5 reasons relocating refugees is a nightmare

Political and logistical problems threaten the Commission’s plans.

EU leaders begin a week of high-profile meetings on the migration crisis with diplomats increasingly concerned that Europe’s plans to relocate refugees across the bloc could fall apart.

Interior ministers meet Monday, followed by a gathering of European and African leaders in Malta on Wednesday and Thursday — with a last-minute, “extraordinary” summit of EU heads of state and government tacked onto the agenda. The focus is on implementing measures already agreed to, from relocation of asylum-seekers to increased border control and humanitarian aid.

For most of the summer, political obstacles prevented real movement on migration until countries agreed in September to relocate 160,000 refugees over the next two years from Italy and Greece. But those problems — with several countries opposed to mandatory quotas on the acceptance of asylum-seekers — were only the beginning.

The relocation effort has been painfully slow. Fewer than 150 refugees out of the 160,000 total moved out of Italy and Greece as of last week. Meanwhile, thousands of new refugees arrive in Europe every day.

The political roadblocks remain, but now logistical complications threaten the EU’s migration agenda. Many countries claim they are simply not prepared to handle the influx.

Sweden on Wednesday asked to change its status in the EU’s refugee relocation scheme so that it will not have to take in additional migrants, but rather will send them to other countries. Other countries seeing record numbers of refugees, including Germany and Austria, could follow Sweden’s lead.

“I am not worried about the slow pace of relocation, I am much more worried for the possibility of a domino effect,” said an EU senior diplomat.

Sweden’s migration agency projected last month that 190,000 refugees could arrive this year, more than twice as many as expected. Sweden was supposed to take in 3,728 refugees from Greece and Italy who now, if the request is approved, will have to be sent to other member states.

The fear is that if too many other countries want to send refugees away and too few want to take them in, a domino effect could collapse the whole process, which is already proving a nightmare to implement.

“I have not heard the Germans or the Austrians saying that they want to do the same thing,” said another EU diplomat, “but obviously if it happens we would need to re-design almost the whole system.”

Here are five ways the relocation plan has gone wrong:

Slow pace

So far 105 asylum-seekers out of 39,600 have been relocated from Italy and 30 out of 66,400 from Greece. To speed up progress and hit the target of relocating more than 100,000 refugees from Italy and Greece over the next two years, 140 refugees need to be boarding a plane every day.

That is currently nowhere near the case, and the way things are going it looks difficult to achieve anytime soon, despite constant urging from EU officials.

“I want to see dozens of such flights in the next days, to all member states, sending a signal to the smugglers and traffickers that we can cut them out and to the refugees that safe avenues exist,” European Parliament President Martin Schulz said Thursday after a two-day visit to Greece.

Missed targets

Even as the actual relocations move slowly, EU countries have still not finalized their agreement on who will take all of them.

The 160,000 total figure is the sum of two different relocation plans: one, decided in June, for 40,000 refugees, and another, decided in September, for a further 120,000. But while the European Commission keeps talking about the total number, it’s worth remembering that counties have yet to meet its first target of relocating 40,000 refugees.

Countries have only agreed to take a total of 32,256 refugees from that number. A final decision on that is expected by the end of the year, EU officials said.

Facilities bottleneck

Countries have been slow to fulfill the agreements they made to accept asylum-seekers, meaning there are not enough places for refugees to be relocated to. So far 14 member states have made available just over 3,500 places for refugees out of 160,000, according to the European Commission.

Bulgaria has done the most on this score: So far it has made available 1,302 places, fulfilling its pledge. But France has prepared just 900 out of 19,694 places, and Germany only 10 out of 27,536 additional refugees it is supposed to take from Italy and Greece as part of the relocation scheme. Among Baltic countries, only Lithuania so far has pledged 40 places.

“Luckily relocation is moving slowly, otherwise we would run out of places very soon,” joked one EU official.

For refugees, a lack of trust

Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker last month told members of the European Parliament that Luxembourg is “quite willing” to welcome refugees but “it seems to me that very many of the refugees are actually not keen to come to Luxembourg.”

Officials working in the field say there is an even bigger problem than convincing refugees to go to countries where they may not want to go: winning their trust.

“Refugees are people who went through awful experiences and they are reluctant to board the plane because they are afraid that we will offload them in some African or Middle East countries,” said an EU official who works in Italy. “To convince them often we have to involve the local communities of migrants in the nations where they will be relocated.”

Offers of help rejected

In the world of refugee-relocation politics, strange things happen.

Kosovo, which has just taken its first official steps toward joining the EU, in September offered to take in 2,000 to 3,000 refugees from Europe. Yet two months later, Kosovo Foreign Minister Hashim Thaçi told POLITICO the country had not gotten any answer from the Commission but still stands ready to help.

“Kosovo was a country of origin of migrants but not anymore,” Thaçi said, adding that according to Eurostat, the EU statistics bureau, “more than 15,000 Kosovars have returned home this year, a majority of which came back voluntarily.”