EU-Turkey deal on refugees moral failure: Analyst

Jan Oberg, the founder of transnational.org, was interviewed by Press TV on the deal between the European Union and Turkey on the refugee crisis.

What follows is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: How do you react to the fact that this deal seems to have genuinely gone through?

Oberg: I predicted two days ago that it would go through and I called it that from now on the European Union is a ‘criminal union.’ I can only rely on Amnesty International and others who have been outraged and used very strong words about this very disturbing, unpleasant impression that we are now bartering in Europe with refugees and bartering them out of the European Union.

Now sending back people from Greece is a very complicated thing to do without violence because they go to Greece because they want to seek asylum there. Secondly, we must not forget that behind every refugee stands an arms trader and a militant policy.

This crisis has been created predominantly by EU and NATO countries who have been bombing in these countries and secondly it is very, very embarrassing, I would say, that the EU has no leadership that can take the moral and other responsibility for having been at least to a certain extent creating this problem but handing it over by paying it away, by paying Turkey to take this.

Remember please that those who came as refugees to Europe last year are 0.2 percent of the five hundred million people living here. It is in my view shameful that we do not have more capacity, more will and more burden-sharing philosophy and vision than just getting rid of it in this way. 

Press TV: Do you think that this will succeed? Many people have said that this was a plan that would fail at some point. How do you feel about that?

Oberg: I think it is a moral failure already. Secondly, unless there is a much better situation developing in a few weeks all over the Middle East, the refugees will keep on coming and the human smugglers will of course find other ways to get them into Europe. This will create huge criminality, you know, people providing false passports or whatever and all this is not going to go away until we change our policies and the European Union becomes a union, a vision that is humane. This union boasts of being first of all a union for peace inside the EU and in the rest of the world. That’s its preamble. Secondly it says that all foreign and security policies shall be done with one voice. Now this is an ultra failure because it has not been able to talk with one voice.

Press TV: Do you see any signs that those root causes that you talked about, that the EU will ever address those root causes of its own policy failures?

Oberg: At the moment Russia is the only one who has done something helpful namely by withdrawing and stopping bombing in Syria. There is no peace agreements yet. There is a lot of groups in Syria not participating, the terrorists who are not at all part of the ceasefire and we have countries bombing in this place.

My own country Denmark decided last week that it will begin bombing in Syria. This means more refugees coming in. And please take into account that when you get rid of people and send them back from Greece to Turkey you send them out of the European Union and this means we have also broken down the Dublin Convention which clearly says that asylum seeker should be processed in the first place where he sets foot in or she sets foot in the European Union.

Now they are thrown out and thrown back outside, back to Turkey which is outside the European Union. I do not understand how this is possible and people can celebrate it. I think it is a day of shame and sorrow in today’s Europe.

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