Migrant children wait by the fence on the Greek side of the border to enter Macedonia
Welcome to the strange world of 'unsolvable' refugee crises and back-room deals, a world where Cold War relics arm terrorist proxies, and where innocent refugees are used as pawns in ever more sinister games of cat and mouse. In all it's a world almost too absurd and too horrific to believe, but we'll try to tell it, and understand it, anyways. This is the story of the EU-Turkey Refugee Deal.
IntroTensions continue to mount across Europe as the refugee crisis reveals deep cracks in the European Union. In the past month Austria announced the construction of a
massive wall along the Brenner Pass, in order to restrict the flow of people moving to Northern Europe. Subsequently Switzerland announced that it would have to respond to Austria's border closure by stationing a battalion of tanks to keep out the inevitable 'migrant onslaught'. Poor Greece is piling up with refugees after Macedonia closed its border - the tension has led to fights erupting between troops and migrants.
In the background EU and Turkish officials would have us all believe that they've been struggling to find a solution to this 'inescapable' crisis. The result was the EU-Turkey refugee deal which recently took effect - the first refugees have been traded like baseball cards.
In an interview with Sputnik Radio a professor from the University of Twente in the Netherlands pointed out a number of obstacles the EU had to overcome before coming to grips with the refugee crisis. Among them is the EU's lack of a central decision-making body that could issue demands which individual member states couldn't push back on. He
stated, "What you have in the EU is the lack of a central government. In fact, they decided at one stage that they were going to take refugees and now they are pushing them back and they have a new deal with Turkey. But the refugees are still coming anyway."
In all, the professor makes several valid points. However, due to his selection of facts he misses the big picture, and thereby misleads his audience. Besides political in-fighting in Europe, and whether or not the refugee deal will be 'efficient', the following elements play a larger and much more critical role in the refugee crisis:
- The EU functions as a mere cheerleader for the interests of the cabal running the USA.
- Recent US interests have included the decimation of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, thus creating a refugee crisis
- Turkey has played a fundamental role in first collecting, then disbursing refugees into Europe for its own political and financial gain