European governments are preparing for a major humanitarian emergency in Greece over refugees amid panic that the European Union is at serious risk of a breakdown, says a Guardian report.
EU interior ministers met in Brussels on Thursday in a new attempt to forge a common response, but the meeting was clouded by a row between Greece and Austria, which is spearheading a campaign to quarantine Greece and throttle the flow of migrants up the Balkans by partially sealing the Greek border with Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. In response, Greece recalled its envoy in Vienna.
If Greece is cut off from the Schengen zone, Berlin predicts a humanitarian and security emergency within days, The Guardian says.
Dimitris Avramopoulos, the EU commissioner in charge of migration, said planning for a major aid operation was highly advanced and would be finalized within days. “The possibility of a humanitarian crisis of a large scale is there and very real,” he said.
Greece’s Deputy Migration Minister Yannis Mouzalas commented on the interior ministers meeting saying, “A very large number [of participants] here attempt to discuss how to address a humanitarian crisis in Greece that they themselves intend to create.”
Interior ministers appear to have set themselves a deadline of March 7 before resorting to a “plan B,” which would cut Greece off and probably also see the 26-country Schengen area being suspended for up to two years as national border controls are imposed across the EU, The Guardian says.
In a unilateral move, Austria announced last week it was limiting the number of people who could claim asylum to 80 days, and then on Wednesday had 10 Balkan countries convene with the aim to stop the refugee flow and return them to Greece.
A special EU summit with the participation of Turkey will take place in March, initiated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The German chancellor is hoping to convince the Turks to take hundreds of thousands of refugees and stop flows to Greece. It is very unlikely that the Turks will deliver, though. Most EU states will refuse to take part in directly resettling refugees from Turkey, according to The Guardian.
The unilateral moves being taken across Europe are adding to the sense of chaos and impotence in the EU and are turning Greece into Europe’s immigration pressure cooker.
The Greek Prime Minister is threatening to block decisions at EU summits unless there is a major shift towards coherent policy-making. However, it seems that the commission in Brussels is being ignored and bypassed.
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