Editor’s note: In collaboration with Danwatch, IRPI Media and The Wire, this investigation took place in Italy, India and Denmark – and was made possible with the support of the EU Journalism Fund.
The 12 armed men appeared just before sunrise, as darkness hung thick over the remote farm outside Borgo Sabotino, south of Rome.
It was March 17, 2017, a date Balbir Singh will never forget.
“I was really scared. The farm owners shouted for me to run away. But I did not,” said Singh, a decision he is happy to have made.
The 12 men were Italian police in plain clothes, and kindly asked him to come along.
“My clothes were filthy. My state was dreadful. I had deep wounds on my hands and feet, and my nails were bleeding. But it was a big day. In the minutes before we left, I saw that the police had arrested the farm owner and his wife.”
Singh, a former English teacher and longtime farm worker who hails from the Punjab region known as India’s breadbasket, said he suffered six years of exploitation in Italy, citing violence, death threats, theft, lack of pay, hunger and deprivation.
Like other Indian workers in Italy, Singh arrived and could not understand the Italian language, had little money and no knowledge of his rights.
For long periods, Singh had no food. He lived on the stale bread he found in the farming family’s rubbish bin or leftovers they had thrown out to feed pigs and chickens.
He lived in an old caravan without gas, electricity or heating.
No one heard his cry for help, until one day, the Italian sociologist and researcher Marco Omizzolo was notified by a fellow Indian worker – and asked local police to intervene.
Balbir Singh reflects on his treatment on an Italian kiwi farm [Stefania Prandi/Al Jazeera]
Singh is one of the few migrant workers who has taken his former employer to court.
He sought justice for the humiliations to which he was subjected and wanted raise awareness of the conditions of migrants.
In 2018, he became the first immigrant in Italy to be granted a residence permit “for reasons of justice”.
The trial is continuing.
Farming’green gold’ plantations
During the past 30 years, Indian workers – mostly from Punjab – have come to Agro Pontino, an area south of Rome, but few dare to speak out, especially to foreigners and journalists, about the abuse they have endured.
According to Omizzolo, of the 30,000 Indian residents in Italy, most are employed as labourers in the Italian fruit-and-vegetable sector.
Agro Pontino is one of the country’s most productive growing regions and its flagship products include kiwis, locally known as “green gold”.
Between July and December, many Indian labourers work in kiwi plantations.
Italy produces 320,000 tonnes of kiwis annually, mostly in Lazio, and exports to 50 countries, making it the main European producer and the third-largest in the world after China and New Zealand.
It is a market worth more than 400 million euros ($431m), led by Zespri, a multinational company.
Zespri is best known for the yellow-fleshed variety – one of their patents – the SunGold.
From the fields of small and medium-sized farms, the kiwis are taken to the cooperatives’ large warehouses, where they are packed and branded with the Zespri logo, before being marketed throughout Europe.
The rules for harvesting Zespri kiwis are strict; cotton gloves are mandatory and delicate, precise manoeuvres are required to preserve the fruit.
Workers described being forced to work in the fields seven days a week, 10-11 hours a day, and are paid no more than six euros ($6.50) an hour. Adequate toilets and taking breaks are out of reach for many, while several workers told Al Jazeera that they were not regularly given compulsory protective equipment such as gloves and masks.
In addition, the impermanence of the jobs make them seem perilous – without a regular work contract, it is not possible to renew a residence permit and live legally in Italy.
To get to Italy, workers pay up to 15,000 euros ($16,200) to Indian intermediaries and incur in debts in India.
Many take on loans from acquaintances and relatives, or sell land, cows, and family jewellery.
But staying at home is not an option – the monthly salary of those who do manual labour in Punjab is usually between 80 and 120 euros ($87 to $120). In Italy, an Indian labourer receives an average 863 euros ($934) per month.
Italy is the main European kiwi producer and the third-largest in the world after China and New Zealand [Stefania Prandi/Al Jazeera]
Gurjinder, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, worked for three years for a company that sells kiwis to Zespri.
With a low voice, hunched shoulders, and tearful eyes, he remembered when a supervisor who scolded him, shouting as soon as he stopped working for a few moments.
“She insulted me and threatened to beat me up.”
In the fields, the supervisor filmed him three times with her mobile phone as he stopped to drink and something got into his eyes.
The videos served as “proof” of his lack of efficiency and were handed over to the head of the company in an episode seen as a “warning” to other workers.
When asked why he did not leave the company immediately, Gurjinder held his head in his gnarled hands and burst into tears.
“I had no choice, I had to earn for my four children and my wife. They stayed in India, I haven’t seen them for 13 years.”
Zespri told Al Jazeera that while most employers in the kiwifruit industry “care for their people, a small minority may be failing to do so”.
The company added, “Any exploitation of workers is unacceptable and we are committed to holding those people involved to account, and to continuing to improve our compliance frameworks to help us do so. We take the allegations made extremely seriously and have commenced an investigation into this, including how we can best support affected workers.”
It works with more than 1,200 growers in Italy who are required to have the Global Gap GRASP (Global Risk Assessment On Social Practice) certificate, an independent and international certification system that outlines criteria for the safety, health, and welfare of workers, Zespri said.
Its suppliers who package the product are registered with Sedex, a third-party certification body that monitors workers’ conditions for Italian suppliers of SunGold Kiwifruit.
Zespri said it has contacted both third-party certification bodies and its suppliers “to make them aware of the alleged unfair practices” alleged in this investigation and “to try to obtain more information” about them.
At present, there are no formal complaints against the consortia that sell kiwis to Zespri, or against the multinational company itself.
Back in India for a visit to attend his son’s wedding, Singh said he now feels like a “free soul”.
“I am waiting for my compensation and the closure of the case. Then I want to take my wife to Italy, where I have decided to build a house. I can’t wait for good days to come,” he said.
“Life is a struggle and one must fight, but I would never want even the worst of my enemies to face the problems I faced. Even today, when I remember that time, I get goosebumps.”
Workers who farm Italy’s fruit plantations live in makeshift homes with little comfort [Stefania Prandi/Al Jazeera]
LONDON — “Better than the last guy” might not be quite the tagline every world leader hopes for. It could yet be Rishi Sunak’s winning formula.
The British prime minister, swept into office late last year by wave after wave of Tory psychodrama, has cleared several major hurdles in the space of the past month. His success has even sparked a shocking rumor in Westminster that — whisper it — he might actually be quite good at his job.
That was the murmur among hopeful Conservative MPs ahead of this week’s U.K. budget, anyway — many of them buoyed by the PM’s recent moves on two long-running sources of angst in Westminster.
First came an apparent resolution to the intractable problem of post-Brexit trade arrangements in Northern Ireland. Sunak’s so-called Windsor Framework deal with Brussels landed to near-universal acclaim.
A week later, Sunak unveiled hard-hitting legislation to clamp down on illegal migration to the U.K., coupled with an expensive deal with France to increase patrols across the English Channel. Tory MPs were delighted. The Illegal Migration Bill sailed through parliament Monday night without a single vote of rebellion.
Then came Wednesday’s annual budget announcement, with Sunak hoping to complete an improbable hat trick.
It started well, with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt making the big reveal that the U.K. is no longer expected to enter recession this year, as had been widely predicted.
But a series of jaw-droppers in the budget small print show the scale of the challenge ahead.
The U.K.’s overall tax take remains sky-high by historic standards — an ominous bone of contention for skeptical Tory MPs and right-wing newspapers alike. Meanwhile, millions of Britons’ living standards continue to fall, thanks to high fuel bills and raging inflation. U.K. growth forecasts remain sluggish for years to come.
“He’s chalking up some wins,” observed one former party adviser grimly, “because he’s going to need them.”
‘Workmanlike’
Among all but the bitterest of Sunak’s Tory opponents, there is a palpable sense of relief about the way he has approached his premiership so far.
“It doesn’t mean everything will suddenly turn to gold,” said Conservative MP Richard Graham, a longtime Sunak-backer. “But like Ben Stokes and England’s cricket team, his quiet self-confidence may change what the same team believes is possible.”
Nicky Morgan, a Conservative peer and former Treasury minister, praised a “workmanlike” budget that would reassure voters and the party there was a “firm hand on the tiller” after the “turmoil” of the preceding year with two prime ministers stepping down, Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss.
UK Chancellor Jeremy Hunt meets children during a visit to Busy Bees Battersea Nursery in south London after delivering his Budget earlier in the day | Stefan Rousseau/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Most of Wednesday’s biggest announcements, including an extra £4 billion for childcare and a decision to lift the cap on pensions allowances, were either trailed or leaked in advance. This may have made for a predictable budget speech, but as Morgan put it: “I think that’s probably what businesses and the public need at the moment.”
An ex-minister who did not originally support Sunak for leader said that the general tone of the budget, together with the Northern Ireland deal and small boats legislation, meant that “increasingly it’s hard for hostile voices to pin real failure on Rishi.”
Others, however, fear key announcements could yet unravel. An expensive change to pension taxes was instantly savaged by critics as a “giveaway for the 1 percent.” Headline-grabbing back-to-work programs and an expansion of free childcare will take years to kick in.
Hiking corporation tax was the “biggest mistake of the budget,” Truss ally and former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg complained.
Doing the hard yards
Observers note that in the wake of the rolling chaos under Truss and Johnson, the bar for a successful government has been lowered.
“[Sunak] could stand at the podium and soil himself, and he’d be doing a better job than his predecessors,” noted one business group lobbyist on Wednesday evening, having watched budget day unfold.
But even Sunak’s fiercest critics praise his work rate and attention to detail, in sharp contrast to Johnson. Most accept — grudgingly — he has set up an effective Downing Street operation.
Having returned from his Paris summit last Friday evening, the PM kicked off budget week with a whirlwind trip to the west coast of California to launch a defense pact with the U.S. and Australia, arranging a bank bailout along the way. He landed back in the U.K. less than 24 hours before Hunt unveiled the annual spending plan.
“It turns out working like an absolute maniac and being forensic is quite useful,” one of his ministers said.
Another Tory MP added: “He’s got the brainpower and will do the hours. He’s not good at barnstorming politics or old school dividing lines — but he is good for the politics we have right now.”
There has also been a clear effort to run a tighter ship behind the scenes at No. 10. One veteran of Johnson’s Downing Street said the atmosphere seemed “calm” in comparison.
There are tentative signs that voters are starting to notice.
James Johnson, who ran a recent poll by JL Partners which showed Sunak’s personal ratings are on the up, said the PM’s growing reputation as a “fixer” seems to be behind his recent rally, and that the biggest increase on his polling scorecard was on his ability to “get things done.”
It remains to be seen if this will shift the dial on the Tory Party’s own disastrous ratings, however, which languish some 25 points behind the opposition Labour Party. “Voters have clearly lost trust in the Tories,” Johnson said. “But if government can deliver … I would expect it to feed through.”
Anthony Browne, a Tory MP elected in 2019, expressed hope that Sunak had begun “changing the narrative” which in turn “could restore our right to be heard.”
Trouble ahead?
Sunak will be well aware that plenty of recent budgets — not least Truss’ spectacular failure last September — have unraveled in the 72 hours after being announced.
And while expanding free childcare, incentivizing business investment and ending the lifetime pensions allowance were all crowd-pleasers for his own MPs, they were not enough to conceal worrying subheadings.
The tax take is predicted to reach a post-war high of 37.7 percent in the next five years, while disposable incomes are hit by fiscal drag pulling 3.2 million people into higher tax bands. Right-wing Tories are not impressed.
Ranil Jayawardena, founder of the Conservative Growth Group of backbench MPs, described it in a statement as “an effective income tax rise,” which will be “a concern to many.”
Net migration is set to rise to 245,000 a year by 2026-27, and will add more people to the labor force than all the measures intended to make it a “back to work” budget, according to the Whitehall’s fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The message is not one Conservative MPs want to hear.
Already singled out by Labour’s Keir Starmer as a “huge giveaway to the wealthiest,” scrapping the lifetime allowance on pensions will cost £835 million a year by 2027-28 while benefiting less than 4 percent of workers. Conservative MPs reply that NHS doctors are one of the main groups to benefit.
Perhaps most worrying of all, the government’s own budget expects living standards to fall by 6 percent this year and next — less than the 7 percent fall predicted in November but still the largest two-year fall since records began in the 1950s.
There are some problems that can’t be solved by pulling an all-nighter. Ironically for Sunak, whose career was made in the Treasury, his may prove to be the state of the U.K. economy.
Rosa Prince, Stefan Boscia and Dan Bloom contributed reporting.
Esther Webber, Eleni Courea and Emilio Casalicchio
France and the United Kingdom have agreed on a multiyear financial package to stop migration across the Channel, days after the UK government drew criticism for a bill barring unauthorised arrivals.
As part of the deal announced on Friday, the UK will help fund a detention centre in France while French authorities will deploy a new dedicated permanent policing unit and enhanced technology to patrol the country’s beaches, including drones and aircraft.
The agreement also involves doubling the number of personnel deployed to northern France to tackle small-boat crossings, half of whom will be in place by the end of 2023.
It will see a new 24-hour zonal coordination centre with permanent British liaison officers that will bring all relevant French authorities together to coordinate the response.
Officers from both countries will also look to work with countries along the routes favoured by people traffickers.
The UK said it would contribute roughly $581m in funding over the next three years to help pay for the new measures, adding that it expected France to contribute “significantly more funding”. France did not provide any cost estimates.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron said at a news conference after meeting in Paris that the two sides had agreed to work more closely together.
“It is time for a new start,” Macron said.
Sunak, who took office in October 2022, said the two countries shared “the same beliefs” and had “taken cooperation to an unprecedented level”.
“Criminal gangs should not get to decide who comes to our country. Within weeks of my coming into office, we agreed our largest ever small boats deal and today we’ve taken our cooperation to an unprecedented level to tackle this shared challenge,” he said.
The two leaders also discussed further cooperation on defence, as well as the joint training of Ukrainian troops.
Sunak has made stopping boat arrivals one of his five priorities after the number of people arriving on the south coast of England increased to more than 45,000 last year.
Camille Le Coz, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told Al Jazeera that in terms of policy, “what we are seeing is more of the same.”
UK-French cooperation over controls at their shared borders has been formalised in the past through a series of bilateral agreements.
“What the UK really wants is to be able to return people to France, and this is something that has not been agreed and won’t be agreed by France,” Le Coz said.
Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler, reporting from Paris, said ties between the two countries have been rocky since the UK voted to leave the European Union in 2016, but have been fortified by the countries’ support for Ukraine since Russia’s invasion last year.
Friday’s summit was the first in five years, Butler said, and the realignment was partly due to “a common sense of purpose” forged by the ongoing conflict.
UK plan to stop Channel crossings
The new deal came on the heels of criticism in the UK of new draft legislation – dubbed the “Illegal Migration Bill” – barring the entry of asylum seekers arriving by unauthorised means, such as in small boats across the Channel.
The legislation would enable the detention of people without bail or judicial review for the first 28 days after arrival.
It would also disqualify people from using modern slavery laws to challenge government decisions to remove them in the courts.
Sunak said the government would “take back control of our borders, once and for all”.
Diane Abbott, a member of Parliament with the main opposition Labour Party, said the bill was “mistreating migrants and their rights” and would not work “in the real world”.
There are policies that can work in the Commons but not in the real world. Sunak & Braverman’s policy on mistreating migrants and their rights is one of them. In the end, there will be safe and legal routes established. Because that is what works.https://t.co/wQG205gYA3
Ylva Johansson, the European Union’s commissioner for home affairs, said she believed the plans breached international law.
Opposition parties and rights organisations have questioned the morality and practicality of the government’s longstanding migration policies, including deporting some asylum seekers to Rwanda.
UK home secretary Suella Braverman admitted on Tuesday that the government had “pushed the boundaries of international law”.
PARIS — Vegetarian sushi and rugby brought the leaders of Britain and France together after years of Brexit rows.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday held the two countries’ first bilateral summit in five years, amid warm words and wishes for closer post-Brexit cooperation.
“This is an exceptional summit, a moment of reunion and reconnection, that illustrates that we want to better speak to each other,” Macron told a joint press conference afterward. “We have the will to work together in a Europe that has new responsibilities.”
Most notably from London’s perspective, the pair agreed a new multi-annual financial framework to jointly tackle the arrival of undocumented migrants on small boats through the English Channel — in part funding a new detention center in France.
“The U.K. and France share a special bond and a special responsibility,” Sunak said. “When the security of our Continent is threatened, we will always be at the forefront of its defense.”
Macron congratulated Sunak for agreeing the Windsor Framework with the European Commission, putting an end to a long U.K.-EU row over post-Brexit trade rules in Northern Ireland, and stressing it marks a “new beginning of working more closely with the EU.”
“I feel very fortunate to be serving alongside you and incredibly excited about the future we can build together. Merci mon ami,” Sunak said.
It has been many years since the leaders of Britain and France were so publicly at ease with each other.
Sunak and Macron bonded over rugby, ahead of Saturday’s match between England and France, and exchanged T-shirts signed by their respective teams.
Later, they met alone at the Élysée Palace for more than an hour, only being joined by their chiefs of staff at the very end of the meeting, described as “warm and productive” by Sunak’s official spokesman. The pair, who spoke English, had planned to hold a shorter one-to-one session, but they decided to extend it, the spokesman said.
They later met with their respective ministers for a lunch comprising vegetarian sushi, turbot, artichokes and praline tart.
Macron congratulated Sunak for agreeing the Windsor Framework with the European Commission | Christophe Archambault/AFP via Getty Images
Speaking on the Eurostar en route to Paris, Sunak told reporters this was the beginning of a “new chapter” in the Franco-British relationship.
“It’s been great to get to know Emmanuel over the last two months. There’s a shared desire to strengthen the relationship,” he said. “I really believe that the range of things that we can do together is quite significant.”
In a show of goodwill from the French, who pushed energetically for a hard line during Brexit talks, Macron said he wanted to “fix the consequences of Brexit” and opened the door to closer cooperation with the Brits in the future.
“It’s my wish and it’s in our interests to have closest possible alliance. It will depend on our commitment and willingness but I am sure we will do it,” he said alongside Sunak.
Tackling small boats
Under the terms of the new migration deal, Britain will pay €141 million to France in 2023-24, €191 million in 2024-25 and €209 million in 2025-26.
This money will come in installments and go toward funding a new detention center in France, a new Franco-British command centre, an extra 500 law enforcement officers on French beaches and better technology to patrol them, including more drones and surveillance aircraft.
The new detention center, located in the Dunkirk area, would be funded by the British and run by the French and help compensate for the lack of space in other detention centers in northern France, according to one of Macron’s aides.
According to U.K. and French officials, France is expected to contribute significantly more funding — up to five times the amount the British are contributing — toward the plan although the Elysée has refused to give exact figures.
A new, permanent French mobile policing unit will join the efforts to tackle small boats. This work will be overseen by a new zonal coordination center, where U.K. liaison officers will be permanently based working with French counterparts.
Sunak stressed U.K.-French cooperation on small boats since November has made a significant difference, and defended the decision to hand more British money to France to help patrol the French northern shores. Irregular migration, he stressed, is a “joint problem.”
Ukraine unity
Sunak and Macron also made a show of unity on the war in Ukraine, agreeing that their priority would be to continue to support the country in its war against Russian aggression.
The French president said the “ambition short-term is to help Ukraine to resist and to build counter-offensives.”
“The priority is military,” he said. “We want a lasting peace, when Ukraine wants it and in the conditions that it wants and our will is to put it in position to do so.”
The West’s top priority should remain helping Ukrainians achieve “a decisive battlefield advantage” that later allows Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to sit down at the negotiating table with Russian President Vladimir Putin from a stronger position, Sunak said en route to the summit.
“That should be everyone’s focus,” he added. “Of course, this will end as all conflicts do, at the negotiating table. But that’s a decision for Ukraine to make. And what we need to do is put them in the best possible place to have those talks at an appropriate moment that makes sense for them.”
The two leaders also announced they would start joint training operations of Ukrainian marines.
The United Kingdom government has set out details of a new law barring the entry of asylum seekers arriving by unauthorised means, such as in small boats across the English Channel.
Home secretary Suella Braverman admitted on Tuesday that the government had “pushed the boundaries of international law” with a bill dubbed the “Illegal Migration Bill” that will bar asylum claims by anyone who reaches the UK by irregular means, and allow the authorities to deport them “to their home country or a safe third country”.
But the proposed legislation has been lambasted by critics as unworkable and inhumane.
Why is the UK introducing this law?
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has made stopping boat arrivals one of his five key priorities after the number of refugees and migrants arriving on the south coast of England soared to more than 45,000 last year, up 500 percent in the last two years, and almost 3,000 have arrived so far this year.
Sunak said the new legislation meant the government will “take back control of our borders, once and for all”, a reference to a slogan of the pro-Brexit campaign that successfully took the UK out of the European Union in 2016.
While the number of applications for asylum in the UK hit a 20-year high of nearly 75,000 in 2022, it is still below the EU average. Germany received more than 240,000 asylum applications last year.
How will the law work?
The legislation will enable the detention of unauthorised arrivals without bail, or judicial review for the first 28 days after arrival.
The legislation will disqualify refugees and migrants from using modern slavery laws to challenge government decisions to remove them in the courts.
Once deported, they will be banned for life from entering the UK, claiming asylum or seeking British citizenship.
Only children, people who are considered too ill to fly, or those at a “real risk of serious and irreversible harm” will be allowed to claim asylum in the UK.
Tens of thousands of people could be held in detention facilities until they are removed to another country.
The UK recently signed a deal with Rwanda to receive some of these people who are deported. But that policy is being challenged in the courts, and so far, no refugee has been flown to the East African country.
How have critics reacted to the proposed law?
The main opposition Labour Party has dismissed the law as “political posturing”, while other critics have underlined several practical and legal challenges to implementing the new law.
The government has said it plans to house people in disused military bases and vacation parks. But there are questions about whether the government has the capacity to keep people detained in these centres.
There are logistical questions about how the UK would be able to remove tens of thousands of people from the country each year, and where they would go.
Rwanda only had one hostel, with a capacity for 100 people, to accept UK arrivals last year, a fraction of those who have arrived in the UK on small boats, and the government has not signed any similar deals with other countries yet.
Turning sick people away from receiving healthcare is not a ‘plan’.
Forcing people into destitution is not a ‘plan’.
Deporting people to a country 4000 miles away is not a ‘plan’.
Refugee groups have said that most of the Channel arrivals are fleeing conflict, persecution or famine in countries such as Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. Analysts using Home Office data in 2021 showed a majority of applications for asylum made by people who arrived by boats were granted in the UK.
The Refugee Council charity said the new plans are “unworkable, costly and won’t stop the boats”.
4 false statements from @SuellaBraverman 1) Refugees dont have to claim asylum in the 1st so-called safe country 2) Being an “adult male” does not mean you can’t be a refugee 3) The UK’s asylum laws aren’t “generous” 4) Seeking asylum is not a crime. #saferoutes don’t exist
— Refugee and Migrant Forum of Essex & London (@RAMFELCharity) March 7, 2023
The charity said the law would leave refugees “locked up in a state of misery” and compared the government’s approach to “authoritarian nations”, such as Russia, which have walked away from international human rights treaties.
🧵 The Government’s new asylum bill ignores the fundamental point that most of the people in small boats are men, women and children escaping terror and bloodshed from countries like Afghanistan, Iran and Syria. (1/4)
Some lawyers have said barring unauthorised people arriving in the UK from claiming asylum would be incompatible with the United Nations Refugee Convention, of which the country is a signatory. This is likely to lead to legal challenges, which could delay removals.
CROTONE, Italy (AP) — Rescue teams pulled more bodies from the sea on Tuesday, bringing the death toll from Italy’s latest migration tragedy to 65, as prosecutors identified suspected smugglers who allegedly charged 8,000 euros (nearly $8,500) for each person making the “voyage of death” from Turkey to Italy.
Authorities delayed a planned viewing of the coffins to allow more time for identification of the bodies, as desperate relatives and friends arrived in the Calabrian city of Crotone in hope of finding their loved ones, some of whom hailed from Afghanistan.
“I am looking for my aunt and her three children,” said Aladdin Mohibzada, adding that he drove 25 hours from Germany to reach the makeshift morgue set up at a sports stadium. He said he had ascertained that his aunt and two of the children died, but that a 5-year-old survived and was being sheltered in a center for minors.
“We are looking into possibilities to send (the bodies) to Afghanistan, the bodies that are here,” he told The Associated Press outside the morgue. But he complained about a lack of information as authorities scrambled to cope with the disaster. “We are helpless here. We don’t know what we should do.”
At least 65 people, including 14 minors, died when their overcrowded wooden boat slammed into shoals 100 meters (yards) off the shore of Cutro and broke apart early Sunday in rough seas. Eighty people survived, but many more are feared dead since survivors indicated the boat had carried about 170 people when it set off last week from Izmir, Turkey.
Aid groups at the scene have said many of the passengers hailed from Afghanistan, including entire families, as well as from Pakistan, Syria and Iraq. Rescue teams pulled two bodies from the sea on Tuesday, bringing the toll to 65, police said.
Premier Giorgia Meloni sent a letter to European leaders demanding quick action on the continent’s longstanding migration problem, insisting that migrants must be stopped from risking their lives on dangerous sea crossings.
“The point is, the more people who set off, the more people risk dying,” she told RAI state television late Monday.
Meloni’s right-wing government, which swept elections last year in part on promises to crack down on migration, has concentrated on complicating efforts by humanitarian boats to make multiple rescues in the central Mediterranean by assigning them ports of disembarkation along Italy’s northern coasts. That means the vessels need more time to return to sea after bringing migrants aboard and taking them safely to shore.
But aid groups’ rescue ships don’t normally operate in the area of Sunday’s shipwreck, which occurred off the Calabrian coast in the Ionian Sea. Rather, the aid groups generally operate in the central Mediterranean, rescuing migrants who set off from Libya or Tunisia — not from Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean.
Crotone prosecutor Giuseppe Capoccia confirmed investigators had identified three suspected smugglers, a Turk and two Pakistani nationals. A second Turk is believed to have escaped or died in the wreck.
Italy’s border police said in a statement that organizers of the crossing charged 8,000 euros (around $8,500) each for the “voyage of death.”
Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi pushed back at suggestions that the rescue was delayed or affected by government policy discouraging aid groups from staying at sea to rescue migrants.
The EU border agency Frontex has said its aircraft spotted the boat off Crotone at 10:26 p.m. Saturday and alerted Italian authorities. Italy sent out two patrol vessels, but they had to turn back because of the poor weather.
Piantedosi told a parliamentary committee that the ship ran aground and broke apart at around 5 a.m. Sunday.
“There was no delay,” Piantedosi told Corriere della Sera. “Everything possible was done in absolutely prohibitive sea conditions.”
The Italian Coast Guard issued a statement on Tuesday saying Frontex had indicated that the migrants’ boat was “navigating normally” and that only one person could be seen above deck.
It added that an Italian border police vessel, “already operating in the sea” set out to intercept the migrant boat.
“At about 4:30 a.m., some indications by telephone from subjects on land, relative to a boat in danger a few meters from the coast, reached the Coast Guard,″ the statement said.
At that point, a Carabinieri police boat which had been alerted by border police “informed the Coast Guard about the shipwreck.”
In contrast to similar cases of migrant vessels in distress, “no phone indication ever came from migrants aboard” to the Coast Guard, the statement noted.
Not rarely, migrants aboard a vessel in distress contact Alarm Phone, a humanitarian support hotline which relays indications of boats in trouble in the Mediterranean to maritime authorities.
When briefing lawmakers, the interior minister cited figures supporting Italy’s long-held frustration that fellow European Union nations don’t honor pledges to accept a share of asylum-seeking migrants who reach Italy.
Piantedosi said that while these pledges covered some 8,000 migrant relocations from June last year through this month, only 387 people actually were transferred to other EU nations, with Germany taking in most of them.
Federal agency investigates people smugglers after two recent incidents of Pakistanis drowning on their way to Europe.
Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistani authorities have launched an investigation to find alleged traffickers after a boat carrying nearly 200 people – 20 of them Pakistanis – drowned near the southern Italian coast, killing at least 63.
Sixteen Pakistanis survived the shipwreck, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif tweeted on Monday, while four others are still missing. A search operation is continuing.
On Tuesday, an official of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) told Al Jazeera there had been two incidents of Pakistani refugees drowning in recent weeks, the other being off Libya’s coast nearly a week ago.
The FIA official, on condition of anonymity, said the agency had formed several teams of investigators following the incidents and expected to arrest some suspected traffickers.
“We have met some families and conducted our own investigation into criminal elements involved in trafficking, and will hopefully make some arrests soon,” he said.
The reports of the drowning of over two dozen Pakistanis in a boat tragedy in Italy are deeply concerning & worrisome. I have directed Foreign Office to ascertain facts as early as possible & take the nation into confidence.
At least 63 people, including 12 children, died after the wooden boat that left Turkey last week crashed early on Sunday against rocks near Steccato di Cutro, a resort on the eastern coast of Italy’s Calabria region.
In a tweet on Monday, Pakistan’s foreign ministry said their embassy official in Italy met the 16 Pakistanis rescued from the capsized vessel.
“They seemed [to be] in good physical condition. According to them, there were 20 Pakistanis on the ship. Embassy is in close contact with Italian authorities to verify status of the four missing Pakistanis,” said the tweet.
Muhammed Waseem, a resident of Gujar Khan, a small city nearly 60km (37 miles) from the capital, Islamabad, told Al Jazeera his nephew Asad Naeem was among the Pakistanis who drowned in the Libya incident.
“We submitted an application to the foreign office on Monday but so far have not heard back anything from the officials,” he said.
Waseem said the family last heard from his nephew on February 22 when he boarded a ship in Libya bound for Italy.
“He called us and said he has boarded a big ship and there is nothing to worry about. But two days later, we got a call from a number in Libya, informing us of his death,” he said.
“We are looking for some help from the authorities to bring his body back to Pakistan,” he added.
At least 43 migrants drowned on Sunday after the fishing boat on which they were traveling sank off the coast of the Italian region of Calabria.
According to local authorities, some 250 migrants were crammed aboard the ship, which broke in two about 20 kilometers from the city of Crotone. Over 100 passengers have been rescued, but at least 70 of the people who were aboard the ship remain missing.
Over the course of the morning, bodies, including those of children and at least one newborn baby, have washed ashore in the resort town of Steccato di Cutro, according to local reports.
Although the ship’s port of origin was in Turkey, authorities say the majority of the migrants that have been rescued are from Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said the disaster was “a huge tragedy that demonstrates how necessary it is to oppose the chains of irregular migration,” adding that more needed to be done to clamp down on “unscrupulous smugglers” who, “in order to get rich, organize improvised trips with inadequate boats and in prohibitive conditions.”
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni expressed her “deep sorrow” for the shipwreck and pledged to stop irregular sea migration in order to prevent more tragedies. “The government is committed to preventing [migrant] departures, and with them the unfolding of these tragedies,” she said in a statement.
“It is inhumane to trade the lives of men, women and children for the price of the ‘ticket’ they have paid with the false prospect of a safe journey,” Meloni said.
Calabrian President Roberto Occhiuto slammed EU authorities for their inaction in addressing the migration crisis and asked “what has the European Union been doing all these years?”
“Where is Europe when it comes to guaranteeing security and legality?” he asked, adding that regions like his were left on their own to “manage emergencies and mourn the dead.”
Opposition parties said the tragedy indicated the flaws in Italy’s migration policy. “Condemning only the smugglers, as the center-right is doing now, is hypocrisy,″ said Laura Ferrara, a European Parliament lawmaker from the 5-Star Movement. “The truth is that the EU today does not offer effective alternatives for those who are forced abandon their country of origin; there are no real alternatives to smugglers and traffickers,″ Ferrara said in a statement.
According to the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project, at least 2,366 migrants lost their lives attempting to cross the Mediterranean last year; at least 124 have been reporting missing in its waters since the beginning of this year.
LONDON — It was clear when Boris Johnson was forced from Downing Street that British politics had changed forever.
But few could have predicted that less than six months later, all angry talk of a cross-Channel trade war would be a distant memory, with Britain and the EU striking a remarkable compromise deal over post-Brexit trade rules in Northern Ireland.
Private conversations with more than a dozen U.K. and EU officials, politicians and diplomats reveal how the Brexit world changed completely after Johnson’s departure — and how an “unholy trinity” of little-known civil servants, ensconced in a gloomy basement in Brussels, would mastermind a seismic shift in Britain’s relationship with the Continent.
They were aided by an unlikely sequence of political events in Westminster — not least an improbable change of mood under the combative Liz Truss; and then the jaw-dropping rise to power of the ultra-pragmatic Rishi Sunak. Even the amiable figure of U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly would play his part, glad-handing his way around Europe and smoothing over cracks that had grown ever-wider since 2016.
As Sunak’s Conservative MPs pore over the detail of his historic agreement with Brussels — and await the all-important verdict of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland — POLITICO has reconstructed the dramatic six-month shift in Britain’s approach that brought us to the brink of the Brexit deal we see today.
Bye-bye Boris
Johnson’s departure from Downing Street, on September 6, triggered an immediate mood shift in London toward the EU — and some much-needed optimism within the bloc about future cross-Channel relations.
For key figures in EU capitals, Johnson would always be the untrustworthy figure who signed the protocol agreement only to disown it months afterward.
In Paris, relations were especially poisonous, amid reports of Johnson calling the French “turds”; endless spats with the Elysée over post-Brexit fishing rights, sausages and cross-Channel migrants; and Britain’s role in the AUKUS security partnership, which meant the loss of a multi-billion submarine contract for France. Paris’ willingness to engage with Johnson was limited in the extreme.
Truss, despite her own verbal spats with French President Emmanuel Macron — and her famously direct approach to diplomacy — was viewed in a different light. Her success at building close rapport with negotiating partners had worked for her as trade secretary, and once she became prime minister, she wanted to move beyond bilateral squabbles and focus on global challenges, including migration, energy and the war in Ukraine.
“Boris had become ‘Mr. Brexit,’” one former U.K. government adviser said. “He was the one the EU associated with the protocol, and obviously [Truss] didn’t come with the same baggage. She had covered the brief, but she didn’t have the same history. As prime minister, Liz wanted to use her personal relationships to move things on — but that wasn’t the same as a shift in the underlying substance.”
Indeed, Truss was still clear on the need to pass the controversial Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which would have given U.K. ministers powers to overrule part of the protocol unilaterally, in order to ensure leverage in the talks with the European Commission.
Truss also triggered formal dispute proceedings against Brussels for blocking Britain’s access to the EU’s Horizon Europe research program. And her government maintained Johnson’s refusal to implement checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain, causing deep irritation in Brussels.
But despite the noisy backdrop, tentative contact with Brussels quietly resumed in September, with officials on both sides trying to rebuild trust. Truss, however, soon became “very disillusioned by the lack of pragmatism from the EU,” one of her former aides said.
“The negotiations were always about political will, not technical substance — and for whatever reason, the political will to compromise from the Commission was never there when Liz, [ex-negotiator David] Frost, Boris were leading things,” they said.
Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss announces her resignation outside 10 Downing Street in central London on October 20, 2022 | Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images
Truss, of course, would not be leading things for long. An extraordinary meltdown of the financial markets precipitated her own resignation in late October, after just six weeks in office. Political instability in Westminster once again threatened to derail progress.
But Sunak’s arrival in No. 10 Downing Street — amid warnings of a looming U.K. recession — gave new impetus to the talks. An EU official said the mood music improved further, and that discussions with London became “much more constructive” as a result.
David Lidington, a former deputy to ex-PM Theresa May who played a key role in previous Brexit negotiations, describes Sunak as a “globalist” rather than an “ultra-nationalist,” who believes Britain ought to have “a sensible, friendly and grown-up relationship” with Brussels outside the EU.
During his time as chancellor, Sunak was seen as a moderating influence on his fellow Brexiteer Cabinet colleagues, several of whom seemed happy to rush gung-ho toward a trade war with the EU.
“Rishi has always thought of the protocol row as a nuisance, an issue he wanted to get dealt with,” the former government adviser first quoted said.
One British officialsuggested the new prime minister’s reputation for pragmatism gave the U.K. negotiating team “an opportunity to start again.”
Sunak’s slow decision-making and painstaking attention to detail — the subject of much criticism in Whitehall — proved useful in calming EU jitters about the new regime, they added.
“When he came in, it wasn’t just the calming down of the markets. It was everyone across Europe and in the U.S. thinking ‘OK, they’re done going through their crazy stage,’” the same officialsaid. “It’s the time he takes with everything, the general steadiness.”
EU leaders “have watched him closely, they listened to what he said, and they have been prepared to trust him and see how things go,” Lidington noted.
Global backdrop
As months of chaos gave way to calm in London, the West was undergoing a seismic reorganization.
Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered a flurry of coordinated work for EU and U.K. diplomats — including sanctions, military aid, reconstruction talks and anti-inflation packages. A sense began to emerge that it was in both sides’ common interest to get the Northern Ireland protocol row out of the way.
“The war in Ukraine has completely changed the context over the last year,” an EU diplomat said.
A second U.K. official agreed. “Suddenly we realized that the 2 percent of the EU border we’d been arguing about was nothing compared to the massive border on the other side of the EU, which Putin was threatening,” they said. “And suddenly there wasn’t any electoral benefit to keeping this row over Brexit going — either for us or for governments across the EU.”
A quick glance at the electoral calendar made it clear 2023 offered the last opportunity to reach a deal in the near future, with elections looming for both the U.K. and EU parliaments the following year — effectively putting any talks on ice.
“Rishi Sunak would have certainly been advised by his officials that come 2024, the EU is not going to be wanting to take any new significant initiatives,” Lidington said. “And we will be in election mode.”
The upcoming 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday peace agreement on April 10 heaped further pressure on the U.K. negotiators, amid interest from U.S. President Joe Biden in visiting Europe to mark the occasion.
“The anniversary was definitely playing on people’s minds,” the first U.K. official said.“Does [Sunak] really want to be the prime minister when there’s no government in Northern Ireland on the anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement?”
The pressure was ramped up further when Biden specifically raised the protocol in a meeting with Truss at the U.N. General Assembly in New York in late September, after which British officials said they expected the 25th anniversary to act as a “key decision point” on the dispute.
The King and I
Whitehall faced further pressure from another unlikely source — King Charles III, who was immediately planning a state visit to Paris within weeks of ascending the throne in September 2022. Truss had suggested delaying the visit until the protocol row was resolved, according to two European diplomats.
The monarch is now expected to visit Paris and Berlin at the end of March — and although his role is strictly apolitical, few doubt he is taking a keen interest in proceedings. He has raised the protocol in recent conversations with European diplomats, showing a close engagement with the detail.
One former senior diplomat involved in several of the king’s visits said that Charles has long held “a private interest in Ireland, and has wanted to see if there was an appropriately helpful role he could play in improving relations [with the U.K].”
By calling the deal the Windsor framework and presenting it at a press conference in front of Windsor Castle, one of the king’s residences, No. 10 lent Monday’s proceedings an unmistakable royal flavor.
The king also welcomed von der Leyen for tea at the castle following the signing of the deal. A Commission spokesperson insisted their meeting was “separate” from the protocol discussion talks. Tory MPs were skeptical.
Cleverly does it
The British politician tasked with improving relations with Brussels was Foreign Secretary Cleverly, appointed by Truss last September. He immediately began exploring ways to rebuild trust with Commission Vice-President and Brexit point-man Maroš Šefčovič, the second U.K. official cited said.
His first hurdle was a perception in Brussels that the British team had sabotaged previous talks by leaking key details to U.K. newspapers and hardline Tory Brexiteers for domestic political gain. As a result, U.K. officials made a conscious effort to keep negotiations tightly sealed, a No. 10 official said.
“The relationship with Maroš improved massively when we agreed not to carry out a running commentary” on the content of the discussions, the second U.K. official added.
This meant keeping key government ministers out of the loop, including Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, an arch-Brexiteer who had been brought back onto the frontbench by Truss.
British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly is welcomed by European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič ahead of a meeting at the EU headquarters in Brussels on February 17, 2023 | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
The first U.K. official said Baker would have “felt the pain,” as he had little to offer his erstwhile backbench colleagues looking for guidance while negotiations progressed, “and that was a choice by No. 10.”
Cleverly and Šefčovič “spent longer than people think just trying to build rapport,” the second U.K. officialsaid, with Cleverly explaining the difficulties the protocol was raising in Northern Ireland and Šefčovič insistent that key economic sectors were in fact benefiting from the arrangement.
Cleverly also worked at the bilateral relationship with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, while Sunak made efforts to improve ties with French President Emmanuel Macron, Lidington noted.
A British diplomat based in Washington said Cleverly had provided “a breath of fresh air” after the “somewhat stiff” manner of his predecessors, Truss and the abrasive Dominic Raab.
By the Conservative party conference in early October, the general mood among EU diplomats in attendance was one of expectation. And the Birmingham jamboree did not disappoint.
Sorry is the hardest word
Baker, who had once described himself as a “Brexit hard man,” stunned Dublin by formally apologizing to the people of Ireland for his past comments, just days before technical talks between the Commission and the U.K. government were due to resume.
“I caused a great deal of inconvenience and pain and difficulty,” he said. “Some of our actions were not very respectful of Ireland’s legitimate interests. I want to put that right.”
The apology was keenly welcomed in Dublin, where Micheál Martin, the Irish prime minister at the time, called it “honest and very, very helpful.”
Irish diplomats based in the U.K. met Baker and other prominent figures from the European Research Group of Tory Euroskeptics at the party conference, where Baker spoke privately of his “humility” and his “resolve” to address the issues, a senior Irish diplomat said.
“Resolve was the keyword,” the envoy said. “If Steve Baker had the resolve to work for a transformation of relationships between Ireland and the U.K., then we thought — there were tough talks to be had — but a sustainable deal was now a possibility.”
There were other signs of rapprochement. Just a few hours after Baker’s earth-shattering apology, Truss confirmed her attendance at the inaugural meeting in Prague of the European Political Community, a new forum proposed by Macron open to both EU and non-EU countries.
Sunak at the wheel
The momentum snowballed under Sunak, who decided within weeks of becoming PM to halt the passage of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill in the House of Lords, reiterating Britain’s preference for a negotiated settlement. In exchange, the Commission froze a host of infringement proceedings taking aim at the way the U.K. was handling the protocol. This created space for talks to proceed in a more cordial environment.
An EU-U.K. agreement in early January allowed Brussels to start using a live information system detailing goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, seen as key to unlocking a wider agreement on physical checks under the protocol.
The U.K. also agreed to conduct winter technical negotiations in Brussels, rather than alternating rounds between the EU capital and London, as was the case when Frost served as Britain’s chief negotiator.
Trust continued to build. Suddenly the Commission was open to U.K. solutions such as the “Stormont brake,” a clause giving the Northern Ireland Assembly power of veto over key protocol machinations, which British officials did not believe Brussels would accept when they first pitched them.
The Stormont brake was discussed “relatively early on,” a third U.K. official said. “Then we spent a huge amount of effort making sure nobody knew about it. It was kept the most secret of secret things.”
Yet a second EU diplomat claimed the ideas in the deal were not groundbreaking and could have been struck “years ago” if Britain had a prime minister with enough political will to solve the dispute. “None of the solutions that have been found now is revolutionary,” they said.
An ally of Johnson described the claim he was a block on progress as “total nonsense.”
The ‘unholy trinity’
Away from the media focus, a group of seasoned U.K. officials began to engage with their EU counterparts in earnest. But there was one (not so) new player in town.
Tim Barrow, a former U.K. permanent representative to the EU armed with a peerless contact book, had been an active figure in rebuilding relations with the bloc since Truss appointed him national security adviser. He acquired a more prominent role in the protocol talks after Sunak dispatched him to Brussels in January 2023, hoping EU figures would see him as “almost one of them,” another adviser to Sunak said.
Ensconced in the EU capital, Barrow and his U.K. team of negotiators took over several meeting rooms in the basement of the U.K. embassy, while staffers were ordered to keep quiet about their presence.
Besides his work on Northern Ireland trade, Barrow began to appear in meetings with EU representatives about other key issues creating friction in the EU-U.K. relationship, including discussions on migration alongside U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
Barrow “positioned himself very well,” the first EU diplomat quoted above said. “He’s very close to the prime minister — everybody in Brussels and London knows he’s got his ear. He’s very knowledgeable while very political.”
But other British officials insist Barrow’s presence was not central to driving through the deal. “He has been a figure, but not the only figure,” the U.K. adviser quoted above said. “It’s been a lot of people, actually, over quite a period of time.”
When it came to the tough, detailed technical negotiations, the burden fell on the shoulders of Mark Davies — the head of the U.K. taskforce praised for his mastery of the protocol detail — and senior civil servant and former director of the Northern Ireland Office, Brendan Threlfall.
The three formed an “unholy trinity,” as described by the first U.K. official, with each one bringing something to the table.
Davies was “a classic civil servant, an unsung hero,”the official said, while Threlfall “has good connections, good understanding” and “Tim has met all the EU interlocutors over the years.”
Sitting across the table, the EU team was led by Richard Szostak, a Londoner born to Polish parents and a determined Commission official with a great CV and an affinity for martial arts. His connection to von der Leyen was her deputy head of cabinet until recently, Stéphanie Riso, a former member of Brussels’ Brexit negotiating team who developed a reputation for competence on both sides of the debate.
Other senior figures at the U.K. Cabinet Office played key roles, including Cabinet Secretary Simon Case and senior official Sue Gray.
The latter — a legendary Whitehall enforcer who adjudicated over Johnson’s “Partygate” scandal — has a longstanding connection to Northern Ireland, famously taking a career break in the late 1980s to run a pub in Newry, where she has family links. More recently, she spent two years overseeing the finance ministry.
Gray has been spotted in Stormont at crunch points over the past six months as Northern Ireland grapples with the pain of the continued absence of an executive.
Some predict Gray could yet play a further role, in courting the Democratic Unionist Party as the agreement moves forward in the weeks ahead.
For U.K. and EU officials, the agreement struck with Brussels represented months of hard work — but for Sunak and his Cabinet colleagues, the hardest yards may yet lie ahead.
This story was updated to clarify two parts of the sourcing.
BRUSSELS — The EU was “scared” of Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon during the European parliamentary election in 2019 — but those fears are gone ahead of the 2024 ballot, European Commission Vice President Věra Jourová said.
Referring to Bannon’s attempts to form a “club” to support far-right populists such as the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders and France’s Marine Le Pen in the run-up to the last EU-wide election, Jourová said Brussels was genuinely concerned his ideas would take off.
“We were scared by Steve Bannon organizing the pan-European campaign comprising Mr. Wilders, Madame Le Pen, and all the rest — finding everywhere useful partners and willing collaborators,” Jourová told journalists at a gathering on Thursday night.
“It was a combination still of the effect of the migration crisis, of terrorism, and Trump,” Jourová said. “It was also the Cambridge Analytica case” — revelations that the infamous British data analytics firm had illegally accessed people’s social media data to target them in a number of elections and was linked to Trump’s successful 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. “It was also the time of rising disinformation, targeted disinformation campaigns — these were things which were relatively new for us.”
Bannon, “with his simplified vision of Europe, could easily trigger something, which the others who know Europe could use as a platform. This was my fear,” Jourová said. But, “it didn’t happen. And I believe that now it will be a similar thing.”
Jourová, who is the European commissioner for values and transparency, said she believed Russia’s war on Ukraine would see Europeans make safe bets in the 2024 election, during which citizens in the EU’s 27 member countries will vote to elect the members of the European Parliament.
“I don’t think there will be a rise of extremist parties — far right or left,” Jourová said. “Because the people now see, especially in the time of crisis, it’s not the time for experiments.”
Asked whether the revelations of corruption and influence-buying by countries such as Qatar and Morocco in the European Parliament would drive extremist sentiment in the ballot, Jourová said it was “hard to say,” as the election was still a year away.
But, she added, “if I take a broader picture, when people see the politicians in jail, there are two kinds of instincts: ‘They are all rotten, they are all bad, we knew it.’ But then when the people see the system works, and when cases of corruption are closed and people are punished, I think that paradoxically, such scandal can even increase the trust of people in democratic institutions.”
ANTAKYA, Turkey (AP) — When war broke out in Ukraine, Aydin Sisman’s relatives there fled to the ancient city of Antakya, in a southeastern corner of Turkey that borders Syria.
They may have escaped one disaster, but another found them in their new home.
They were staying with Sisman’s Ukrainian mother-in-law when their building collapsed last Monday as a 7.8 magnitude earthquake leveled much of Antakya and ravaged the region in what some in Turkey are calling the disaster of the century.
“We have Ukrainian guests who fled the war, and they are also lying inside. We have had no contact.” said Sisman, whose Turkish father-in-law also was trapped under the rubble of the 10-year-old apartment building.
As rescuers dig through heaps of rubble, Sisman appeared to have lost hope.
Millions of refugees, like Sisman’s relatives, have found a haven in Turkey, escaping from wars and local conflicts from countries as close as Syria to as far afield as Afghanistan.
There are at least 3.6 million Syrians who have fled their homeland’s war since 2011, arriving in trickles or en masse, sometimes overrunning the border, to seek safety from punishing bombardments, chemical attacks and starvation. Over 300,000 others have come to escape their own conflicts and hardships, according to the United Nations.
For them, the earthquake was just the latest tragedy — one that many are still too shocked to comprehend.
“This is the greatest disaster we have seen, and we have seen a lot,” said Yehia Sayed Ali, 25, a university student whose family moved to Antakya six years ago to escape Syria’s war at its peak.
His mother, two cousins and another relative all died in the earthquake. On Saturday, he sat outside his demolished two-story building waiting for rescuers to help him dig out their bodies.
“Not a single Syrian family has not lost a relative, a dear one” in this earthquake, said Ahmad Abu Shaar, who ran a shelter for Syrian refugees in Antakya that is now a pile of rubble.
Abu Shaar said people are searching for loved ones and many have refused to leave Antakya even though the quake has left the city with no inhabitable structures, no electricity, water or heating. Many are sleeping on the streets or in the shadows of broken buildings.
“The people are still living in shock. No one could have imagined this,” Abu Shaar said.
Certainly not Sisman, who flew from Qatar to Turkey with his wife to help find his in-laws and their Ukrainian relatives.
“Right now, my mother-in-law and father-in-law are inside. They’re under rubble … There were no rescue teams. I went up by myself, took a look, and walked around. I saw bodies and we pulled them out from under the rubble. Some without heads,” he said.
Construction workers sifting through the debris told Sisman that although the top of the building was solid, the garage and foundations were not as strong.
“When those collapsed, that’s when the building was flattened,” a shaken Sisman said. He appeared to have accepted his relatives were not coming out alive.
Overwhelmed by the trauma, Abdulqader Barakat stood desperately pleading for international aid to help rescue his children trapped under concrete in Antakya.
“There are four. We took two out and two are still (inside) for hours. We hear their voices and they are reacting. We need (rescue) squads,” he said.
At the Syrian shelter, Mohammed Aloolo sat in a circle surrounded by his children who escaped the building that swayed and finally folded like an accordion.
He came to Antakya in May from a refugee camp along the Turkish-Syrian border. He had survived artillery shelling and fighting in his hometown in Syria’s central Hama province, but he called his survival in the earthquake a miracle.
Other relatives were not so lucky. Two nieces and their families remain under the debris, he said, holding back tears.
“I wish this on no one. Nothing I can say that would describe this,” Aloolo said.
Scenes of despair and mourning can be found across the region that only a few days earlier was a peaceful refuge for those fleeing war and conflict.
At a cemetery in the town of Elbistan, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) north of Antakya, a Syrian family wept and prayed as it buried one of its own. Naziha Al-Ahmad, a mother of four, was pulled dead from the rubble of their new home. Two of her daughters were seriously injured, including one who lost her toes.
“My wife was good, very good. Affectionate, kind, a good wife, God bless her soul,” said Ahmad Al-Ahmad. “Neighbours died, and we died with them.”
Graves are quickly filling up.
At the Turkish and Syria border, people transferred body bags into a truck waiting to take the remains to Syria for burial in their homeland. They included the body of Khaled Qazqouz’s 5-year-old niece, Tasneem Qazqouz.
Tasneem and her father both died when the quake wracked the border town of Kirikhan.
“We took her out from under the destruction, from under the rocks. The whole building fell,” Qazqouz said. “We worked for three days to get her out.”
Qazqouz signed his niece’s name on the body bag before sending her off to the truck heading for Syria.
He prayed as he let her go.
“Say hi to your dad and give him my wishes. Say hi to your grandfather and your uncle and everyone,” he cried. “Between the destruction and the rubble, we have nothing now. Life has become so difficult.”
___
Titova reported from Elbistan, Turkey, and Abuelgasim from Cilvegozu, Turkey. Associated Press writer Sarah El Deeb in Antakya contributed to this report.
The announcement comes after Nicaragua’s legislature moved to strip released prisoners of their citizenship.
Spanish officials say they have offered citizenship to more than 200 Nicaraguan political prisoners released earlier this week, after legislators aligned with Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega moved to strip them of their legal status as citizens.
Spanish foreign minister Jose Manuel Albares announced the decision on Friday to the news outlet Servimedia, one day after 222 political prisoners were freed by Nicaragua and sent to the United States.
The former prisoners include opposition leaders, journalists and religious figures who have been outspoken against Ortega, a politician that human-rights groups have accused of orchestrating a violent campaign to silence his critics.
In a statement on Thursday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed the release as a step “towards addressing human rights abuses” in Nicaragua and said it was the result of “concerted American diplomacy”.
The Ortega administration, meanwhile, has described the prisoner release as an effort to remove criminals from within Nicaragua’s borders. In televised remarks, Ortega derided the prisoners as “agents” of foreign powers, saying, “Let them have their mercenaries.”
The vote by Nicaragua’s legislature to revoke the released prisoners’ citizenship left critics in fear that the 222 people would become stateless. The decision, however, would require a constitutional change to become official, and a second vote on the citizenship issue is not likely to occur before 2024.
Albares told reporters the Spanish government made its decision to offer the former prisoners citizenship following “reports that proceedings had begun to declare them stateless”.
The prisoners have been allowed to enter the US on temporary humanitarian visas. Spanish authorities said they would reach out to the prisoners to invite them to formally apply for citizenship.
Two individuals were freed on Thursday but refused to board a plane to the US. One of them was Catholic Bishop Rolando Álvarez, who was expected to be sentenced on charges of conspiracy and spreading false information next week.
But his sentencing hearing was moved forward to Friday after the release of the prisoners. Before a Managua appeals court, chief magistrate Octavio Ernesto Rothschuh handed Álvarez a 26-year sentence — the longest prison term given to an opposition figure under Ortega’s presidency in recent years.
The court also announced that Álvarez would receive a fine and have his Nicaraguan citizenship revoked.
Álvarez, one of Ortega’s most prominent critics, has been under arrest since August when police launched a pre-dawn raid on his church residence. He declined to leave Nicaragua on Thursday without first being able to consult with his fellow bishops, a condition Ortega ridiculed as “absurd”.
The bishop is reportedly being held in the nearby Modelo prison, a facility Amnesty International has accused of torture and inhumane conditions.
EL PASO, Texas (AP) — President Joe Biden walked a muddy stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border and inspected a busy port of entry Sunday on his first trip to the region after two years in office, a visit shadowed by the fraught politics of immigration as Republicans blame him for record numbers of migrants crossing into the country.
At his first stop, the president observed as border officers in El Paso demonstrated how they search vehicles for drugs, money and other contraband. Next, he traveled to a dusty street with abandoned buildings and walked along a metal border fence that separated the U.S. city from Ciudad Juarez.
His last stop was the El Paso County Migrant Services Center — but there were no migrants in sight. As he learned about the services offered there, he asked an aid worker, “If I could wave the wand, what should I do?” The answer was not audible.
Biden’s nearly four-hour visit to El Paso was highly controlled. He encountered no migrants except when his motorcade drove alongside the border and about a dozen were visible on the Ciudad Juárez side. His visit did not include time at a Border Patrol station, where migrants who cross illegally are arrested and held before their release. He delivered no public remarks.
The visit seemed designed to showcase a smooth operation to process legal migrants, weed out smuggled contraband and humanely treat those who have entered illegally, creating a counter-narrative to Republicans’ claims of a crisis situation equivalent to an open border.
But his visit was likely do little to quell critics from both sides, including immigrant advocates who accuse him of establishing cruel policies not unlike those of his hard-line predecessor, Donald Trump.
In a sign of the deep tensions over immigration, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, handed Biden a letter as soon as he touched down in the state that said the “chaos” at the border was a “direct result” of the president’s failure to enforce federal laws. Biden later took the letter out of his jacket pocket during his tour, telling reporters, “I haven’t read it yet.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy dismissed Biden’s visit as a “photo op,” saying on Twitter that the Republican majority would hold the administration “accountable for creating the most dangerous border crisis in American history.”
El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego welcomed Biden’s visit, but said a current lull in arrivals prevented the president from seeing how large the group of newcomers has been.
“He didn’t get to see the real difficulties,” said Samaniego, who was in the local delegation that greeted Biden. “It was good that he was here. It’s a first step. But we still need to do more and have more time with him.”
Elsewhere in El Paso where Biden did not visit, hundreds of migrants were gathered Sunday outside the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, where they have been sleeping outdoors and receiving three meals a day from faith groups and other humanitarian organizations.
The migrants included several pregnant women, including Karla Sainz, 26, eight months along. She was traveling in a small group that included her 2-year-old son, Joshua. Sainz left her three other children back home in Venezuela with her mother.
“I would ask President Biden to help me with a permission or something so we can work and continue,” she said.
Juan Tovar, 32, one of several people in her group, suggested he also had political reasons for leaving his home country.
“Socialism is the worst,” he said. “In Venezuela, they kill us, they torture us, we can’t talk bad about the government. We are worse off than in Cuba.”
Noengris Garcia, also eight months pregnant, was traveling with her husband, teen son and the small family dog from the tiny state of Portuguesa, Venezuela, where she operated a food stall.
“We don’t want to be given money or a house,” said Garcia, 39. “We just want to work.”
Asked what he’s learned by seeing the border firsthand and speaking with the officers who work along it, Biden said: “They need a lot of resources. We’re going to get it for them.”
El Paso is currently the biggest corridor for illegal crossings, in large part due to Nicaraguans fleeing repression, crime and poverty in their country. They are among migrants from four countries who are now subject to quick expulsion under new rules enacted by the Biden administration in the past week that drew strong criticism from immigration advocates.
Biden’s recent policy announcements on border security and his visit to the border were aimed in part at blunting the impact of upcoming investigations into immigration promised by House Republicans. But any enduring solution will require action by the sharply divided Congress, where multiple efforts to enact sweeping changes have failed in recent years.
From Texas, Biden traveled south to Mexico City, where he and the leaders of Mexico and Canada will gather on Monday and Tuesday for a North American leaders summit. Immigration is among the items on the agenda. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador met Biden at the airport Sunday night and joined him in the presidential limousine for the ride to Biden’s hotel.
The numbers of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has risen dramatically during Biden’s first two years in office. There were more than 2.38 million stops during the year that ended Sept. 30, the first time the number topped 2 million. The administration has struggled to clamp down on crossings, reluctant to take measures that would resemble those of Trump’s administration.
The policy changes announced this past week are Biden’s biggest move yet to contain illegal border crossings and will turn away tens of thousands of migrants arriving at the border. At the same time, 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela will get the chance to come to the U.S. legally as long as they travel by plane, get a sponsor and pass background checks.
The U.S. will also turn away migrants who do not seek asylum first in a country they traveled through en route to the U.S. Migrants are being asked to complete a form on a phone app so that they they can go to a port of entry at a pre-scheduled date and time.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters aboard Air Force One that the administration is trying to “incentivize a safe and orderly way and cut out the smuggling organizations,” saying the policies are “not a ban at all” but an attempt to protect migrants from the trauma that smuggling can create.
The changes were welcomed by some, particularly leaders in cities where migrants have been massing. But Biden was excoriated by immigrant advocate groups, which accused him of taking measures modeled after those of the former president. Administration officials disputed that characterization.
For all of his international travel over his 50 years in public service, Biden has not spent much time at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The only visit that the White House could point to was Biden’s drive by the border while he was campaigning for president in 2008. He sent Vice President Kamala Harris to El Paso in 2021, but she was criticized for largely bypassing the action, because El Paso wasn’t the center of crossings that it is now.
Trump, who made hardening immigration a signature issue, traveled to the border several times.
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Associated Press writers Andres Leighton in El Paso, Texas; Anita Snow in Phoenix; Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.
KYIV — When the Russians first came to the school where Larysa taught history in southeastern Ukraine, they asked for all the history and Ukrainian language textbooks.
The director refused to hand them over.
The school closed — but then reopened virtually on September 1, with up to 80 percent of its 700 pupils attending online. More than half of them remain in occupied Berdiansk in Zaporizhzhia region, said Larysa, who left in April for the Odesa region.
“Some go to Russian school and do homework with us,” she said. “We do all we can to make it incognito. We deleted all electronic lists, never put up any photos or screenshots or write names.”
Larysa did not give her surname or name the school for security reasons. Half of her colleagues are still on occupied territory and teaching online, risking imprisonment or worse from occupying forces — two were already detained and later released in September.
“They’re holding lessons in extreme conditions,” Larysa said. “Some were saved just because someone was on lookout. The wife was teaching a lesson and her husband was watching from the window so that she had time to hide everything before they came.”
After reopening in autumn 2021, following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, Ukrainian schools have moved mostly back online following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February. But from bombs to blackouts to displacement to occupation, millions of Ukrainian children and young adults face an education interrupted, with educators struggling to work under desperate conditions.
Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, more than 3,000 educational institutions in Ukraine — 10 percent of the total — have been damaged or destroyed, according to the Ministry of Education. School buildings are at risk of shelling or lack heating after massive damage to the country’s energy infrastructure, while blackouts and interrupted internet connections hamper learning from home.
Meanwhile, thousands of students and teachers living under occupation face pressure to switch to Russian schooling.
Education, with its propaganda potential to influence young hearts and minds, has become a front line in the war.
Ideological battle
Crimea, under Russian control for more than eight years, is an example of how Russian education in occupied territories aims — with eventual success — to erase Ukrainian identity and militarize children.
History lessons there claim that Ukraine was always part of Russia. Army cadet courses and classes sponsored by law enforcement agencies start for children as young as six, says Maria Sulyanina from the Crimean Human Rights Group.
Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, more than 3,000 educational institutions in Ukraine — 10 percent of the total — have been damaged or destroyed | Genya Savilov AFP via Getty images
“We see that these children who were small kids when the occupation started, after eight years they have been turned into Russians,” she said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has steadily been moving its educational system away from that inherited from the Soviet Union. It has relegated Russian to foreign language teaching; moved Russian literature to part of the study of world literature; and revised history courses to include events like the Holodomor, the Soviet-caused famine in the 1930s that killed millions of Ukrainians and is still largely denied in Russia.
Yet despite Russia’s carrot-and-stick approach — from September, parents in recently occupied territories are paid a one-off of 10,000 rubles (€145) to send their children to Russian school, plus 4,000 per month that they stay — many families are sticking to a Ukrainian education for their children, and teachers are still teaching it.
But the war has made Ukrainian education extremely tenuous.
When Russia invaded and occupied Kupiansk, a town in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region, the vocational school where Viktoria Scherbakova taught was pressured to switch to the Russian system, and later damaged and looted.
Now, her classroom — and office — is the kitchen table at a small rented flat she shares with her two children and elderly parents in Kyiv, after she and her children fled the Russian occupation. The flat is also her daughter’s Kharkiv university virtual lecture hall and her son’s Kyiv ninth-grade classroom on days when air raid sirens sound and he can’t attend school.
The motor transport vocational college in Kupiansk where Scherbakova taught, which offered practical training for mechanics and drivers along with courses in transport logistics to some 300 pupils aged 14 to 18, exists as a displaced, virtual entity, with no home of its own. Although she is offering lessons online, Scherbakova doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to teach there again in person.
“We’re not in Kyiv, not in Kharkiv, not in Kupiansk,” she said. “We’re not anywhere.”
The education front line
As of October, about 1,300 schools were on Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia. Teachers have been targeted for collaboration and detained, threatened and mistreated. Staff have been sent to Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea for retraining in the Russian education system or told they would be replaced by teachers from Russia if they refused to work.
In Kupiansk, after the then-mayor surrendered to the Russians on February 27, educational establishments stayed open. However, many parents kept their children out of school — including Scherbakova, whose 14-year-old son stayed at home although she herself continued to work at the college.
Apart from hoisting a Russian flag outside, the occupiers left them alone — until June. But by the end of term, it became clear that staff would be forced to decide: leave, or start the next school year under the Russian system.
“And if you didn’t work for them, it wasn’t clear what the consequences would be,” said Scherbakova. “If you openly said you didn’t support them, you would end up in their prisons or cellars.”
Many families are sticking to a Ukrainian education for their children, and teachers are still teaching it | Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty images
One school director in Kupiansk, who refused to open her school after occupation, spent almost a month detained in the basement of the police station.
Of nearly 50 teaching and administrative staff in the vocational college, only seven refused to work with the Russian occupying authorities, according to Scherbakova.
“I’m ashamed of my college,” she said.
Spurred by the apparent ultimatum, Scherbakova and her children managed to leave Kupiansk for free Ukrainian territory in early June. The college was moved to operate virtually in Ukrainian-controlled territory, with her role shifting to acting director. With a colleague, they printed diplomas for those graduates who were reachable — 35 out of 53 — and developed a program to start the new teaching year.
But when she and a colleague started calling students, they found out that the teenagers had been enrolled to start the year in the college in Kupiansk — under the Russian system.
The physical and the virtual college started teaching parallel courses on September 1. Eight days later, Ukrainian forces took back Kupiansk.
When Scherbakova went back to Kupiansk after liberation, she found that though the college had been completely looted of its equipment and training vehicles, the library was full of untouched new Russian textbooks.
Some of the college staff who had remained in Kupiansk fled to Russia. Others got in touch with Scherbakova asking if they could work with her.
“At first I didn’t have an answer. I’m not the SBU [Ukrainian security services], I can’t judge them,” she said.
Some are under suspicion of collaboration. Later, the Ministry of Education clarified that teachers who had collaborated or brought in the Russian education system were banned from teaching. According to Ukrainian legislation on collaboration adopted in early September, teachers who engage in Russian propaganda in schools can be sentenced to prison terms. By mid-September, 19 proceedings had been opened against teachers in Ukraine.
Back in Kyiv,Scherbakova conducts online lessons and end-of-term exams amid daily power cuts since Russia began bombing essential infrastructure in Ukraine.
Her students, scattered around the country by war, face power outages too. Others, displaced abroad, are fitting lessons around schooling in Germany or England. And some remain in Kupiansk, recently liberated from occupation, where there is no internet, and the town comes under Russian shelling morning and night.
Viktoria Scherbakova conducts online lessons and end-of-term exams amid daily power cuts since Russia began bombing essential infrastructure in Ukraine | Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty images
“Those ones, all I can do is call and ask: ‘Are you alive? How did the night go? This is your exam question, just tell me something, whatever comes into your head,’” said Scherbakova.
“Of course, I can’t give them good marks. But I can’t abandon them.”
Lost generation
The physical challenges of war and the ideological battle as Russia seeks to impose its education system threaten the very basis of education in Ukraine: participation.
Scherbakova says her students, many of whom come from low-income families, are dropping out of online courses. “They need to survive. They dropped everything to find work,” she said. “Many of them had to leave their homes, and they need to live on something.”
Teachers are leaving the profession too — due to migration, retirement, low salaries, and war-related stresses and bans. The Kharkiv region has lost nearly 3,000 of 21,500 teachers since February, according to its education department.
In Kupiansk, as in many liberated towns and villages, the will to learn is not matched by the necessary infrastructure of electricity, internet and teachers. Children can only get an education if they move.
“We don’t want to leave. This is our land, and we want to live here,” said Iryna Protsenko, who was recently collecting humanitarian aid in Kupiansk with her daughter Zlata, 6. The family ran a small dairy business in the town before the war and stayed throughout occupation. “But now I’m afraid we will have to leave, because of school.”
Zlata, smiling shyly next to her mother, wants to learn, said Protsenko. She should start school this year. For the moment they read books together at home — easier now that electricity has been restored. “But she’s lonely.”
Ukrainian children were already starved of live interaction due to pandemic restrictions. Now, with only online teaching, plus the interrupted routines and safety restrictions of war, they are becoming increasingly stressed and withdrawn.
“It’s not so much the quality of education as the communication. They are losing socialization,” said Larysa, the teacher from Berdiansk.
Some parents compare the situation to that of their grandparents, who missed years of education during World War II. When the war was over, they had to study together with much younger children, earning themselves the name ‘pererostki,’ or ‘overgrown.’
“I think it will be like my grandma,” said Maria Varenikova, a journalist living in Kyiv with her son Nazar, 11. “Something will have to be figured out in Ukraine, given that for years children don’t have an education because of COVID, and now war.”
“They try hard and worry so much. They are lost children” said teacher Viktoria Scherbakova | Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty images
Nazar’s school opened in person this September, keeping going with generators, bottled water and a basement bomb shelter. But Nazar is repeating the largely lost previous school year.
Scherbakova’s son, on top of the trauma of fleeing his home, had to cram in most of the last school year in extra classes over the summer in order to progress to the next grade in Kyiv.
“They try hard and worry so much,” said Scherbakova. “They are lost children.”
Governor Ron DeSantis criticised US President Joe Biden’s immigration stance as rising numbers of Cuban asylum seekers arrive.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Friday mobilised the state national guard to help local officials respond to a large influx of Cuban asylum seekers landing at the southernmost tip of the contiguous United States.
DeSantis, a Republican, used an executive order on Friday to activate the Florida National Guard and direct state law agencies to assist in the Florida Keys, a chain of tropical islands that extend into the Gulf of Mexico.
The move came in response to the arrival of more than 700 mostly Cuban refugees and migrants over the New Year’s weekend alone.
In a statement on Friday, the governor criticised Democratic President Joe Biden and the federal government’s immigration policies.
“The burden of the Biden administration’s failure falls on local law enforcement who lack the resources to deal with the crisis,” DeSantis said.
The governor’s statement made no mention of the Biden administration’s announcement of a new policy on Thursday to start turning back Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who arrive illegally at the Texas border.
The administration also said it would offer humanitarian parole for up to 30,000 people a month from those four countries if they apply online, pay their airfare and find a financial sponsor.
Some refugee and migrant advocates said the new policy could worsen the situation in Florida. Ramon Raul Sanchez with the Cuban American group Movimiento Democracia said even more Cubans may risk their lives by taking to the sea to reach the US instead of flying to Central America and coming to the Texas border by land.
But Blas Nunez-Neto, acting assistant secretary for Border and Immigration Policy at the US Department for Homeland Security, argues the new program could incentivise Cubans not to come illegally by sea.
He said Cubans would be better off applying under the new parole program announced on Thursday because that would give them a potential path to residency they might not otherwise have.
“Do not risk your life at sea” because there are “much better options” under the new program, he said.
DeSantis said Florida will deploy aeroplanes, helicopters and marine patrols to the area “to support water interdictions and ensure the safety of migrants attempting to reach Florida through the Florida Straits”.
More than 4,400 asylum seekers and migrants, mostly Cubans with some Haitians, have arrived by boat in Florida since August as the two countries face deepening and compounding political and economic crises.
Because Washington and Havana do not have diplomatic relations, it is problematic for the US government to send Cubans back once they arrive in Florida.
Those stopped at sea are already taken back, since Cuba will accept those people. Almost 8,000 Cubans and Haitians have been intercepted since August – about 50 per day compared with 17 per day in the 2021-22 fiscal year and just two per day during the 2020-21 fiscal year.
Officials said at least 65 migrants have died at sea since August.
BERLIN — This year, the number of refugees arriving to Germany is almost as high as it was in 2015 and 2016 — when the government nearly fell apart over it.
When civil war broke out in Syria, refugees came in masses to Europe. Between the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016, tens of thousands arrived in Germany. Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “Wir schaffen das” — “We got this.” Merkel’s government allowed migrants to enter Germany even though, under the EU’s framework, other countries in the bloc would also have been responsible for them. The massive influx led to friction both within Germany and between European capitals.
Germany saw nearly 1.2 million applications for asylum in 2015 and 2016. At first, many Germans applauded the Syrians arriving at train stations and offered support — coining the term Willkommenskultur. But as cities and towns were overwhelmed, with gyms and container villages being set up to house the influx of refugees, the political mood soon soured.
Fast-forward to 2022: The number of refugees from Ukraine amounted to just more than 1 million people receiving temporary protection. Add to that around 214,000 applications by asylum-seekers with no connection to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to the German interior ministry. That means that this year, more people have sought refuge in Germany than in 2015 and 2016 combined.
But things are different this time around. While authorities on the ground still fear being overwhelmed, the situation has changed, including how EU countries handle refugees. Here are three key points:
1. Refugees from Ukraine form a distinct category
First of all, Germany is not going it alone now, as the EU has activated the so-called Temporary Protection Directive for refugees from Ukraine. This means that they automatically receive temporary asylum status and can claim social benefits in any EU country, spreading the burden across countries in the bloc.
Within Germany, a new distribution system known as “FREE,” in place since July, considers family ties and other factors. This has created a steering effect, as distribution can be linked and tracked. Furthermore, when able to privately organize accommodation themselves, refugees from Ukraine may choose where to settle. Only if they apply for social welfare or housing may they be allocated throughout Germany like other refugees.
Almost three-quarters of refugees from Ukraine live in private apartments and houses, according to the study “Refugees from Ukraine in Germany” (conducted between August and October this year). Of these, around 25 percent live with relatives or friends in Germany. Only 9 percent live in shared accommodation for refugees.
In contrast, refugees not coming from Ukraine are spread among German states via the so-called “EASY” system. After an initial period at regional reception centers, migrants are distributed at random to municipalities across the country.
That system does not take individual preferences into account; it only grants a higher probability of assigning refugees to facilities in the same region if family members have been registered in the region — and if there is capacity.
2. Not all cities and towns are overwhelmed — yet
“Reception capacities are exhausted in many places, tent shelters and gymnasiums already have to be used,” Burkhard Jung, the mayor of Leipzig and vice president of the German Association of Cities, said in November.
Plenty of déjà vu with 2015 on this front.
“We don’t know a concrete number, but we are getting feedback from very many federal states that the municipalities are reaching their limits,” Alexander Handschuh, a spokesperson for the German Association of Towns and Municipalities, confirmed earlier this month. He pointed out that large cities such as Berlin or Munich are more popular among refugees from Ukraine — a trend that is ongoing.
“Meanwhile, however, heavy burdens are being reported from all over Germany,” Handschuh added.
While many refugees from Ukraine were initially welcomed into private accommodation “with overwhelming willingness to help,” this is becoming increasingly difficult the longer the war continues. Thus, German municipalities are now calling for help from the federal government, demanding full reimbursement for the costs of handling refugees and calling for higher reception capacity at the regional level.
Migration researcher Hannes Schammann of the University of Hildesheim says he is hearing mixed signals from local authorities. “There are isolated hot spots where we have this situation with gymnasiums and the like. But there are also municipalities where this can still be managed quite well,” Schammann told POLITICO.
The newly arriving refugees are not the problem, he believes. Rather, he said, the issue is German bureaucracy, as the distribution system itself causes delays and uncertainty.
3. Although the situation is tense, it is not surprising
Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) confirmed that migration pressure is currently “increasing significantly” not only in Germany, but also at the EU’s external borders. “Although the numbers have increased every year … the current influx of arrivals has a higher dynamic compared to previous years,” it said. As to why, the BAMF cited a catch-up effect after pandemic travel restrictions were lifted, and economic and political situations in transit states such as Turkey, Tunisia and Libya.
Yet, the number of refugees now arriving from countries other than Ukraine is within the expected range, Schammann said. This becomes a problem, however, when that flow comes up against any uneven distribution of Ukrainian refugees.
In addition, many municipalities held on to both physical and policy infrastructure built up during the situation in 2015 and 2016. “Those who maintained it did quite well,” Schammann pointed out.
The main countries of origin for asylum-seekers besides Ukraine continue to be Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey and Iraq — as in previous years. “There are currently no noticeable developments in individual countries of origin,” a spokesperson from the interior ministry told POLITICO. Nevertheless, he confirmed a somewhat tense situation in terms of the ability to receive refugees.
Schammann expects the debate to heat up because of bottlenecks that may arise due to the distribution of refugees already in Germany. He described it as a difficult situation and definitely a source of strain on the system. “But it’s not collapsing. It will continue to function regardless,” he said.
Without a magic crystal ball, the ministry declined to provide an outlook for the months to come.
The boom gates at Croatian border posts swung up at midnight Sunday as the country joined Europe’s zone of free movement as the country also adopted the euro as its currency.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hailed “two immense achievements,” speaking alongside Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and Slovenian President Nataša Pirc Musar at a border post in the town of Bregana.
“There is no place in Europe where it is more true today that it is a season of new beginnings and new chapters than here at the border between Croatia and Slovenia,” von der Leyen said.
“Nothing is the same after this,” said Plenković, noting the convenience that free movement and currency union will bring to Croatians.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the former Yugoslavian republic joining the EU. Von der Leyen praised the hard work of the Croatian people and singled out Plenković for pushing through the reforms needed to make the rapid ascension into the EU’s currency club.
She said the euro “brings macroeconomic stability and credibility” at home and abroad.
“Our citizens and the economy will be better protected from crises,” said Plenković.
But more than that, von der Leyen said, the euro coin imprinted with the pine marten — which gave its name to Croatia’s former currency, the kuna — is “a symbol of the successful union between your national identity and your European destiny.”
The adoption of the euro comes on the back of a long campaign to demonstrate that Croatia can adhere to the currency zone’s requirements for economic management. Croatian Finance Minister Marko Primorac told POLITICO last week that he expected the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio to fall steeply in the coming years as the recovery from the pandemic continues.
Shortly after midnight, Primorac withdrew the first euros from a Croatian ATM.
The entry into the Schengen zone means the removal of land and sea border checks with Croatia’s European neighbors. Airport checks from the 26 other countries that participate in the scheme will end in March.
The fall of these barriers to movement is “the final affirmation of our European identity, for which generations of Croats fought and fought,” said Interior Minister Davor Božinović, who opened the barrier at Bregana at midnight on New Year’s Day alongside his Slovenian counterpart, Sanja Ajanović Hovnik.
Parties were organized by citizens at the border. Von der Leyen said those living close to Slovenia and Hungary would see “tangible results” as they were able to travel freely across the frontier for employment and shopping. “Communities will grow closer together,” she said.
The Commission president also noted the responsibility that joining Schengen confers on Croatia, at a time when migration pressures are a matter of growing political tension between the bloc’s members.
“We will need to work very closely together to protect Schengen and preserve its benefits,” said von der Leyen. “In Schengen, we rely on each other and we know that we can trust you and that we can rely on Croatia.”
In a statement, Slovenia’s Hovnik congratulated Croatia on a “historic” step, which her country took just a year before, and tried to settle Slovenian anxiety about security along the newly open border.
“It is an event for which we have been preparing for a long time on both sides of the border,” she said.
After six years of chaos and recrimination since Britons voted to leave the European Union, there are signs the country is showing an unexpected outbreak of common sense in its approach to the bloc.
In his first weeks in office, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak — a Brexiteer himself — has sent clear signals that he wants a more constructive relationship with Brussels and Paris, and to avoid a trade war with Britain’s biggest economic partner.
Gone are the nationalist bombast of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the sheer havoc wrought by his successor Liz Truss crashing the economy in pursuit of a Brexit dividend. Instead, they have both given way to a sudden burst of pragmatism, as Sunak is seeking practical solutions to festering problems.
This change in outlook may be partly due to the realization that Europe needs to stand united in the face of a threat to its common security from Russian President Vladimir Putin — although that hadn’t stopped Johnson from bragging about how leaving the EU had supposedly freed the United Kingdom to be more supportive of Ukraine than France or Germany.
It may also be due to the dire economic straits Britain is in after the collapse of Truss’ short-lived experiment for a deregulated, low-tax Singapore-on-the-Thames. Or, perhaps, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s hard line on any EU deal with the U.K. has had a sobering effect. As may have the shift in British public opinion, which now thinks leaving the bloc was a mistake by a margin of 56 percent to 32 percent.
For whatever reason, it is a welcome start.
In just three weeks, Sunak has signed up to an EU defense initiative to make it easier to move armed forces around the Continent, he’s acted to improve Britain’s relations with Ireland, and he’s created political space for a possible compromise on the vexed issue of trade with Northern Ireland, which has bedeviled relations with Brussels since the U.K.’s exit from the EU.
At their first meeting, Sunak told United States President Joe Biden that he wants to have a negotiated settlement on the Northern Ireland Protocol in place by next April — the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday peace agreement. So, sustained pressure from Washington is starting to pay off as well.
The prime minister has also sought to thaw frosty relations with France, clinching an agreement with Paris to clamp down on migrants crossing the Channel from northern France in small boats. Europe’s only two nuclear powers have now agreed to hold their first bilateral summit since 2018 early next year, focusing on strengthening defense cooperation.
To be fair, after saying “the jury is still out” on whether Macron was a friend or foe of the U.K., Truss had already taken a symbolic first step toward reconciliation by agreeing to attend the first meeting of the European Political Community last month. The geopolitical grouping was dreamed up by Macron to bring the entire European family together — except Russia and Belarus.
What’s more, the torrent of Europe-bashing rhetoric from Conservative ministers has almost dried up — at least for now. Suddenly, making nice with the neighbors is back in fashion, if only to ensure they don’t turn the lights off on the U.K. by cutting energy exports when supplies get tight this winter.
The tone of contrition adopted by Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, once the hardest of Brexit hardliners, was one of the most striking signals of this new humility. “I recognize in my own determination and struggle to get the U.K. out of the European Union that I caused a great deal of inconvenience and pain and difficulty,” he told Ireland’s RTÉ radio recently. “Some of our actions were not very respectful of Ireland’s legitimate interests. And I want to put that right.”
Meanwhile, encouragingly, Sunak is reportedly considering deprioritizing a bill by ousted Brexit ideologue Jacob Rees-Mogg to review, reform or automatically scrap some 2,400 retained EU laws, standards and regulations by the end of 2023 — a massive bureaucratic exercise that has rattled business confidence and angered almost everyone. The prime minister now seems receptive to pleas from business to give the review much more time and avoid a regulatory vacuum.
A bonfire of EU rules would inevitably provoke new trade tensions with Brussels — and at a time when the Office of Budget Responsibility, Britain’s independent fiscal watchdog, has just confirmed the growth-shredding damage inflicted by Brexit.
This isn’t the end of Britain’s traumatic rupture with the bloc. Just how neuralgic the issue remains was highlighted when earlier this week, Sunak had to deny reports that senior government figures were considering a Swiss-style relationship with the EU to ensure frictionless trade. He vowed there would be no alignment with EU rules on his watch.
To paraphrase Churchill, it may not even be the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Puncturing the illusion of a deregulated fiscal paradise fueled by borrowing without new revenue has had a sobering effect on the U.K. — offering Sunak a political window of opportunity to start fixing EU ties. After all, the Conservative Party can’t afford to defenestrate yet another prime minister after Theresa May, Johnson and Truss, can it?
But beyond the conciliatory tone, the real test still lies ahead.
Sunak will have to confront the hard-line Protestant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to push through any compromise with the EU on the Northern Ireland Protocol.
As the province remains part of the EU single market under the withdrawal treaty, any such deal is bound to involve some customs checks in Northern Ireland on goods arriving from Great Britain — even if they are scaled down from the original plan. It’s also bound to involve a role for the Court of Justice of the European Union as the ultimate arbiter of EU law. Both are anathema to the DUP.
But securing such an agreement would at least open the door to a calmer, more cooperative and sustainable relationship between London and Brussels.
PARIS (AP) — An Iranian man who lived for 18 years in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport and whose saga loosely inspired the Steven Spielberg film “The Terminal” died Saturday in the airport that he long called home, officials said.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri died after a heart attack in the airport’s Terminal 2F around midday, according an official with the Paris airport authority. Police and a medical team treated him but were not able to save him, the official said. The official was not authorized to be publicly named.
Nasseri lived in the airport’s Terminal 1 from 1988 until 2006, first in legal limbo because he lacked residency papers and later by apparent choice.
Year in and year out, he slept on a red plastic bench, making friends with airport workers, showering in staff facilities, writing in his diary, reading magazines and surveying passing travelers.
Staff nicknamed him Lord Alfred, and he became a mini-celebrity among passengers.
“Eventually, I will leave the airport,” he told The Associated Press in 1999, smoking a pipe on his bench, looking frail with long thin hair, sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. “But I am still waiting for a passport or transit visa.”
Nasseri was born in 1945 in Soleiman, a part of Iran then under British jurisdiction, to an Iranian father and a British mother. He left Iran to study in England in 1974. When he returned, he said, he was imprisoned for protesting against the shah and expelled without a passport.
He applied for political asylum in several countries in Europe. The UNHCR in Belgium gave him refugee credentials, but he said his briefcase containing the refugee certificate was stolen in a Paris train station.
French police later arrested him, but couldn’t deport him anywhere because he had no official documents. He ended up at Charles de Gaulle in August 1988 and stayed.
Further bureaucratic bungling and increasingly strict European immigration laws kept him in a legal no-man’s land for years.
When he finally received refugee papers, he described his surprise, and his insecurity, about leaving the airport. He reportedly refused to sign them, and ended up staying there several more years until he was hospitalized in 2006, and later lived in a Paris shelter.
Those who befriended him in the airport said the years of living in the windowless space took a toll on his mental state. The airport doctor in the 1990s worried about his physical and mental health, and described him as “fossilized here.” A ticket agent friend compared him to a prisoner incapable of “living on the outside.”
In the weeks before his death, Nasseri had been again living at Charles de Gaulle, the airport official said.
Nasseri’s mind-boggling tale loosely inspired 2004′s “The Terminal” starring Tom Hanks, as well as a French film, “Lost in Transit,” and an opera called “Flight.”
In “The Terminal,” Hanks plays Viktor Navorski, a man who arrives at JFK airport in New York from the fictional Eastern European country of Krakozhia and discovers that an overnight political revolution has invalidated all his traveling papers. Viktor is dumped into the airport’s international lounge and told he must stay there until his status is sorted out, which drags on as unrest in Krakozhia continues.
No information was immediately available about survivors.
___
Angela Charlton in Paris contributed.
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This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Nasseri’s first name to Mehran, not Merhan.
PARIS (AP) — An Iranian man who lived for 18 years in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport and whose saga loosely inspired the Steven Spielberg film “The Terminal” died Saturday in the airport that he long called home, officials said.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri died after a heart attack in the airport’s Terminal 2F around midday, according an official with the Paris airport authority. Police and a medical team treated him but were not able to save him, the official said. The official was not authorized to be publicly named.
Nasseri lived in the airport’s Terminal 1 from 1988 until 2006, first in legal limbo because he lacked residency papers and later by apparent choice.
Year in and year out, he slept on a red plastic bench, making friends with airport workers, showering in staff facilities, writing in his diary, reading magazines and surveying passing travelers.
Staff nicknamed him Lord Alfred, and he became a mini-celebrity among passengers.
“Eventually, I will leave the airport,” he told The Associated Press in 1999, smoking a pipe on his bench, looking frail with long thin hair, sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. “But I am still waiting for a passport or transit visa.”
Nasseri was born in 1945 in Soleiman, a part of Iran then under British jurisdiction, to an Iranian father and a British mother. He left Iran to study in England in 1974. When he returned, he said, he was imprisoned for protesting against the shah and expelled without a passport.
He applied for political asylum in several countries in Europe. The UNHCR in Belgium gave him refugee credentials, but he said his briefcase containing the refugee certificate was stolen in a Paris train station.
French police later arrested him, but couldn’t deport him anywhere because he had no official documents. He ended up at Charles de Gaulle in August 1988 and stayed.
Further bureaucratic bungling and increasingly strict European immigration laws kept him in a legal no-man’s land for years.
When he finally received refugee papers, he described his surprise, and his insecurity, about leaving the airport. He reportedly refused to sign them, and ended up staying there several more years until he was hospitalized in 2006, and later lived in a Paris shelter.
Those who befriended him in the airport said the years of living in the windowless space took a toll on his mental state. The airport doctor in the 1990s worried about his physical and mental health, and described him as “fossilized here.” A ticket agent friend compared him to a prisoner incapable of “living on the outside.”
In the weeks before his death, Nasseri had been again living at Charles de Gaulle, the airport official said.
Nasseri’s mind-boggling tale loosely inspired 2004′s “The Terminal” starring Tom Hanks, as well as a French film, “Lost in Transit,” and an opera called “Flight.”
In “The Terminal,” Hanks plays Viktor Navorski, a man who arrives at JFK airport in New York from the fictional Eastern European country of Krakozhia and discovers that an overnight political revolution has invalidated all his traveling papers. Viktor is dumped into the airport’s international lounge and told he must stay there until his status is sorted out, which drags on as unrest in Krakozhia continues.
No information was immediately available about survivors.
___
Angela Charlton in Paris contributed.
___
This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Nasseri’s first name to Mehran, not Merhan.
