17 Sep, 2015 14:04

‘Refugees to EU made homeless by NATO interventions’

Asylum seekers heading to the EU have been made homeless by Western interventions and now they are being used by the US as a sort of a battering ram to weaken Europe to its own will, says political analyst Aleksandar Pavic.

RT: UN chief Ban Ki-Moon has condemned the treatment of refugees at the Serbian-Hungarian border. What can the international community do to stop similar repeating in the coming days?

Aleksandar Pavic: First of all, there is no end in sight of this crisis unless it’s being treated at its very source. And that is the place from where these people are coming from. These poor people are being used as a sort of a battering ram without their own consent. They have been made homeless by NATO-Western interventions and now I think America is using them to weaken Europe to its own will. So they are really chess pieces not of their own doing, and they are really caught in a bad place. But so are the countries though which they are going, and Hungary said two months ago that they were going to close the border, they are going to control the border. So this is not something that happened overnight, and Hungary is within its rights to do this. So they can turn to Croatia, but for how long – nobody knows. There are some indications from Brussels that they are not going to give their blessing to Croatia to be a corridor and then we’re going to have a big problem.

RT: Hungary's overall approach to the migrant emergency has been widely criticized by other EU members. How justified is it?

AP: I don’t think Hungary is out of line. Each country, if they don’t control their own borders, it’s not a country. Hungary gave everyone fair time. They announced that they are going to build a fence to control their border back in June and they’ve been really faced with an onslaught, a flood of migrants. Look what happened with Germany.

RT: But people don’t want to stay in Hungary, they want to go north to Germany, Austria, etc.

AP: Yes, but you see the thing is, when you have thousands of people passing through and if you just let them through uncritically and without adequate controls you don’t know who you are letting in…

RT: How come Germany manage to do it then?

AP: The Germans managed to do it up to a point, but they have been forced to close their borders as well, to bring back border controls. That means that even Germany can’t control this, they need to institute border controls. Hungary doesn’t have nearly the capacity that Germany does. But you know something, it’s very well-coordinated that Hungary closed its borders at about the same time Germany and Austria placed border controls. It might very well be that Germany has given a kind of a blessing from behind the scenes to Hungary to do this, because there is no other explanation. Germany is criticizing Hungary, but nobody is doing anything to stop Hungary from doing what it’s been doing.

RT: Thousands of people are already in Europe, what is going to happen to them?

AP: It’s tough to say, because Hungary is very serious about closing its borders, limiting the numbers of people that can enter Hungary. Croatia has shown itself to be open right now but who knows how it will be in a week’s time. If they can’t get through, then they might try through Bosnia, but pretty soon there’s going to be chaos in Bosnia as well and today we have news that Slovenia is going to institute border controls as well. So if migrants enter Croatia or even Bosnia they still have to go through Slovenia to get to the EU. So the thing is, they may be caught in a no man’s land and this no man’s land may just be Serbia, perhaps Bosnia, perhaps partially Croatia.

RT: What are the chances EU will reach a unified solution to the crisis?

AP: The only way we are going to see united EU action is if they agree to treat, as I said, the problem at its core, because you have EU members stepping out of line. Slovakia is not going to accept any migrants, Hungary doesn’t want to accept them, Poland doesn’t want to accept them, and the Czech Republic doesn’t want to accept them. So we have countries turning to their own national interests in times of crisis. Maybe people have warned that this is what is going to happen to the EU the first time a big crisis hits. It could be an economic crisis, this time it’s the migrant crisis and we have everybody minding their own business. So unless they all agree on some sort of an intervention in the Middle East against Islamic State [IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL] which is the only proper thing to do, or to coordinate an effort for Turkey to offer shelter to all these people, I don’t see a united EU policy anytime soon.

EU capitals secretly praising Hungary for protecting Western ‘green zone’

Political analyst Boris Malagursky suggests that European countries are grateful to Hungary for preventing refugees from reaching the 'promised land' of Germany and other Western countries. He adds that in a way Hungarian PM Orban is a hero to them.

RT: Hungary's border will stay shut for the next 30 days. How likely is it that we will see more confrontations there?

Boris Malagursky: Well, I think what we are seeing now is just the beginning. Because what’s happening on a global level is the establishment of ‘the green zone’ and ‘the red zone’, as I like to call it. If you look at Baghdad when the Americans came in and occupied Iraq, they established ‘the green zone’ where the US embassy was and where today you go to McDonalds or Burger King and pretty much feel safe in the middle of the Middle East. And everything outside of ‘the green zone’ is ‘the red zone’ where people from ‘the green zone’ like the Americans go in and take what they want: take the oil, take the national resources, take jobs, companies away from the Iraqis. And when the Iraqis want something in return, they are met with closed doors. And this is what’s happening on a global scale. The West has interfered in countries worldwide, taking what they want, causing political instability, conflicts, wars. And then when the people try to escape all of that and reach the safe haven of the green zone, they are just isolating themselves from the rest of the world. This is what the whole refugee crisis is about because these people should be allowed to go where they want to, to flee from the war zones that the West has created. And they are met with resistance, as we are seeing, at the Hungarian-Serbian border.

RT: Hungary has been widely criticized over its handling of the crisis by fellow EU members. How justified is any of it?

BM: It’s interesting because the rest of the EU is secretly praising Hungary for doing this by protecting the Hungarian borders that the elites in Germany and other Western countries are actually feeling that Hungary is protecting their interests, because they are protecting ‘the green zone’ in the West. And in a way, Victor Orban is a hero for them because he is… creating a conflict area at Hungary’s border instead of it being created at Austria’s or Germany’s border, which is where most of these refugees are trying to go. And it is really horrible the scenes that you’re seeing close to my home town of Subotica in the north of Serbia. These people are really fleeing a zone that is devastated, but not devastated because of their own actions, in my opinion, it is devastated because of the West’s actions in supporting the rebels in Syria, in going into Iraq and creating a crisis, and creating the circumstances which led to the creation of Islamic State which is causing trouble in the Middle East.

RT: Croatia says it'll allow migrants and refugees to go through the country to get into the EU. What effect will that have on the crisis?

BM: We have yet to see how Croatia will handle this issue. Of course, the refugees that go into Croatia they still have to cross into Hungary or Slovenia if they want to reach ‘the Promised land’ of Germany and Austria. Again, it is good to see that these refugees that are fleeing these war zones, they are trying to reach the West in hopes of prosperity and the ‘American dream’ as they like to call it. But when they do get there they are met with more problems. And it is not ‘game over’ once they get there. More problems will start for them. The West is also in a difficult financial situation. They do not have the capacity to help all these refugees and give them what they need. I think it would be much more constructive for these countries which have caused these conflicts in the Middle East to simply either not just meddle in the internal affairs of the other countries, but at least to help them as the US did after WWII with the Marshall Plan. Then, when the war ended there was financial support for the nations that were destroyed by war.
What we have today is the Americans, the Western countries going into other countries creating a huge mess that they don’t fix afterwards and then they are all surprised that refugees want to leave these countries and go to the West. So, this problem will be solved when the West changes its foreign policies, changes the way it looks at the rest of the world as a sort of global ‘red zone’ where they can go and take whatever they want and try to build a more just world.

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