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Europe: At the Intersection of Eastern and Southern Flows

Europe has emerged as the destination of a broad range of new refugee flows. The Mediterranean has long been and continues to be a key route for long-established migrant and refugee flows. Here I only focus on a set of new flows that took off in 2014 and need to be distinguished from the ongoing older flows of, mostly, migrants. The Mediterranean, especially on its eastern side, is now the site where refugees, smugglers, and the European Union (E.U.) each deploy their own specific logics and together have produced a massive multifaceted crisis. One facet was the sudden surge in the numbers of refugees in late 2014, a possibility not foreseen by the pertinent E.U. authorities given that the wars they were escaping had been going on for several years. A second one was that the crisis became a business opportunity for smugglers that would expand over the ensuing year to reach an estimated $2 billion in income by mid-2015, which is now estimated to have grown to $5 billion.3030. Rick Gladstone, “Smugglers Made at Least $5 Billion Last Year in Europe Migrant Crisis.” The New York Times, May 17, 2016, accessed May 30, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/world/europe/migrants-refugees-smugglers.html. One feeder was that the smugglers benefitted from keeping the flows going, persuading their potential clients/victims, that everything would be fine once they reached Europe. A third was the major crisis in Italy and, especially, Greece, two countries already burdened by their struggling economies, with Greece the destination for over a million refuge-seekers by early 2016 who had to be sheltered, fed, and processed.

And yet, the facts on the ground in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Eritrea, and others, were all familiar. If anything, the surprise should have been that the surge in refugees did not happen sooner. The UNHCR, among others had been recording the escalating numbers of the internally displaced and of refugees.3131. “World at War: UNHCR Global Trends 2014 - Forced Displacement in 2014,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2015, accessed January 9, 2016, http://www.unhcr.org/556725e69.html. The conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria were not going to end anytime soon. Nor will those in Somalia or in South Sudan, each with their specific character. The brutality of these conflicts, with their full disregard for international humanitarian law, indicated that sooner or later people would start fleeing the violence.3232. See, e.g., James Hampshire, “Europe’s Migration Crisis,” Political Insight 6, no. 3 (2015):8-11; IDMC, 2015; Ibrahim Sirkeci, Deniz Eroglu Utku, and Pinar Yazgan, “Syrian Crisis and Migration,” Migration Letters 12, no. 3 (2015): 181-92.

For three decades Afghanistan has produced the greatest number of refugees, according to the UNHCR: It has 2.7 million refugees under UNHCR’s mandate.3333. “World at War,” UNHCR, 2015. According to the Afghan government, 80 per cent of the country is not safe. That is because extremist groups such as the Taliban and Islamic State’s local affiliate are waging insurgencies in many provinces. Now in the past year Syria has taken its place, and one new refugee in four worldwide in 2015 is now a Syrian. Syria is an extreme case. According to UNHCR, 7.7 million Syrians had left the country by September 2015, but those numbers keep growing.3434. According to a report by the Washington Post (Karam Alhamad, Vera Mironova, and Sam Whitt, “In Two Charts, This Is What Refugees Say about Why They’re Leaving Syria Now.” Washington Post, Sept. 28, 2015, accessed January 11, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/09/28/in-two-charts-this-is-what-refugees-say-about-why-they-are-leaving-syria-now/), among those who left, 57 per cent of ordinary civilians say that they left because it is simply too dangerous to stay. Others give more elaborate versions of the same reason. Some left because the Assad government occupied their towns (43 per cent) or destroyed their homes (32 per cent) or because they were threatened with violence if they did not leave (35 per cent). Many left at the urging of family (48 per cent) and friends (38 per cent) or following the lead from their neighbors (32 per cent). Others point to the increasingly high costs of finding even basic access to food and other necessities (32 per cent) and left once they finally ran out of money (16 per cent). Iraq has 3.4 million recognised refugees.3535. See, e.g., Patrick Kingsley, “Refugee Crisis: Apart from Syrians, Who Is Traveling to Europe?” Guardian, September 10, 2015, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/10/refugee-crisis-apart-from-syrians-who-else-is-travelling-to-europe. Its situation deteriorated further when much territory, including its second city, Mosul, was conquered by Isis, adding to the disastrous effects and religious divisions that became extreme with the west’s invasion of the country in 2003.3636. Patrick Cockburn, “Refugee Crisis: Where Are All These People Coming from and Why?” Independent, September 7, 2015, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/refugee-crisis-where-are-all-these-people-coming-from-and-why-10490425.html. More than 1.2 million Pakistanis have been displaced by insurgencies in north-west Pakistan, according to the UN;3737. “2015 UNHCR Country Operations Profile-Pakistan,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2015, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e487016.html. further, Pakistan has seen acute terrorist violence for many years and which continues.3838. See “Fatalities in Terrorist Violence in Pakistan, 2003-2016,” South Asia Terrorism Portal, 2016, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/pakistan/database/casualties.htm. Somalia remains the third largest refugee producing country at 1.1 million refugees.3939. “World at War,” UNHCR, 2015.

The humanitarian crisis is escalating and spreading. According to Human Rights Watch, over the last two years about 25 million people were driven from their homes, including almost 12 million Syrians, 4.2 million Iraqis, 3.6 million Afghans, 2.2 million Somalis, and almost half a million Eritreans.4040. “Why do People Risk Their Lives to Cross the Mediterranean?,” Human Rights Watch, July 28, 2015, accessed May 21, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/07/28/why-do-people-risk-their-lives-cross-mediterranean. Eritrea is somewhat different (e.g. “Despite Border Crackdown in Ethiopia, Migrants Still Risk Lives to Leave,” Guardian, August 25, 2015, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/aug/25/despite-border-crackdown-ethiopia-migrants-risk-lives; Patrick Kingsley, “It’s Not at War, but Up to 3% of Its People Have Fled. What Is Going On in Eritrea?” Guardian, July 22, 2015, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/22/eritrea-migrants-child-soldier-fled-what-is-going; and Vittorio Longhi, “Refugees: Ask the EU to Stop Funding the Eritrean Dictatorship!” Change.org, 2014, accessed January 9, 2016, https://www.change.org/p/free-eritrea-support-democracy-prevent-the-exodus-and-further-deaths-at-sea). The 1998-2000 war with Ethiopia remains an issue even though the war ended with the Algiers Accord in 2001. Ethiopia does not recognise the border demarcated under the agreement, and Eritrea considers some territory that remains under Ethiopian control as illegally occupied. The state has used this disagreement with Ethiopia to justify the mass conscription of its citizens, often lasting a lifetime. It is this that has pushed almost a million Eritreans to leave the country (See e.g. Zachary Laub, “Authoritarianism in Eritrea and the Migrant Crisis.” CFR Backgrounder, Council on Foreign Relations, Nov. 11, 2015, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.cfr.org/eritrea/authoritarianism-eritrea-migrant-crisis/p37239; and more generally, “2015 UNHCR Subregional Operations Profile-East and Horn of Africa,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2015, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e4838e6.html). Further, UNHCR has found that there are also far more unaccompanied children in the recent flows into Europe than were expected. To these flows we need to add the half million waiting in northern Libya, at any given time in the last two years, for ships to take them across the Mediterranean. According to UNHCR,4141. “Facts and Figures about Refugees,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2015, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.unhcr.ie/about-unhcr/facts-and-figures-about-refugees. the number of global refugees is now over 60 million, with some tentative estimates reaching 80 million by early 2016. This is the largest ever since the humanitarian system was put into place. Left out of this count are many of the internally displaced and the growing number of undeclared or not yet counted refugees; this might be the case with some of those crossing the Mediterranean.

There are multiple histories at work in the flows to Europe. And yet, seen together there is a distinct logic that emerges: expulsion. And if anything this logic of expulsion is expanding. The civil war in Yemen that started in 2015, the resuming of the Turkish-Kurdish civil war in July 2015 (a war that has killed 40,000 people since 1984), and the rise of Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group fighting a brutal war in northern Nigeria and Chad.4242. “Southeast Asia Migrant Crisis,” The Citizen, 2015; Monica Mark, “Boko Haram’s ‘Deadliest Massacre’: 2,000 Feared Dead in Nigeria.” Guardian, January 10, 2015, accessed January 13, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/09/boko-haram-deadliest-massacre-baga-nigeria. Significant is also the collapse of the political and economic order in Libya, which has produced a massive security vacuum. And land-grabbing in Sub-Saharan Africa is generating a whole new politics of food,4343. See e.g. Ruth Hall, “Land Grabbing in Africa and the New Politics of Food.” Future Agricultures, Policy Brief 41, June, 2011, accessed April 13, 2016, http://www.future-agricultures.org/publications/research-and-analysis/1427-land-grabbing-in-africa-and-the-new-politics-of-food/file; and Sassen, Expulsions, 2014, chapter 2. with the numbers of the disadvantaged growing rapidly. These trends are enormous challenges to the international and to the European system.