They do not serve to stop people, they produce unprecedented suffering and push migrants and traffickers to open other routes, but despite this Europe is entering a new era of walls. It was inaugurated by the Hungarian Viktor Orbán who, in the midst of the migration crisis of 2015, decided to build a fence on the border between Hungary and Serbia to prevent refugees – mostly Syrians and Afghans from traveling the Balkan route – to enter the country to reach other countries of the European Union.
It seemed like an abrupt return to the past, to a Europe of divisions that we thought had been overcome after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In fact, Orbán’s decision marked an irreversible transition: from that moment the block of Eastern European countries , the so-called Visegrád group (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) strongly opposed the reform of the European asylum system (the Dublin system) and imposed a nationalist approach to managing migratory flows.
Six years later, faced with the possibility of a new wave of refugees in particular from Afghanistan, twelve European countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Slovakia) asked Brussels to finance the construction of walls at their borders with European funds. Lithuania, one of the signatories of the letter, has already decided to build a 508 kilometer long fence on the border with Belarus to stop the arrival of mainly Iraqi migrants. Neighboring Latvia has also recently announced that it will build a 134-kilometer-long barbed wire fence on the border with Belarus.
Lukashenko’s cynicism
The EU commissioner for home affairs, Ylva Johansson, has so far stated that she will not finance the walls against migrants, but has also expressed sympathy for the countries that have forwarded the request to Brussels. The Pact on Immigration and Asylum, proposed by the European Commission a year ago, goes in the direction of strengthening the external borders: outsourcing and repatriation are the two pillars on which the program document of the commission announced in September 2020 a few days ago is based from the fire that destroyed the refugee camp of Moria, Greece.
This latest crisis has its origin in a unilateral act by the President of Belarus Aleksandr Lukashenko, who is using migrants to blackmail the European Union. Brussels, in fact, had threatened to sanction Minsk for the violent repression of the opposition which took place in August 2020, when the Belarusians took to the streets to protest against the presidential elections, denouncing fraud and demanding the resignation of the president in office since 1994.
The two European countries that sided in favor of the protests were mainly Lithuania and Poland: both governments, in particular the Lithuanian one, pushed the European Union to impose sanctions against the Belarusian government. To put pressure on Europe, Lukashenko used the old technique of Libyan Muammar Gaddafi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: he granted visas to Iraqi migrants to arrive in Minsk by plane, then took the refugees by bus to the borders of Lithuania. and Poland. Within weeks, a new route opened: Lithuania, Latvia and Poland threatened to build barbed wire walls and fences to prevent migrants from passing through. Non-governmental organizations have denounced serious human rights violations by border guards in Lithuania, Latvia and Poland and five refugees have lost their lives in recent weeks because they slept in the open at the border. A new era of walls has begun in Europe, which demonstrates all the fragility of the European project at this time.
Brussels, instead of fighting this approach, and adopting a common policy on immigration and asylum is seeking a compromise: on the one hand, it does not strongly condemn the construction of walls and the inhuman treatment to which migrants are subjected to all external borders of the Union and, on the other hand, it continues to strengthen and finance policies for externalization of borders, despite the fact that since the end of the 1990s this type of policy has proved ineffective.
Brussels pays the governments of neighboring states to stop migrants with soldiers, detention centers, fences. It did so in 2016 with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey to stop Syrian refugees, then in 2017 with the Tripoli government to block and reject migrant boats bound for Europe from Libya, finally with Tunisia and Egypt or with Morocco to stop the flow of people along the Canary Islands route. But it is a short-term policy that has the sole effect of strengthening the authoritarian leaders of neighboring governments and putting in their hands a powerful weapon of blackmail: the lives of thousands of people used as a bargaining chip, without any respect for their rights and no concern for their safety.
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