shopping centre shooting rampage in Munich on Friday and four people were wounded in an axe attack on a train in Wuerzburg on July 18.

All three attacks were in Bavaria, which has been a gateway for tens of thousands of refugees under German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal asylum policy.

Police said the man intended to target the music festival on Sunday but was turned away because he did not have a ticket, and set off the explosive device outside a nearby cafe.

The perpetrator was killed in the blast, police said in a statement, and a spokeswoman said 12 people were wounded, three of them seriously.

“My personal view is that it is very likely that this was a real Islamist suicide attack,” regional interior minister Joachim Herrmann said.

Herrmann added that beyond the heightened security fears, he was worried “the right to asylum would be undermined” by the events of the past week.

Sunday’s explosion happened just outside a cafe in Ansbach city centre, not far from where more than 2,500 people had gathered for the concert, at around 10pm.

Credit: Punch

EU Migrant Relocation Plan To Start Wednesday In Greece

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Greece will begin the process of sending refugees, mostly Syrians and Iraqis, to other EU member states under the bloc’s refugee relocation plan on Wednesday, Athens said.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will meet a first group of 30 refugees at Athens airport early Wednesday morning before they voluntarily board a plane for Luxembourg, the government said in a statement Tuesday.

The European commissioner for immigration, Dimitris Avramopoulos of Greece, as well as European Parliament president Martin Schulz and Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn will attend the launch of the programme, an EU statement said.

Under the EU plan, nearly 160,000 migrants, including 66,000 for whom Greece was the first port of call, are to be shared out among EU countries after being processed at so-called “hotspots” in Italy and Greece.

Credit: AFP