Europe Refugee Crisis

solarz said:

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What prompted me to post this article wasn't so much the article itself, but the comments.

This is what happens when we have a government that continuously fanned the flames of Islamophobia for 10 years. It makes the bigots in our society believe that their hatred and venom is socially acceptable.

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Jura said:

... I'd suggest everybody who comments on the
Europe Refugee Crisis
to consider if (s)he would've said the same (whatever it is!) if
ten times more; hundred times more
refugees/migrants/displaced persons had been arriving.

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London’s St Pancras station sees second protest this month against UK’s response to migration crisis in which thousands have died while travelling

video follows

Activists threw smoke bombs in a clash with police at London’s Eurostar terminal during a pro-refugee demonstration on Saturday night.

About 100 protesters broke through a police cordon in an attempt to reach the platforms at St Pancras station.

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in riot gear used teargas and batons against the No Borders demonstrators, according to activists.

video follows

Videos posted on Twitter show a melee with police officers trying to hold back a group of demonstrators until more than a dozen managed to break through onto the concourse.

Once inside the station, some of the demonstrators held up a banner saying “Close down Yarl’s Wood & all detention centres”.

Scotland Yard said they tried to enter the Eurostar platforms at the station, but were stopped by officers.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: “Some protesters began to throw items at police, including smoke bombs.

“These protesters were ejected from the station and later dispersed from the area.”

Demonstrators said two people had been arrested and that one person had been injured by police officers.

Activists also claimed the demonstrators were subjected to kettling – a police tactic where groups that police wish to suppress are held in a tight cordon until being allowed to leave one by one.

Pictures were published on social media sites showing police in high-visibility vests questioning people on the concourse of King’s Cross station, just over 100 metres from the scuffles at St Pancras.

Bystanders wrote of the chaos on social media. Joel Benjamin said: “Utter carnage at Kings Cross station for migrants demo. Flares, Cops going in batons drawn.”

PhD student Theo Kindynis wrote: “Protestors break through police lines at Kings Cross St Pancras.

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in solidarity with refugees.”

British Transport police said demonstrators arrived at the station at around 6pm and began a peaceful protest, adding: “Around this time a number of other individuals arrived at the station causing disorder and missiles, including smoke bombs, were thrown at police officers.”

It was the second pro-refugee demonstration to have taken place at St Pancras station this month after protesters threw fake blood on themselves and held up placards saying “borders kill”.

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BRUSSELS (AP) — European leaders lashed out Sunday at each other's handling of the continent's greatest immigration crisis since World War II, even as they came together to seek ways to ease the plight of the tens of thousands marching across the Balkans toward the European Union's heartland.
At a hastily called emergency summit in Brussels, 11 EU and Balkan leaders were especially looking to shore up Greece's porous border with Turkey and slow the flow of people heading north toward the European Union's heartland.

"Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

Nearly 250,000 migrants have passed through the Balkans since mid-September and the surge is not being deterred by either cold weather or colder waters off Greece. Croatia said 11,500 people crossed into the country Saturday, the highest in a single day since Hungary put up a fence and refugees started coming into Croatia in mid-September.

Slovenian Prime Minister Miro Cerar said his tiny Alpine nation was being overwhelmed by the refugees — with 60,000 arriving in the last 10 days — and was not receiving enough help from its EU partners.

He put the challenge in simple terms: if no fresh approach is forthcoming "in the next few days and weeks, I do believe that the European Union and Europe as a whole will start to fall apart."

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Migrants make their way through a field after crossing from Croatia, in Rigonce, Slovenia, Sunday, O …
Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic asked a fundamental question that the 28-nation bloc and non-EU nations like Serbia have been unable to answer since the migratory trek across the Mediterranean and through Turkey started last spring: "What we are going to do with hundreds of thousands of these people?"

Half a year later, there is no answer. Sunday's meeting was hoping to come up with some Band-Aid solutions at best. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras commented that having a summit on the migrant crisis was of little use if Turkey was not invited.

Many say the EU needs to get control of the refugee flow at the bloc's external border between EU-member Greece and Turkey. Migration experts, however, say the flood of refugees won't be halted until the world resolves the war in Syria, which is driving millions out of the country.

Vucic said he was prepared for "hard, not very pleasant" talks. He said Serbia would not "put up any walls" like Hungary's new razor wire-topped border fences.

Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic asked of fellow EU nation Greece: "Why doesn't Greece control its maritime half with Turkey?"

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Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic, center, gestures as he arrives for an EU summit at EU headq …
Greece, criticized for being ill-prepared as a first EU buffer against the migrants, decried the lack of EU solidarity.

"Till today, it was difficult to find a solution, because a series of countries adopt a stance 'Not in my backyard,'" Tsipras said.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, so often the target for building border fences that diverted the flow of refugees to other nations, simply said "Hungary is not on the route anymore, so we are just observers here." Then he lashed into measures other EU nations had already taken, especially those belonging to the Schengen passport-free border zone.

"The no. 1 source of the crisis is that members of the European Union, and especially those who are members of Schengen treaty, are not able, or are not ready to keep their word," Orban declared.

As the leaders bickered, those out in the field begged them to act quickly and more decisively.

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, right, wait for th …
At Slovenia's overwhelmed Brezice refugee camp near the border with Croatia, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency urged leaders to come up with a system to register and screen newcomers when they first enter Europe, rather than in piecemeal attempts at borders along the way.

"But also very important is to help Syria's neighboring countries, where there are around 4 million refugees," said UNHCR spokesman Babar Baloch. "These people don't need to take these risky journeys if there are legal pathways to come to Europe."

Migrants now mainly travel across the water from Turkey to Greece, and then north to Macedonia and Serbia before entering Croatia and moving on to Slovenia and Austria. Most are aiming to get to Germany or Scandinavia.

In a reminder of the dangers, Greece's coast guard said a woman and two young children drowned and seven other people were missing after their boat smashed into rocks on the island of Lesbos amid turbulent seas. Fifty-three others were rescued.

Syrian refugee Mohamed Alabdulameed was one of many forging into Slovenia after nearly three weeks on the road.

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Migrants move through a field after crossing from Croatia, in Rigonce, Slovenia, Sunday, Oct. 25, 20 …
The 28-year-old said he initially hoped to make it to Britain but was changing plans after hearing how dangerous it had become to try and get across the English Channel. More than a dozen migrants have been killed in the last few months trying to hitchhike on trains or trucks going through the Channel Tunnel.

"I am asking myself 'Why do they close the doors in front of us, especially the educated people who studied their language in other countries?'" he said. "That's why I am really surprised and astonished at the same time."

The number of people on the move across Europe was still in the tens of thousands.

Mahmoud Awad, a UNHCR field protection officer, said about 1,000 people passed through Serbia's border town of Berkasovo and into Croatia overnight. In the Austrian border town of Spielfeld, 2,500 people spent the night in tents and 7,000 more were expected Sunday from Slovenia, the dpa news agency reported. In Germany's southernmost state of Bavaria, the flow of asylum-seekers from Austria was steady at 3,000 to 6,000 people per day.

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kwaigonegin said:

None of this would've happen if Assad is still in power. As bad as he was/is you didn't have millions of Syrians trying to flee Syria as they do now because the entire damn place is >>> messed up <<<

NOTE: According to SD rules, not even substitutes for the profanity is allowed

On a very related note my town could potentially be a receiving site for 10K Syrian refugees.

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This is the moment our generation must act, says migration expert Peter Sutherland

Britain will be adopting a morally unacceptable position if it turns its back on the refugee crisis in Europe, according to the

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special representative for international migration.

As winter weather sets in across Europe, Peter Sutherland, a former attorney general of Ireland, and chairman of the London School of Economics, said: “This is not a transient issue. It challenges the moral fabric of the societies we live in. To think, to be told, that your country can in some way isolate itself from the crisis is insane. It’s completely wrong.” Sutherland added: “Are we going to allow refugees to stand in freezing rivers at our borders this winter, to live in freezing tents with their children?”

Speaking after the European Commission estimated that more than three million more people are expected to arrive in the EU by the end of next year and that those numbers are not expected to diminish until 2017, Sutherland said the EC had mechanisms to deal with the crisis, but that the humanitarian response had been woefully inadequate. “If the national debate is all around the negatives, keeping people out, then of course it’s going to be polarised and xenophobic,” he said. “This is not me having an Anglophobic rant. Right across Europe the evidence is that migration makes a positive contribution, not a negative one. Migrants contribute far more than they take out and they are necessary to keep a balance between retirees and workers.”

Sutherland has been scathing of the language of “racism and xenophobia” used by

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and other heads of state, criticising them for dismissing the plight of those they called “economic migrants”. But he said there was no longer any hiding place for leaders confronted with the issue. “This is a generational challenge for Europe. Earlier generations have had theirs, and have coped with them. We have to know that this is our moment,” he said. “Legally and morally, proximity should never define response. Why should people whose lives have been commendably saved in the Mediterranean become the responsibility of Italy? Why should Greece take all the responsibility because they are on the route? This is a distortion, this is a global responsibility, a European responsibility. Resettlement and relocation has to be part of the solution.”

Sutherland said there was a lack of strong leadership: “Angela Merkel has provided enormous leadership; Sweden has provided enormous leadership. Then you compare to what others are doing and you see the chasm.

“You can say problems are developing politically in Germany, which they are. But part of the reason there’s antagonism is the fact that the responsibility is not being fairly shared. It’s inevitable that people in Sweden, Germany and Denmark look around and think, ‘This is unfair’,” he said.

This year 700,000 people have come to Europe looking for sanctuary or jobs. Britain has pledged to take in 4,000 a year from camps near Syria, a tiny number compared with German and Swedish offers. Sutherland said Europe was more than capable of absorbing a problem which is “less than 1% of our population”.

“We have three alternatives. One, do we send them back? Two, do we leave them on the beaches or put them in insanitary camps getting bigger and bigger? Three, do we welcome them? There’s no way to dress this up. These are the questions and the moral answer is we take them in. You cannot solve this problem by building fences or moats.”

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Jeff Head said:

Pretty amazing animated graphic of the influx into Europe.

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At the above site, scroll down to the full, moving graphic. Hover over the top portion with the date scale and pan to move the date. Select any country to look at it alone.

Here's a single point in time from that presentation:

View attachment 20712

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Brumby said:

When I look at the map, the white dots are all moving up northwards even though there are many Muslim countries in the immediate vicinity (south) like Saudi Arabia which has the capacity to provide temporary relief. It looks more like some form of attempted permanent migration rather than any temporary relief effort. I don't get the politics concerning this and neither have I seen any discussions on why the immediate Muslim countries are not providing the immediate relief solution.

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