Europe is at "war" against refugees and German Chancellor Angela Merkel is using "double-faced" rhetoric of welcome and repulsion, migration expert Professor Klaus Bade told MiGAZIN, an online portal specializing in migration issues, Thursday.
Bade said the refugee situation in Europe is a global issue driving victims to the gates of "Fortress Europe," adding that the term "refugee crisis" is itself a rhetorical misnomer working to shape refugees as security threats instead of seeing them as individuals desperately seeking asylum.
He accused Berlin of placating the public with security policies instead of working to tackle the root causes of the problem, which he argues have been prevalent for a number of decades.
Bade, a world-renowed professor and former chair of the Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration, branded the Balkan route a "razor-sharp" wire and the EU's new "red line."
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The professor of migration said the groundwork for current policies of deterrence were established in 2006 when Spain ran Operation Seahorse to stop migrants and refugees from Senegal, Mauritania and Cape Verde from reaching the country's Canary Islands.
On the current talks between the EU and Turkey, he branded the former's overtures to Ankara "scandalous." Bade mainly criticized Merkel's conservative ally, the Interior Minister Thomas de Maizìere, whom he accused of using "acrobatics" in the deal between the EU and Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The legal "trick" used in this acrobatic act is to ask Greece to single-handedly declare Turkey a secure third country. This has allowed for tens of thousands of refugees to be "shoved back" outside the EU's external border, explained Bade.
Humanitarian Europe turning "gruesome" says migration expert Klaus J. Bade | photo: Reuters
Bade went on to call the intended deal between the EU and Turkey cruel as it reduces refugees to the level of "commodities." He also called Germany out for its plan to outsource the crisis and "externalize" the issue to the European periphery.
Bade even went so far as to call Europe's failure to adequately deal with the causes of migration and refugee flows a "historical scandal" that reminds him of 1938, when envoys from 32 nations failed to act on Jews who were trying to escape Nazi Germany and Austria.
"The verdict in the future will be a terrible one: No one will be able to again say that he did not know it all. Whoever knew about it and raised no objections has made himself complicit," said Bade.
More than 4,200 migrants and refugees have died trying to reach Europe since the beginning of 2015.