Paris Attacks Complicate Europe’s Already Strained Border Controls
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Version 0 of 1. The news that one of the Paris attackers entered Europe with a Syrian passport last month, amid the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war and persecution, has alarmed leaders and reinvigorated talk about tightening border controls. But after months of discussion on exactly that point — and as many leaders and others warned that infiltration by would-be attackers was a grim possibility — Europe is no closer to resolving the issue, or even agreeing on what must be done to reduce that risk. European leaders and some experts said the terrorism question just made the flow of migrants across the union’s borders more politically loaded and the burdens on border officials even more daunting. “Security-wise, a situation that was complicated before has just gotten much more complicated,” said Marc Pierini, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, a nongovernmental group based in Brussels, and a former European Union ambassador to Turkey and Syria. And the need to serve both migrants and security interests burdens a system that is poorly equipped to deal with both. “The Paris attacks have put a lot of pressure on border officials and security services in all countries, including in Austria,” said Peter Webinger, a senior official for migration and asylum in Austria’s Interior Ministry. “We really need to be extremely cautious, and I emphasize this strongly, not to mix migration process and terrorism.” Part of the complication with border checks involves the different kinds of borders in Europe: the outer border, such as between Turkey and Greece, which marks the boundaries of the European Union, and internal open borders of the 26-nation Schengen area. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has been pressing appeals to Italy, Greece and Turkey to secure Europe’s external borders and thus preserve freedom of movement in the Schengen zone. That position is shared by President François Hollande of France, who on Monday, even after increasing evidence that the attackers came from both outside the European Union and from within it, emphasized that erecting walls and fences “would be the end of Europe.” Despite mounting criticism of her open welcome of refugees, Ms. Merkel has stressed that Germany will not emulate Hungary, which fenced shut its southern borders with Serbia and Croatia. Germany has about 2,200 miles of land borders, including a 500-mile border with Austria, where refugees arrive after traveling via Turkey, Greece and the Balkans. Her concerns about protecting Europe’s open borders have been matched by the lack of practicality in shutting them, especially in recent months, as hundreds of thousands of migrants trudged from country to country toward the heart of Europe. That human tide has left security forces all along the trail from Greece through Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria with little choice but to let migrants on through to their desired destination of Germany or Scandinavia. Checks conducted en route vary, leaving the authorities with an incomplete picture of who is arriving. Recent arrivals in Berlin said in interviews on Monday that they favored more security checks. Mobi Clureshi, 24, now helping as a translator at Berlin’s main refugee registration center, said he arrived from his native Pakistan via Russia three months ago. He went to Paris shortly before Germany and said he had felt unsafe in its multicultural environment. “I think they allow too many people to get in,” he said. “They don’t check everyone.” Fingerprinting should be more widespread, he suggested. “When you cross a border and you have a system like that,” he said, “the world would be more secure.” Some 5,000 refugees are arriving daily at the five crossing points between Bavaria and Austria. The authorities try to take everyone’s fingerprints and check all identity documents, but the data is not stored because of German legal protections of privacy, Johannes Dimroth, a spokesman for the German Interior Ministry, said on Monday. However, most of the new arrivals are applying for asylum and are taken to a registration center, where they are formally registered before a much more thorough check and an interview — with a translator, if necessary — as the asylum application is reviewed, Mr. Dimroth said. The countries that the migrants enter before reaching Germany have even fewer protections. For Austria, which more than 500,000 people have traveled through this year, just over 70,000 requested asylum and went through a full check and registration. The large majority move on, with no record being taken of their having been there, because the country has insufficient infrastructure to do so, Interior Ministry officials in Vienna said. Most migrants also refuse to be registered before they reach the country in which they want to settle, they added. The border with Slovenia is now the most common point to enter Austria after the trek through the Balkans. More than 220,000 people have passed through Slovenia since Oct. 17, when Hungary closed its border with Croatia and forced the migrants to shift west. Slovenia has started constructing a razor wire fence on its 400-mile southern border with Croatia — a measure it insists is not shutting the frontier but merely controlling the influx and thus enforcing the Schengen zone, of which it is a member but Croatia is not. Once in Slovenia, migrants are fingerprinted, and in most cases their picture is taken, and their names and documents are entered into a European database. Names are also checked against databanks of criminal records. Many migrants show up without documents. They are registered with names and information they give to border personnel, Slovenian officials said. Only 79 migrants so far have requested asylum in Slovenia. Most of the migrants arrive in Slovenia from the Balkan trail that starts in Macedonia and goes to Serbia, which is in neither the European Union nor the Schengen zone, but where 430,000 migrants have been registered passing through this year. Interior Ministry officials there declined to say whether fingerprints were taken or personal documents examined. Only 548 people sought asylum in Serbia this year, officials said. Ms. Merkel has failed to win support for swift distribution of refugees amid more countries, and promised registration centers in Greece and Italy are not yet functional. Still, Europeans are taking steps to enhance security, said Mr. Pierini at Carnegie Europe. More police officers from member states will be sent to borders in Greece and Slovenia, he said, and intelligence services will coordinate and share information. “If the E.U. can get its act together, proper screening of migrants would take place in various countries of entry, starting with Greece — and also Turkey, if they could convince Turkey,” Mr. Pierini said. “That would be the only way to make sure that people who are migrating to Europe are genuine asylum seekers and not terrorist operatives in disguise,” he said. “The risks of that happening among tens of thousands has so far been very low.” Some of the asylum seekers said they feared that message was slipping away. “I feel so bad about Paris and so bad for the incoming refugees,” said Parisa Gholami, 25, from Afghanistan, while waiting with her husband to board a train to Germany at Vienna’s main station. Several of her relatives were traveling behind them, Ms. Gholami said, and when they speak on the phone about conditions on the road, they do not mention the terrorist attacks in France. “It’s a bad moment for Muslims because of Paris,” Ms. Gholami said. “People will think that all Muslims are like this.” |