EU Migrant Crisis: Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann was very quick to condemn Hungarian PM Viktor Orban's treatment of the refugees, now he does a U turn and demands every migrant picked up is dumped into Turkey, Europe’s attitude is hardening, refugees are now not welcome

Dear All

If you have followed the migrant crisis in Europe, you will have seen how the badly informed policy of Angela Merkel saying refugees are welcome has gone full circle to refugees are not welcome.

At the start of the crisis, the country which impressed me most was Hungary, it seemed that the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban understood right from the start that the breaching of European borders wasn’t just a bad idea but there would be serious consequences for doing so.

The Paris attacks rightly shocked everyone, innocent people killed and harmed by Islamic terrorists, then in Germany, the Cologne sex attacks by migrants, two big stories, but just two stories in an ocean of stories of murder, rape, robbery and violence.

We learned something significant about the political class after the invasion of Europe, we learned that they were slow to recognise their political stupidity, we learned they were slow to act, we learned they were suppressing the truth and free speech in the media, and we learned they didn’t have the political will to act to protect the communities of Europe.

German chancellor Angela Merkel has damaged the European project beyond belief; she has also created ill will towards her personally by her actions to bully other EU members to accept a quota by use of threat. Not surprisingly after events which have made into the public domain, some EU leaders decided not to accept migrants. In Europe, a proposal of an inner Schengen free travel area was floated but this will fail, why because it is too late for that, Islamic terrorists are already here.

You may remember my ideas to help save Europe:

1/ EU Border Force

2/ EU internal immigration policy for EU citizens

3/ intervention and mobilisation of the military in member states

4/ New EU wide ID card scheme

5/ No non EU economic migrant processed from this crisis and allowed to remain within an EU country which has accept them can travel to any other EU member state. Everyone should be completely documented, if a breach occurred; the person or group will be returned to the EU country they were settled and registered in.

All are needed and necessary, also people talk about the need to ‘police’ the Med to turn back migrant boats, which is why I suggested that a joint civilian and military force was needed, and for speed, NATO was the ideal umbrella organisation for this exercise since they have experience of joint military operations.

The press must take some of the blame for the extraordinary length of time it has taken for politicians to change and act after getting it wrong. Like most people, I saw the picture of the little dead boy washed up on a beach; who couldn’t help but be moved by this, his life was cruelly robbed from him. Also, the press sat on the stories of criminality involving migrants; this was to create a false image that the migrants were mostly women and children when in fact the majority are healthy young men. In one video, I watched a man using a screaming child as a ‘shield’ during a riot as migrants tried to storm a barrier by Police, he carried the child at chest height, a deliberate act.

He endangered the life of this little girl, because the migrants were rioting hurdling missiles at the police to break through the security corridor. They couldn’t act to save her, law and order had broken down, just in the same way that law and order had broke down in Cologne and countless other places across Europe. When parts of society break down like, it doesn’t just affect the people involved, it affects everyone; this is why I suggested that there was a need for the military to be involved right from the start. Police should be re-deployed from border duties to cities, although additional military units should be made available for them to draw on.

Things have changed in Europe, so much so that the politicians faced with angry citizens have now realised that their positions are now under direct threat, the rise of the far right has acted as a catalyst to spur on politicians to act in the common good, something they should have done from the start.

How much have they changed?

'Send them all back': this isn’t just a rallying cry from Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann, it is a sense of the new reality dawning in Europe among the political class that something major is needed. The Austrian chancellor is demanding that the EU border patrols return every migrant picked up trying to reach Greece to Turkey. The Turkish people have also hardened their stance on their borders to stop refugees flooding into their country from Syria.

And you can be sure this isn’t being left to the Police as a civil matter, it is a matter of national security, something which some European politicians shamefully chose to ignore.

Although Chancellor Werner Faymann wants all refugees sent back to Turkey, that isn’t enough, and Angela Merkel visiting Turkey to speak to the Turkish PM for talks on reducing refugee influx is the wrong person to do so. Through-out the crisis she has singly failed to grasp the dire consequences of her actions, with Merkel it isn’t a question of losing faith more an issue that you cannot put faith in her at all.

Faymann’s idea of ‘sending them back’ however isn’t as straight forward as it seems, this is because Turkey would effectively have to sent up camps to house the migrants, something which they will be reluctant to do due to the volume of numbers. It could be a scenario that migrants pass straight from one border to another and are deposited or dumped back into Syria. And we should remember that not all migrants are actually Syrian, some reports put that number at 30% of the total volume heading into Europe.
So, let be real, it is easier to stop a rolling stone at the top of the hill rather than half way down it, this is why stopping the influx at source is so important. The West should be in discussion with the Syrian Government for the return of their citizens back home. The obvious hiccup is that the West has acted rather badly on Syria in the past, so we need someone or organisation that is acceptable to the Assad regime.

In politics, it is not unknown for a politician to get it spectacular wrong, the Chancellor of Austria Werner Faymann is one such individual. He now has had his ‘Road to Damascus’, at the start of the migrant, he jumped on the ‘bandwagon’ to criticise the actions of the Hungarians by saying Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's treatment of the refugees was similar to the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps.

He also said:

“Sticking refugees in trains and sending them somewhere completely different to where they think they're going reminds us of the darkest chapter of our continent's history”.

Where is Werner Faymann now, he is wanting to ship off migrants, presumably in trains to somewhere completely different, unless of course he decides to do a ‘Bataan death march’, no, he will probably use trains.

In her weekly broadcast to the German people, Angela Merkel said:

“We must be prepared to take in quotas of refugees legally and bear our part of the task. I don't think Europe can keep itself completely out of this.”

Maybe she should take the time to visit the mother of the 10 year old boy who was violently raped in a swimming pool in Austria, apparently the Iraqi man said in his defence that it was a ‘sexual emergency’. The mother of the boy raped by an Iraqi migrant said she regrets teaching her children to be welcoming to migrants, and she is a migrant who came to Austria from Serbia. The little boy had to be hospitalised after the attack suffered serious injuries, his mother said her son has been crying himself to sleep every night since the attack.

His mother added:

“I know that the physical wounds will heal, but the wounds to his soul may never heal. I don't want the man to be deported; I want him to be jailed because I have heard what they do to child sex attackers in jail. I want him to experience everything in jail that child sex attackers can experience from the other convicts. And then I want him deported.”

When you have the wrong people in political office making bad decisions, the consequences can be devastating, little Goran ended up being violently raped because politicians wanted to show they were ‘caring’ for their political advantage. To them it was just another tactic to garner support among the electorate; Angela Merkel has a lot to answer for in my opinion, her actions border on criminal negligence in public office.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University