M N Hebbar :
FOR THE past several weeks Germany has been witness to waves of refugees from the Middle East, more precisely from Syria, where the ongoing fighting between ISIS and Kurdish forces has resulted in an overspill into Turkey.
Refugees seeking political asylum in Germany is not a recent phenomenon given its historical past. Germany has put the welfare of refugees among its constitutional obligations whereby persons fleeing political persecution and/or physical torture and violence at the hands of regimes back home arriving in Germany seeking asylum are not sent back, pending due processes of law.
However, this beacon of hope for the oppressed has seen the scale of political refugees growing steadily in the last few years, rising from some 48,000 in 2010 to more than 139,000 arrivals in 2014 and still counting. Both the government and the public at large are deeply concerned while right-wing extremists have begun fomenting trouble.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has had important issues to grapple with as she returned from Brussels last week but none so absurd as a legal petition received in Berlin from a civilian outfit in Italy charging Germany with responsibility for the ‘massacre’ in 1943 of 215 Italian citizens in Rome during World War II by Nazi troops in reprisals.
What’s more, it demands monetary compensation individually as well. The government is dumbfounded since it is well over six decades that the incident has allegedly taken place. Why now?
However, it’s the latest influx of refugees from war-torn Syria that has the government worried. What is more alarming are German intelligence reports pointing to the quiet departure of nearly a dozen German nationals to Syria to join the forces fighting there. The government has stepped up preventive surveillance on this count.
The issue of immigration in Germany has assumed more urgency ever since the first refugee crisis struck home in 2012 when some 300 African would-be refugees drowned due to their boat capsizing in Italian waters while attempting to enter Europe via Italian shores. There was widespread outrage in Europe demanding answers.
In the face of huge diplomatic pressures from African sources, Germany had then agreed to accept a token 5000 such African refugees while the rest were ‘distributed’ among other EU states willing to take them in, rather reluctantly. But the present influx has compelled the authorities to step up immediate measures to put these Syrian refugees, women and children mostly, into acceptable shelters, converting even football stadiums into a temporary haven for them. Relief and rehabilitation are an urgent priority until a more permanent solution can be chalked out at the EU level in Brussels.
In other words, with developments in Iraq, Syria and now Turkey hovering on the brink of military intervention, Chancellor Merkel has taken it upon herself to forge a German policy towards migration that could be the template for EU-wide policy that is sorely lacking, with each member state throwing up reservations on the back of national interests. The issue has just erupted into a major controversy, with Britain wading into it from a different angle with the recent astounding statement of Prime Minister David Cameron that seeks to cut immigration levels from EU.
Chancellor Merkel has maintained her diplomatic cool but promptly and firmly shot down Cameron’s proposal while addressing the House of Commons during her visit to London, saying a clear ‘No’ to basic reforms sought by Britain to the EU constitution that would permit such deviation. “I’ve not come here to preside over the disruption of the European architecture that answers all Britain’s wishes”, she thundered.
This was a great disappointment for Cameron on his home turf on top of the EU’s demand that Britain pay up 2.1 billion euros to the Euro budget within weeks because of its relative prosperity!
What Britain has a little in common with Germany is the fact that for the most part of three decades, the main focus was on the economy, unemployment and health services. Now they seem to have been edged out in a way by the rise of immigration on the national agenda.
Rightly or wrongly, immigration has become a priority for the British citizen and politics has seen the rise of UKIP (UK Independence Party) and its wooing of voters on the immigration issue – they are for limiting immigration. The Tories are now fighting on a peculiar pitch, as Cameron would be hard put to defend his position that is to face the electorate in the 2017 parliamentary stakes. In short, the immigration issue makes demands that cannot be met, setting up an agenda that is most likely to fail. The fact of the matter is that Eurosceptics will have a field day in Britain and make Cameron’s position difficult and indefensible. He has been pushed into a corner, exacerbating anti-EU feelings.
Furthermore, an island race can find it an uphill struggle to be left out there on a limb in this age of an interdependent international order if Britain were indeed to leave the EU.
European Commission President Manuel Jose Barroso delivered practically the same message in London last week when in the course of a speech he stated firmly that “Britain will be irrelevant outside the EU”.
(M. N. Hebbar is a veteran journalist and commentator on European affairs)
