Turkish soldier fires at German Frontex officers at Greece’s Evros border

Source: Keep Talking Greece

May 1 2020

A dangerous incident took place at the Evros border netween Turkey and Greece, when Turkish soldiers fired warning shot and then aimed at German officers patrolling with border with Greece. According to an exclusive story by German magazine Der Spiegel the incident took place on April 28.

Frontex has deployed some 100 officers, among them 20 Germans, in Greece along the Evros border in March as part of the so-called RAPID intervention requested by Athens, when Turkey was pushing thousands of migrants to Europe.

The Turkish soldiers targeted German officials and fired at least one shot; it is unclear where the bullet went to.

No one was injured in the incident that was confirmed by both the European border protection agency Frontex and the German Ministry of Interior.

The incident occurred near the Greek town of Tychero

Citing an internal document of Frontex, Der Spiegel writes that “a Turkish soldier fired a shot at 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday evening when German officer were on the other side of the border.”

The German border guard reportedly heard a shot from the Turkish side of the border and he immediately took cover.

Through a pair of binoculars, the German border guards saw a Turkish soldier aiming an automatic weapon at the Greek side on the other side of the river shore.

Then the Turkish soldier showed his right middle finger and went back to his tent. Other soldiers would have shouted “come, come”. A short time later, six more Turkish soldiers had appeared and were once again aiming their weapons at the German and Greek border guards.

Frontex said on a Spiegel request that all the facts about the incident were with the Greek authorities.

The Turkish government was unavailable for comment on Thursday, the German magazine notes.

Germany has been participating in the Frontex mission in Greece for several years. It is mostly federal police officers who assist the Greek authorities in checking the border, but the state police also provide officials for the German Frontex force. By March there were usually around 60 civil servants.

A day after he incident, Greece’s deputy migration minister George Koumoutsakos had a teleconference with FRONTEX boss Fabrice Leggeri. The two men discussed the dispatch of additional reinforcements by Frontex to Greece in light of anticipated increased summer migrant arrivals.

800,000 Migrants Lie In Wait In Libya, Ready To Break For Europe

Πηγή: Breitbart News
By CHRIS TOMLINSON
March 31 2016

A report from Libya claims there are at least 800,000 migrants on the coast waiting for the right moment to cross the sea to Italy, and the European Union (EU) plans a new summit to prepare for the next potential great wave of migrants.

Austrian paper Kronen Zeitung reports that French Interior minister Jean-Yves Le Drian claimed the number of migrants in North Africa waiting to cross the Mediterranean sea numbered in the “hundreds of thousands.” European Union foreign policy chief Federica Moghoerini confirmed the fears of the French official saying that the EU estimated at least 500,000 displaced people were waiting to flee to Italy. Ms. Mogherini was slammed by critics last week after she cried during a press conference following the Brussels attacks, with Members of the European Parliament calling for her resignation over the incident.

Libya has been a more or less failed state since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and has seen rebel fighters and Islamic State militants battle for control of the country. For months Libyan government forces have struggled to combat the two groups who use the migrant crisis to extort money from African migrants who want to come to Europe.

Mr. Le Drian said their is an urgent need for sides to come together and form a national unity government to control the borders or Europe risks hundreds of thousands of African migrants arriving when the weather on the sea improves.

He noted that the European mission to combat people smuggling from North Africa, code named Operation Sophia, has only a limited effectiveness.

The ships that track migrant vessels only have the ability to do so in international waters and not in Libyan territory. Mr. Le Drian says that a working government would benefit greatly by allowing EU ships to cooperate with Libyan officials to stop smuggling at the source rather than hope to find them miles out at sea.

In the past year around 200,000 people have crossed the sea from Libya into Italy. Around 3,700 of them were killed in accidents where makeshift rafts capsized, resulting in drownings. Some migrants, later identified as Christians, did not survive the trip for different reasons, as they were thrown off boats by Muslims before they could make it to shore. At least 15 Muslim migrants were arrested in one particular incident according to Italian police.

European leaders have convened a new summit for April 18th to discuss the situation in Libya. The topic of the summit will be how to potentially handle the 800,000 migrants who may attempt to cross into Europe this summer.

An unnamed spokesperson for the EU Foreign Affairs Council told Belgian site EurActiv: “…the discussion will focus on the EU support of an inclusive agreement in all sectors, from humanitarian to migratory… including security related aspects. the discussion will take place on April 18th following the regular Foreign Affairs Council meeting and ahead of Foreign Affairs Council Defence on April 19th, in Luxembourg.” The spokesman also said, “the objective will be to bring together foreign affairs ministers with their counterparts in defence in order to effectively address the new challenging situation.”

Breitbart London previously reported that the EU border agency Frontex has said that stated Africa will be the next great challenge for illegal migration into Europe. Millions of Africans face poverty, war, and disease, and due to a weak regime in Libya, combined with a growing cottage industry of people smuggling, the threat of 800,000 migrants may only be the beginning.

The Western Balkans: a Threat to the EU?

Πηγή: Geopolitical Monitor
By Dr. Muhammad Aslam Khan
Nov 12 2012

Simmering geopolitical environments in Middle East (ME), characterised by violence and conflicts have posed a challenge as well as a threat to the security, peace and stability of Western Balkan Region (WBR). 

The EU woke up to a surprise when a wave of instability swept across ME and authoritarian governments, considered strong and stable thus far, fell like a pack of cards (Arab Spring). 

“The Middle East is the most important geography which can directly affect the EU’s well-being in economic and security aspects. Weak governance, if not absolute corruption, the absence of rule of law and justice, nepotism and non-adherence to the democratic processes were the main collapse-syndromes that many see as possible recurring phenomenon in Western Balkan if these were allowed to pass by in the ME without inferring clues to achieve peace and prosperity in WBR.

WBR, the periphery of Europe, or as some call it ‘the periphery of the periphery,’ is vital ground that Europe cannot remain oblivious about. Though it poses no military threat of any significant magnitude, it has the potential to become a conduit for various threats and challenges emanating from the Middle East and Sahel-Sahara Region. These threats are as follows:

Illegal Immigrant Traffic

Involves the act of recruiting, transporting, transferring, harbouring or receiving a person using force, coercion or other means, for the ultimate purpose of exploitation. 

Every year, thousands of men, women and children fall into the hands of traffickers, in their own countries and abroad. 

Every country in the world is affected by trafficking, whether as a country of origin, transit or a destination for victims [1]. 

In the wake of visa liberalisation for the WBR by the EU, immigrants have tended to leave the poorer areas of the WBR in order to seek better living conditions within the EU and richer WBR states. 

This trend is historic and perhaps manageable by the WBR or at least not as risky as the inflow of Asians and Africans who beat the Border Check Points (BCP) ability to interdict illegal immigrants. 

Such illegal immigrants may be criminals, potential terrorists or arms and drug smugglers as no record of their credentials is available as compared to those falling in the category of regular immigrants. 

The WBR would certainly be impacted, as the statistics prove, as an increasing number of them are appearing on Greece-Turkish, Romania-Serbian and Serbian-Macedonian borders. Out of total 7400 detections of irregular traffic in 2011, on the basis of nationality, Afghans had a 28 % share, followed by 25% being Pakistanis. 

This increase resulted from the combination of increasing flows and more efforts undertaken by the Serbian authorities to detect migrants at their green borders. Consequently, Serbia’s 2011 share in the region’s overall total for illegal border-crossing rose to a massive 40%, up from just 3% in 2010 [2]. 

Yet there appear to be some deterring arrangements in place that keep WBR somewhat immune from the machinations of the organized crime axis. Therefore, the criminals who facilitate the illegal immigrants from Africa and the ME, by employing modes worse than those meted to animals, have not been able to develop WBR as huge market so far. 

It still revolves around $ 150 million as compared to illegal immigrants from East, West and North Africa to Europe and from Latin America to North America that fetched them a bonanza of about $ 6.75 billion last year. UNODC plays a crucial role to train and build the target state’s capacity to combat organised crime. The EU in concert with UNODC appears to be mindful of this aspect and the vulnerability that confronts the WBR.

Drug Trafficking

Western Europe is a lucrative market for drug traffickers. The annual flow of drugs through global markets weighs in at about 450 tons. Out of this, 2008 statistics show that 380 tons of heroin and morphine were produced in Afghanistan alone, gaining access to Western Europe and Russia through Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria and the WBR (the western approach) as well as through the Caspian and Central Asia (the northern approach). 

There have been sizeable seizures also, conspicuously in Turkey and Iran but the drug barons appear determined to swallow these losses for the sake of the Western European market ($ 20 billion) and the Russian Federation market ($13 billion) [3]. 

Along the route, some quantities are sold to locals that are wreaking havoc on the societies where one finds large numbers of young addicts without any hope of recovery. To put it simply, when the drug route of the western approach from Afghanistan is fairly broad, it converges on the WBR. This stands as an understandable concern for WBR governments. 

They are left with no choice but to accept the challenge to eliminate drug trafficking through operational as well as pre-emptive strategies in concert with EU. In other words, the EU is compelled to consider that its stakes are high in the WBR. 

Covering the threat of huge quantities of cocaine from Colombia is not a direct concern here because no significant source is located in the ME. However Europe shares a big brunt. In 2008, 470 tons of cocaine moved to North America, Canada and Europe and while 40 % was consumed in North America only, a quarter of it ended up reaching Europe.

Terrorism

Terrorists invariably have a political agenda that is often ambitious. They enjoy universal alliance, though unspoken, with all such elements in any part of the world across all conceivable divides because their mutual interests do not clash. 

In other words, at least their sympathisers if not abetters are found everywhere. Such vulnerability haunts the WBR because conventionally drugs, illegal human trafficking, arms smuggling and terrorists are traditional allies that move hand in glove and trace a common trajectory. 

In the WBR, ordinary crimes have declined but organised crime has remained indelible. 

The corruption and crime nexus could not be refuted, particularly when ethnic wars were rampant. In case of Bosnia-Herzegovinian, there has been support from Middle East militants though no conclusive evidence has come forth, not necessarily because it did not exist but for the possibility that these groups may have managed clandestine support effectively.

Money Laundering

Organized crimes perpetrators need to funnel money to give it legitimacy or stash it at such locations and banks so that their wealth remains out of sight. Bojan Dordevic contends that money laundering involves disguising the source of illicit profits and is achieved through a basic process (although money laundering typologies differ in complexity)

Placement – illicit proceeds are placed within the formal banking secor.

Layering – illicit proceeds are redistributed through a series of accounts in small amounts so as to disguise the origin of the funds; and

Integration – the once-illicit proceeds are now licit and are used to purchase property, stocks and bonds so that they can be deposited legally into client bank accounts [4].

To afford the states the desired ability to nab these ill-gotten treasures, UNODC has been assigned the role to enforce laws to combat money laundering and terror financing in shape of Global Programmes against them, employing its unit that was established in 1997. 

The unit mandate was reinforced by subsequent protocols and legal instruments to enable the states for implementing necessary measures to combat the curse of money laundering. The unit also provides guidance and technical assistance. WBR certainly deserves to seek help from UNODC.

Global Overview of Tangential Threats to EU

The destiny of Balkans, and more importantly of the WBR, is intertwined with the destiny of Europe. Therefore any conflict scenario looming on the horizon worldwide, threatening Europe would be a dire challenge for the Balkans as well. As the globalisation is characterised by the universal interconnectivity through rapid communication means hence long stretch of spaces have shrunk. 

The EU thrust in European as well as adjoining continents is not only to manage the conflicts but to resolve them despite not possessing any integral military might except within the NATO Charter. The conflict issues in ME, Caucasus, Korean peninsula, Indian Subcontinent and recently in Asia-Pacific can wreck EU efforts to quell eruptions in and around Europe as well as in far flung areas to the East. 

For instance, in all cases, if diplomacy fails and conflict graph probability picks up; US, India, Japan, Australia, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, China, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, North and South Korea, Egypt, Iran and Turkey are likely to be sucked in by any of the imbroglios one way or the other. 

An EU that maintains ideal relations with large spread of countries would be the first casualty by way of resultant traction on Euro-Atlantic alliance directly and on trade volumes indirectly that would tailspin because future conflicts would also be riddled with economic blockades and severing of sea lanes. 

The point to emphasise here is not to give the probable dimensions of each conflict but to elucidate a point that the EU has on its responsibility card, not only the European continent and the ME but the stretch of spaces that could become a war arena anywhere in the world. 

What really emerges from the prevailing strategic and global military orientation is that EU has to be forthcoming to conduct a dispassionate critique of its own erring allies as well as others when the friendly and not so friendly powers are suspected to embrace too much of Richelieu Concept and show scant regard for the urge to sustain peace. 

It also implicitly means that world’s greater expectations for conflicts resolution would seek a major shift from the traditional titans to would-be honest brokers. EU is in unique position to adjust to these emerging global realities.


End Notes:


[1] UNODC: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, report, “Transnational Organized Crimes: Let’s put them out of business”, accessed at www.unodc.org/unodc.en/human-trafficking, on 2 October 2012.


[2] “Western Balkans: Annual Risk Analysis 2012”, (Report), FRONTEX: European Agency for the Management of Operational Co-operation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union, Warsaw, Poland, April 2012, accessed at www.frontex,europa.eu on 10 October 2012.


[3] UNODC Drug Report-2010, accessed at www.unodc.org/unodc.en/drugs on 29 September 2012.


[4] Bojan Dordevic, “Underground Banking: Legitimate Network or Money Laundering System”, in Claude Berthomieu and Srdjan Redzepagic (eds), “Financial System Integration of Balkan Countries in the European Financial System”, Institute of Economic Sciences, Znaj Jovina, Belgrade, Republic of Serbia, 2008, p.33

For Illegal Immigrants, Greek Border Offers a Back Door to Europe

Shamzur Rahmat, 17, and other Afghans who earn $40 a week in Istanbul. Many are saving to pay smugglers to get them into Greece. 

Πηγή: New York Times

By J. MICHAEL KENNEDY
July 14 2012

ALEXANDROUPOLIS, Greece — At the train station here, an unshaven man with a weary look leaned against the brick wall of a building, taking in the morning sun.

He said that his name was Zulifoar Baht; that he was 38, from Pakistan; and that his train for Athens would not arrive until midafternoon. So there was nothing to do but wait, along with a dozen or so other illegal immigrants who had finally made it into Greece from Turkey, crossing one of the most porous borders in Europe.

The 126-mile border between Turkey, which is not in the European Union, and Greece, which is, has become the back door to the European Union, making member countries ever more resentful as a tide of immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa continues to grow.Frontex, the European Union’s border policing agency, estimated that a vast majority of the crossings in 2011 occurred at the Greece-Turkey border. Last year, Frontex said, more than 55,000 people crossed the border, a 17 percent rise from the year before.

The flow has raised tensions throughout Europe, to the point where the top French official responsible for immigration seriously suggested that a wall be built along the entire border. In Greece, one person in 20 is estimated to be here illegally, at a time when the country is sinking in debt, the far right is making political gains and instances of knife-wielding vigilantes taking out their frustrations on immigrants are becoming increasingly common.

Zarif Bakhtyri, 28, a wiry, streetwise playwright and aspiring film director, said he fled Afghanistan in 2006 after rankling the authorities by writing and directing a play that criticized polygamy. Mr. Bakhtyri’s story is a familiar one — making it to Greece, where he was jailed and then released, then moving along a route that led him to Italy, Norway, Sweden, and back to Greece in 2010 because it was his point of entry.

He, like many others, has been trapped in Greece’s backlogged refugee system, the result, in part, of a longtime European Union rule that stipulated an asylum petition must originate in the first country the immigrant entered. That changed in January 2011, when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that sending asylum seekers back to Greece could infringe on their fundamental rights because the Greek system had become so saturated and living conditions were so poor.

The increase in illegal immigrants in Greece has created support for the extreme-right Golden Dawn party, which has vowed to rid Greece of foreigners who enter the country illegally. Even the country’s mainstream parties have taken a harder line, though the Greek government is widely derided as inept in its efforts to police the border.

Athens is building a $7.3 million fence on the Turkish border to close off the short land crossing between the two countries, but few expect it to stem the flow. In rejecting a request from Greece to help pay for the fence, the European Commission described it as “pointless.”

The last hurdle to Greece is the Evros River Valley, beginning in the north at the Turkish city of Edirne, once the capital of the Ottoman Empire. To the south, on the Greek side, farms sometimes abut barbed-wire fencing, with signs warning of minefields along the dirt roads adjacent to cornfields. Villagers along the border talk of immigrants emerging from the river, wet and cold, as they begin their trek toward Athens.

But the last staging area for most immigrants is really Istanbul, the teeming Turkish city that is a magnet for those who have often walked for months through the wilds of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

Turkey has come under criticism because of its liberal visa requirements, which make it easy for immigrants to legally enter the country and then move on. Citizens of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Syria and Iran, among many other nations, do not need a visa to enter the country.

Once in Turkey, they share crowded apartments and try to find work and save enough to pay smugglers for false papers and passage across the border.

In the cluttered cellar of a dingy Istanbul garment factory, Mustafa Mirzaie, 18, worked with his friend Hussein Rezaie to repair a sink. Both are from Afghanistan, a major source of refugees trying to make their way to Europe. Last winter, they walked for 24 hours over the frigid mountains of Iran into eastern Turkey. Now they do odd jobs to sustain themselves until moving on.

“It’s a difficult way, but it’s the only choice we have,” Mr. Mirzaie said. “I’ll work here and find a smuggler. We have no choice.”

Immigrants in Istanbul often find themselves stuck on a financial treadmill, barely able to meet their basic living expenses. One 17-year-old Afghan named Shamsollah lives and works in a basement sweatshop. He says he will need about $5,000 for the next stage of the journey, though he makes only about $250 a month — just enough to cover expenses.

“Istanbul is very big and very expensive,” Shamsollah said. “I have $1,500 now. But that is not enough for me. I don’t want to stay in Greece without money. There is no work in Greece.”

Sitting at an outdoor cafe recently in one of Istanbul’s poor neighborhoods, a smuggler named Mustafa talked about how he operated his business.

He takes 16 people at a time by van from Istanbul to the border, where his customers walk for an hour to the Evros River and then float across on rubber rafts. He charges $1,000 a person for the three-hour journey. He said he tells his clients not to fear being caught on the Greek side of the border.

“I say to my passengers don’t worry because they don’t want to deport them,” he said. “They just want to register you and take money from the United Nations.”

Sometimes, though, the journey is just too hard. There is a small but growing number of people who have made it to Greece, but returned to Turkey.

Earlier this year, on a windy day in Istanbul, Mustafa and Ali, two 17-year-old Afghan refugees, stood shivering in a park on the Marmara Sea. They had made it to Alexandroupolis but had run out of money. So they returned to Istanbul.

Their only possessions were the shoes, pants and T-shirts they wore. They had waited for hours for an Istanbul contact, but he had not shown up. Without papers, they were afraid even to leave the park and look for help.

And so they sat there, looking out on the sea, wondering what they would do next.