Europe, in debt

Afghan family evacuated by Spain from Kabul airport, Afghanistan.Olmo Calvo

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• The long wait for Afghan refugees in Greek limbo

The session held on Tuesday by the EU Justice and Interior Ministers is extraordinary due to the seriousness of the matter they will address: the impact on European security of the Afghanistan drama and the management of its migratory flows. The temptation to shield the borders is becoming more than just a temptation: fences are already growing in countries like Greece, but a selfishness incompatible with the best European tradition is also growing. Emmanuel Macron valued refugees early and very disturbingly as a threat, while Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has been even more petty: there is no room for anyone else in his country. In return, Angela Merkel is willing to offer asylum to collaborators of the international occupation forces and their families.

That is the beginning of the journey: the EU must not and cannot abandon entire families fleeing Afghanistan for having supported for years the construction of a system of values, rights and freedoms in accordance with Western standards. Europe's debt to these people can only be paid off by offering them effective protection and the guarantee to continue their lives outside of the current Afghan hell.

There is a useful background: the sour and unsuccessful haggling that the EU carried out in the wake of the Syrian crisis in 2015 should serve as an example to deal with the current situation. The bulk of the refugees may remain in countries bordering Afghanistan, and others may be stranded in Turkey on their way to Europe. That is why the path that Brussels is exploring to create, together with the UN, the United States and Canada, among other countries, an international resettlement forum, capable of allocating significant quotas of refugees, seems promising.

But the magnitude of the problem remains enormous. Pakistan already hosts some three million Afghan refugees and Iran 3.5 million, according to UNHCR data. And almost four million Syrian refugees are in Turkey. Calling for aid from those countries now would make European humanitarian stinginess all too obvious. The EU might seem caught in the self-serving scaremongering that the extreme right wing cultivate in Europe in the face of incomparably lower numbers of refugees. The EU will have to assume its share of distribution in that Forum and specify how many people it is willing to host, as the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom have already done.

Adding to the current collapse in Afghanistan a soft, calculating or selfish management of the flow of refugees would place us very far from the standard of demand that Europe itself has set itself. It is worth remembering that 2021 marks the 70th anniversary of the International Convention on the Status of Refugees: credible Europeanism is that which fulfills its solemn commitments. Hence, the utterances of the ultra-right about the alleged invasion of Europe shamelessly display a strange insensitivity to the majority of European society and to Europeanism itself as a cultural and political construction. The reality is more cruel: 85% of the refugees will never reach Europe because they will end up detained in developing countries.But it is Europe that has sufficient host resources and it is the EU that must repudiate any temptation to shield or, even worse, any electoral calculation to catch a handful of xenophobic votes.