Queues of refugees wrapped in blankets, surrounded by snow, bring to mind those queues of human beings in concentration camps who were also waiting for a bowl of soup in winter. The clothes they are wearing are different because times have changed, but the pictures of humiliation and suffering are very similar. Those were taken in yesterday’s Europe, when death awaited the deportees in the camps.
In today’s Europe, the people in these queues or warming their hands, as this little boy in a refugee camp is doing over a fire built in a petrol drum, can find refuge and humanity because we are talking about a Europe whose economy is second in the world, and the countries that it is composed of are not at war.
The European Union has been and is a great international project for peace, security, economic growth and well-being. Possibly the most important project of the 20th century. But throughout the years in which the project was being rolled out, the possibility that, in a few decades’ time, hundreds of thousands of people would flee from wars and misery from countries very near at hand, and do so by any procedure to endeavour to reach Europe, was not contemplated.
The attempt to achieve a common policy on asylum and protection for refugees in the E.U. has not been fully achieved, so far. Several countries do not accept it and close their borders. Others, among them Spain, are willing to take in people who arrive from Greece and Italy, as the E.U. is asking.
The procedures in place for identifying and transferring people are lengthy, which is why only a few people have arrived yet. But they do arrive, and are given a warm welcome at airports and transferred to cities where they are lodged in centres run by municipalities and a number of NGOs, among them the Red Cross.
There is still room for improvement in some aspects, in a matter for which we were not prepared, just as other countries were not, either, such as speeding up procedures for making and handling subsequent applications for asylum, increasing financial support for refugees, and keeping a very close watch on the situation of unaccompanied minors. This is explained by the Ombudsman of Spain (Defensor del Pueblo) in the case study “Asylum in Spain. International protection and reception system resources” presented and defended recently at the Spanish Parliament.
The Ombudsman institution is monitoring closely the arrival and transfers of refugees in which the Ministry of the Interior and the Department for Immigration are participating; it acknowledges the work and efforts of so many people who make it possible to give refugees decent accommodation and the care needed to help them overcome the traumas of their terrible journeys and be able to think about a new life.
UNHCR (the UN Agency for Refugees) warns that there will be many more arrivals in Europe shortly. It is quite likely that the figures given by the European Union in September 2015 for countries to take in refugees are no longer valid as they have been far exceeded.
But the pictures we see of refugee camps at below zero temperatures, with queues for soup, flimsy tents and oil drums for building fires in, may perhaps make us ponder and be a little more generous, along with other Europeans. For we already knew that refugee camps are not places for a lifetime.
