Baghdad, Iraq – As the plane taxied on the runway of Erbil’s airport after a three-hour flight from the Belarusian capital Minsk, Azad looked out the window, clutching his wife’s hands.

“We’ll lower our hats, wear masks, and leave the airport as soon as possible,” Azad, a 28-year-old man from the Kurdish city of Duhok, recalled telling his wife after their failed attempt to enter the European Union from Belarus.

Left physically bruised and in indescribable emotional pain, Azad and his wife, who asked not to be fully named, told Al Jazeera they had been treated like animals at the Belarus-Poland border and did not want to be subjected again to rounds of questions by reporters as soon as they returned to the place they so desperately wanted to leave.

“For now, we’ll try not to think about our future too much because as soon as we start thinking, it’ll become clear that we don’t have one here in Kurdistan,” Azad told Al Jazeera while sitting in their house in Duhok. “But we both know we are probably stuck here for the rest of our lives.”

For many Iraqi families stuck at the Poland-Belarus border, waiting was simply not an option any more.

Azad, along with some 430 other Iraqis, returned from Belarus to Iraq last Thursday on a government-mandated repatriation flight, as part of the Iraqi government’s bid to ease the tensions that have been flaring by the Belarus-Poland border for the past few months.

While most of the refugees and asylum seekers decided to remain in Belarus with the growingly slim hope that they could someday cross into Poland, others “gave up their naive hope that they could succeed” and decided that they would return home, Azad said.

‘Time to let go’

Coming back to Iraq was not an easy decision to make. Just like many others who left for Belarus in the hope of entering the EU, Azad saved up, asked for financial support from his family, and nearly sold his house. When they heard the Iraqi government was offering repatriation flights from Minsk for those who wished to return voluntarily, their first reaction was an adamant “No”.

“I remember I told my wife in our tent at night that we didn’t spend all the money and waste all this energy so we would go back to Iraq,” Azad said. But then the next day, the usual clashes between the Belarusian border forces and their counterparts in Poland occurred.

Azad said they were being pushed by the Belarusian police to the other side of the border, while Polish police were then pushing them back.

“Back and forth, back and forth, they were playing us like animals,” he said, becoming visibly upset. “That was the moment when we thought it was time to let go of this dream of moving to Europe.”

What was described by Azad is only a fraction of a political and humanitarian crisis that has been unfolding at the EU’s eastern frontier. So far, at least 11 people have died in this round of the border crisis, and many others are facing freezing temperatures and a dwindling supply of essentials.

Despite the Belarusian government’s effort to bus migrants and asylum seekers to warehouses for temporary shelter, it remains unclear how the government will resolve this crisis. Western politicians accuse Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of using migrants and asylum seekers as “weapons” for revenge against the EU’s sanctions on his government.

For many like Azad, waiting simply is not an option any more: they decided to go back home. Now back in Iraq, Azad said they were lucky he did not sell the house. But that is the last thing he owns now: He sold the sofas, the refrigerator, and even the coffee pot. Basically, anything that could be turned into cash to support their odyssey out of Iraq was fair game for sale.

Social media posts also revealed a grim picture of what awaits the returnees in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. For example, one Kurdish family did not even have enough money for a taxi to take them from the airport to the internally displaced people’s (IDP) camp where they resided.

‘Only choice I had’

Even though the Kurdish region, home to the Iraqi Kurds and some Yazidis, enjoys relative security and prosperity compared with the rest of Iraq, people who live in the region face rising unemployment and endemic corruption. Ravaged by the armed group ISIL (ISIS), some parts of the Kurdish and Yazidi communities are still struggling to rebuild.

Employment opportunities are scarce and many young people like Azad are not seeing a future in the Kurdish region. “I tried and tried, but I simply couldn’t find a job, so leaving Erbil was the only choice I had,” said another young Kurdish man who is still in Belarus.

The regional government, in the face of the hardships that many of the people encounter in the region, insists the migrant crisis was stirred up by people smugglers. Yet many people who spoke with Al Jazeera said they voluntarily left their homes and went to Belarus with travel agency-arranged flights and visas.

For the 430 people who have returned from Europe to Iraq, their future now is even bleaker than when they decided to embark on this journey a few months ago. Without government support, many are facing more despair.

“I don’t expect the media to really care about us and I don’t think people could really understand what we are going through, but I’m glad that I have someone to talk to,” Azad said, standing up from the floor and ending the conversation.

 World Opinions – AL JAZEERA

L’article Destitute and hopeless: Iraqi Kurds return from Belarus est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has accused the Russian President Vladimir Putin of orchestrating the migration crisis on the country’s border with Belarus.

« (Belarusian leader) Lukashenko is the executor of the latest assault, but this assault has a sponsor who is to be found in Moscow, and this sponsor is President Putin, » Morawiecki said during an emergency debate in the Polish parliament.

The Russian and Belarusian leaders have spoken by phone about the tensions at the border between Poland and Belarus, Moscow and Minsk said on Tuesday.

A statement from the Kremlin simply referred to « an exchange of views on the refugee situation ».

Earlier, its spokesman said Moscow was watching the situation « very closely ».

« It’s a real problem which concerns Belarus and Poland. Of course, we are very worried, » Dmitri Peskov added.

Lukashenko’s office elaborated further, saying the circumstances at the border had featured prominently in the conversation between the two leaders, « as well as the harsh actions of the Polish party towards civilians ».

Minsk described as « particularly worrying » the deployment of Polish security forces at the border and said that the two men, both in power for over two decades, had discussed the situation « in detail ».

Russia is Belarus’ main ally and Lukashenko has relied on Putin for political and financial support in the face of increased pressure from the EU and the West over last year’s disputed election, human rights and more recently the migration crisis.

Thousands of migrants and refugees remained massed in freezing cold weather on Tuesday at the Belarus-Poland border, on the doorstep of the European Union.

A sudden surge in numbers and attempted crossings on Monday brought international condemnation of Belarus. The EU accused Lukashenko of a « cynical » exploitation of migrants, orchestrating the influx in revenge for European sanctions imposed on his autocratic regime after the brutal repression of opposition in the country.

Minsk rejects the allegations and has blamed Poland for flouting its humanitarian obligations. In an interview on Tuesday, Lukashenko accused Poland of conducting a « war » against the migrants.

The EU believes Belarus has been flying people from Middle Eastern countries and dumping them at EU borders, or facilitating their journeys — exploiting them in a « cynical » manner to destabilise the bloc in retaliation for Western sanctions.

The past few days represent a major escalation in tensions between Minsk and its neighbours. For months migrants have been arriving at the country’s border not just with Poland — but also with Lithuania and to a lesser extent, Latvia — the three EU states on the bloc’s eastern border with Belarus.

World opinions / agencies

L’article Poland-Belarus: Putin behind migrant crisis at border, says Polish PM Morawiecki est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

Brexit means Brexit” – the mantra of the former British prime minister Theresa May – deserves a place in philosophy textbooks as the most meaningless sentence ever to contain the word “means”. But let’s not fool ourselves thatwhen we finally discover if there is to be a minimal UK-EU trade deal, or no deal, we will then know what Brexit means. It will be five years at least, and probably 10, before we see a clear outline of the new relationship between the offshore islands and the continent. By then the EU may be a very different community, and the UK may not exist.

In a further referendum that is likely to happen in the next few years, the Scots will decide whether they want to leave the 300-year-old union with England and rejoin the European one. If they vote for independence, despite the attendant economic difficulties, then the UK will effectively cease to be. Any British politician who wants the Scots to stick with the English must soon present a different, federal model of the British union as the alternative to independence. So the choice will be the end of the UK or a new Federal Kingdom of Britain.

The path from the 2016 referendum vote to this hard Brexit was strewn with broken promises: from the article Boris Johnson wrote in the Daily Telegraph four days later, blithely asserting that “there will continue to be free trade, and access to the single market” to then then trade secretary, Liam Fox, saying the free trade agreement with the European Union “should be one of the easiest in human history”. In a triumph of cognitive dissonance, Brexiteers managed to hold two incompatible thoughts simultaneously: that “Europe” is a hideous Franco-German plot to submerge England in a Napoleonic empire; but also that those same new Napoleons would (on instructions from the German car industry) be bound to give the UK privileged, unfettered access to the single market, so the British could have their cake and eat it.

The question now is whether there will be a dynamic of convergence or divergence between Britain and the EU. Every plausible alternative to the current populist British government would prefer a softer Brexit. That includes a more pragmatic and competent Conservative government under a new leader such as Rishi Sunak, the current chancellor. It would be even more true of a Labour – or Labour-led coalition – government under Keir Starmer. This, as well as the logic of economic self-interest, suggests that Britain will, over time, gradually edge back closer to the EU, sector by sector, issue by issue.

On the other hand, the harder the Brexit, the more Britain must seek an alternative business model. As the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine demonstrates, even England and Wales on their own still have significant strengths: financial services, great universities, biotech, DeepMind, alternative energy, creative industries. The economy will be smaller than it would have been without Brexit, but may in time develop a new, competitive profile. This points to divergence. And the bad blood and mutual recrimination around a no-deal Brexit, if it comes to that, would be likely to infect and hamper the development of cooperation in other areas, such as foreign and security policy, for some time to come.

Yet the future of Brexit will depend as much on developments on the continental side of the Channel. People in Germany, France or Italy now talk very little about Brexit – not only because they are fed up with the subject, but also because the EU faces two other enormous crises, which will certainly be discussed at the European summit this week. The EU must urgently put through its impressive new €1.8tn (£1.6tn) budget and recovery fund, as without it, the post-Covid recovery will be more difficult and north-south tensions inside the eurozone may again become acute. But to do this, it has to overcome threatened vetoes from Hungary and Poland, which are holding the rest of the EU to ransom so as to further weaken the proposed rule-of-law conditionality on those funds.

Some have argued that Brexit may actually help the EU because, liberated from the Anglo-Saxon awkward customer, the other member states can smoothly move ahead to further integration. This is an illusion. It took a marathon five-day summit this summer to agree the budget and recovery fund, over fierce resistance from the “frugal four” (Austria, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands), with the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, playing Thatcher.

What the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, are now doing to their EU partners makes Thatcher look like a gentle Europhile. The former British prime minister may have cried “I want my money back”, but at least Britain was a major net contributor to the European budget. After she got her rebate, she forcefully advanced a central project of European integration – the single market whose “level playing field” (a very British metaphor) the EU is now insisting the UK must accept.

Hungary and Poland, by contrast, stand to be enormous net beneficiaries from the budget and recovery fund, which together could contribute more than 6% of Hungary’s GDP. Yet they are refusing to accept some fairly minimal rule-of-law conditions, without which the EU will gradually cease to be a community of democracies and a shared legal order.

In effect, what the Hungarian and Polish leaders are saying to German and Dutch taxpayers is: we won’t let you make those badly needed transfers to southern eurozone countries like Italy and Spain, both of them hard-hit by Covid, unless you allow us to go on using large amounts of your money without any significant constraints. In Hungary, that means EU funds being distributed to prop up Orbán’s increasingly undemocratic regime, not to mention it probably benefiting his family and friends.

If this shameless blackmail succeeds, the populist, xenophobic, nationalist ruling parties in Hungary and Poland will be able to go on doing pretty much what they please, being paid for it generously and, for good measure, biting the German and Dutch hands that feed them.

Fast forward to Hungexit or Polexit? Why would they be so stupid? Johnson can talk of having his cake and eating it; Orbán actually does it.

No, the immediate threat to the EU is not that Hungary and Poland will follow Britain out of the door, but that they will remain full members of the club while continuing to violate its most important rules. It is hard to say which is now the greater danger to the future of the EU: a democratic Britain that has left, or an undemocratic Hungary that remains.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist

L’article For Europe, losing Britain is bad. Keeping Hungary and Poland could be worse est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.