Jean-Thomas Lesueur: "Frontex is encountering great hostility in Europe itself"

Jean-Thomas Lesueur is Managing Director of the Thomas More Institute (think-tank).

While the European Union is questioned for its strategy for purchasing vaccines and the European recovery plan, adopted in the sentence last December, is already experiencing its first failures, another case, serious and serious for the future of the peoples of Europe is currently being played out quietly - although the media are starting to report it: this is the questioning of Frontex, the European border and coast guard agency.

She has been the target, since last October, of repeated accusations in the European press (mainly German) and of public words of mistrust on the part of Ylva Johansson, Swedish Commissioner for Home Affairs who exercises supervision over Frontex. .

Frontex and its management are accused, pell-mell, of having participated in or supported “pushback” operations (refoulements of migrants without offering them the possibility of submitting an asylum application) during control operations in Mediterranean, for having tried to cover up these acts, to be in the hands of the lobby of companies in the security sector, to drag their feet in welcoming forty “fundamental rights observers” within it, and so on.

OLAF (European Anti-Fraud Office) is currently carrying out an investigation for “illegal practices” and has searched the agency's premises since December.

Frontex was cleared of eight of the thirteen “pushback” operations of which it was accused (for the other five, further investigation was requested).

From a strictly factual standpoint, it is important to know that Frontex was cleared of eight of the thirteen “pushback” operations of which it was accused (for the other five, additional investigations were requested).

As for the meetings and discussions with companies in the security sector, they are integral to its mandate.

It should also be remembered that the accusation of "pushbacks" made by Der Spiegel last October, which ignited the powder, is mainly based on videos provided by the Turkish Coast Guard.

We know from Timisoara at least that we can make the images say what we want.

It is obvious that the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has not given up holding the migratory gun to the temples of Europeans.

It is obvious that the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has not given up holding the migratory gun to the temples of Europeans.

Let us remember his blackmail in 2015-2016 which resulted in the urgent signing of the agreement of March 18, 2016. Let us remember the pressure coup of March 2020 when the regime massaged more than 130,000 applicants for immigration at the gates of Europe (of which, according to the Turkish Minister of the Interior, only 20 to 25% could possibly claim refugee status).

Remember that in June 2020 a real Turkish protectorate was allowed to settle in Tripolitania and western Libya, Ankara thus ensuring control of a second migratory route to Europe. .

During his visit to Brussels on January 21 and 22, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu officially came to turn a "new page with the European Union".

In fact, he came to say that the 2016 agreement "should be revised in all its elements", including the financial aspect.

And he conditioned on these new negotiations the return, under the terms of the said agreement, 1,450 migrants from Greece to Turkey, which has been waiting for weeks.

This is the geopolitical context in which Frontex's enterprise to destabilize intervenes, which endangers the action of the European Union in the area of ​​migration.

To read also:

Jean-Thomas Lesueur: "The European pact on migration or the absence of will erected into a system"

For Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson, immigration is a phenomenon that we can do nothing about and to which we must adapt, and a boon for European economies.

In addition, it is necessary to indicate the return in force, within the Commission, of a “borderless” vision embodied by Commissioner Ylva Johansson.

His position deserves the clarity: “Immigration is part of what makes our continent prosperous.

We have a lot of immigration to the EU.

And we need these people, our society is aging ”(Brussels, 23 September 2020),“ Migration phenomena have been and always will be part of our societies ”(Brussels, 23 September 2020),“ Migration is not a threat to Europe ”(TT, November 13, 2020).

Immigration is thus seen both as a phenomenon to which nothing can be done and to which it is necessary to adapt, and a benefit for European economies.

This view extends the vision of the UN in its famous report “Replacement migration: a solution to the decline and aging of the population?”, Which dates from the year 2000. This report, which has caused so much to flow ink, was steeped in the dogma of "happy globalization" that reigned at the time.

The problem is that, twenty years later, the results are gloomy to say the least.

This dogma, which saw the human person as an interchangeable economic agent and movable according to the needs of globalization, does not resist the spectacle of the fracturing of our societies, the rise of communitarianism and racialism, spectacular phenomena of ethnic violence. that we see in Europe.

This is because the migration problem is not a variable of economic and social policy.

It is an existential question in that it affects the identity and the future of peoples and cultures.

This is what the European Commissioner especially does not want to see.

Read also:

Migrants: The culpable irresponsibility of the EU, which was not ready to stem a new crisis

If the European Commissioner concedes that the European Union must set as its objective the "rapid return" of asylum seekers, we can deduce from the very harsh words she had against the director of Frontex, the Frenchman Fabrice Leggeri, that she seeks to make the agency at best a control body for the police at the borders of the Member States, at worst a kind of super-NGO responsible for bringing back to European mainland migrants mounted on makeshift boats .

There is therefore no need to be Eurolatrous, or even Europhile, to worry about the possible consequences of this regular attack on Frontex (we ourselves have often criticized European migration policy in these columns, for example the " European Pact on Migration and Asylum ”last September).

Realism commands it.

Because it is all the efforts made since the migration crisis of 2015, however limited and fragmented they may be, that risk being wiped out.