Migrants wait on edge of Europe ahead of return to Turkey

[Anthea]

Telegraph

Migrants wait in limbo on edge of Europe ahead of Turkey returns

Smugglers are reported to offer trips to Germany starting at €1,500 (£1,200), or to Scandinavia for €2,500. Ships to Italy are priced at around €1,000.

Refugees’ Facebook groups abound with suggestions and advertisements for new routes. Smugglers are offering direct trips with large “ghost ships” from Turkey to Italy — a route that was shut by the Turkish coastguard last year.

“Until legal options for refugees are established, a crackdown on smugglers will have a limited effect,” said UNHCR’s Boris Cheshirkov on Lesbos. “Smugglers are a criminal enterprise and therefore flexible. As some routes close, others open.”

Heaven Crawley, a professor of migration at Coventry University, said: “The problem with this deal is that it just won’t work. The migrants will keep coming… all Europe will have achieved is the loss of the moral high ground.”

On Lesbos, few knew of the planned returns to Turkey. Others had heard rumours, but believed their smuggler’s tale that the deal was a fiction invented by Europe to deter them from coming.

“Even if I knew it would be like this, I would still have come,” said Jonathan, who fled from Eritrea to Uganda three years ago. After receiving threats in Uganda he flew to Turkey with his wife and boarded a dinghy to Lesbos four days ago.

Turkey is currently negotiating with Eritrea and other countries, including Afghanistan, to send back failed asylum-seekers, raising fears of “refoulement” — returning refugees to places where they are at risk, which is prohibited under international law.

Aid agencies have questioned the legality of the deal, warning that Turkey was not the “safe country” European leaders made it out to be. On Friday, the UN voiced concerns that safeguards ensuring returned migrants’ rights had not been put in place.

“I don’t know what they would do to me if I returned. They made me join the military in 1995. When I tried to leave, they put me in a prison and made me work hard for years,” said Jonathan.

“There was no shelter, little food. But honestly” — he gestured at the detention centre’s tall fence in front of him — “it looked a bit like this. I escaped prison in my country to another prison in Europe.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04 ... y-returns/