#dublin 2

https://www.tiktok.com/@deathpiercemind/video/7593531931543850262

It almost doesn’t matter who started the fires this week in the squalid refugee camp on Lesbos called Moria, leaving thousands to sleep on the streets.

It could have been the desperate migrants, dwelling in cramped tents without clean toilets and forced by Covid-19 to “quarantine,” whatever that may mean in such conditions. It could have been local Greeks, who resent what they see as a slum that sullies their beautiful island. Or the fires could have flared all by themselves, because in such a wretched place, bad things are just bound to happen.  

Either way, Europe — from Brussels to Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw and Athens — is responsible for this tragedy. This is blowback for one of the European Union’s worst failures on an admittedly long list: its inability to fix a broken refugee system.

It’s been clear for many years that migration from poor and war-torn regions in the Middle East and Africa to this comparatively orderly continent would be one of the EU’s biggest challenges. But most member states that can’t be reached by dinghy, raft or boat across the Mediterranean — and only Greece, Malta, Italy and Spain can be — refused to acknowledge migration as their problem.

The result was the notorious and cynical “Dublin system.” It requires migrants, at least in theory, to apply for asylum only in the first EU member state they physically enter. Unless they jet in by airplane — and Syrians who’ve been bombed out of their homes tend to flee without boarding passes — this means the Mediterranean states.