slovenia – European Affairs Magazine

Minister Crnadak on the Summit Brdo-Brijuni: EU will be completed only after the Integration of Balkans

5 Giugno 2017 BreakingNews @en di

Minister of Foreign Affairs of BiH Igor Crnadak attended the meeting of foreign ministers in Brdo, in Slovenia. The minister stressed during the discussion the importance of such meetings at the ministerial level and added that this type of initiative can give new impetus to the process of integration into the European Union. He agrees with the fact that the European Union will not be complete until the arrival of the Balkans. He also stressed the importance of the Trieste meeting, which will address this issue, but also other types of problems, such as the fact that young people leave the area and corruption. He also added that some things should be improved regardless of the European Union but actually for the sake of democracy and development, such as independence and freedom of the media. All this, in the opinion of the Minister, can be achieved through cooperation and good relations between the countries.

Migrants: phase 2 of EUNAVFOR MED is started

24 Ottobre 2015 Defence di

The second phase of EUNAVFOR MED, “Sofia”, started in October. It takes name from a Somali child born during a critic journey in the Mediterranean and rescued by a German ship last August.

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The project aims to stop the trafficking of human beings intercepting smugglers in the sea. The monitoring of international waters, aims to search, control and seize suspicious craft, and it is entrusted to military ships, helicopters and drones. All this, within the framework of the objectives set in July by the European Union to stem the crisis of migrants in the Mediterranean: identification, arrest and destruction of boats and means used by traffickers.

Currently, six European warships are engaged offshore Libya: an Italian one, an English one, a French one, a Spanish one and two German, but later this month three other means should be made available from England, Belgium and Slovenia. Four helicopters, many drones and 1300 military will be added to these.

According to Admiral Enrico Credendino, head of mission, “the order is enforcing law by the use of force, to dislocate traffickers’ business. While the first phase aimed to find the necessary information about transnational criminal network, the second phase provides for the boarding of vessels, their inspection, the reception of migrants, the arrest of traffickers and the destruction of their boats. All this, however, within international waters, 12 nautical miles away from the Libyan coast. We need a United Nations decision and an invitation from Libyan government to operate directly in the territorial waters. The third next phase would allow the temporary landing on the ground for the destruction of smugglers’ structures “.

This last phase, which hasn’t yet received the green light of the EU, would actually be the most effective, since it is in Libyan waters that most of the smugglers operate, but – as the Italian Foreign minister Paolo Gentiloni says – ”UN Security Council can’t authorize this intervention without the express request of Libya “.

14 European countries are participating in EUNAVFOR MED: Italy, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Slovenia, Greece, Luxembourg, Belgium, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Sweden. The costs of military intervention – apart from an annually European contribution of 12 million Euros – are supported by the individual participating countries. Italy has contributed to the mission with a budget of 26 million euro and 1.020 soldiers.
Viviana Passalacqua

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Migrants and borders: Slovenia and Croatia face Hungary’s fence effects

23 Ottobre 2015 EUROPA di

The endless floyd of desperate migrants keeps the Balcan countries in permanent emergency state. Slovenia and Croatia are facing problematics while Orban’s Hungary had it’s border blocked up by that fence.

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More than 12,000 migrants have crossed into Slovenia in the past 24 hours and thousands more are expected, prompting authorities to ask the rest of the European Union for help dealing with the flood of people.
EU officials said Austria, Germany, Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland offered to send police reinforcements.

“We are standing by Slovenia in these difficult moments, Slovenia is not alone,” European migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said after meeting Gyorkos Znidar. The EU executive later said Slovenia had formally requested tents, blankets and other supplies under the bloc’s disaster relief programmed.
Croatia also decided on Thursday to seek international help, the news agency Hina reported. The government in Zagreb said it would ask for blankets, winter tents, beds and containers. Since mid-September, 217,000 refugees have entered Croatia

Slovenia’s Interior Ministry said Croat police were dumping thousands of undocumented people on its border “without control” and were ignoring telephoned Slovene requests to contain the surge.
On Tuesday morning, a train carrying more than 1,000 people from the Croatian town of Tovarnik and some 20 buses of full of refugees from the Opatovac refugee camp were headed toward the Slovenian border.

Migrants began streaming into Slovenia last Friday, when Hungary closed its border with Croatia. Before then, they were heading for Hungary – a member of Europe’s Schengen zone of visa-free travel – and then north and west to Austria and Germany. Sealing the border diverted them to Slovenia, which is also a member of the Schengen zone.
The daily cost of handling migrants was costing the former Yugoslav republic €770,000 Gyorkos Znidar said.

The European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker called an extraordinary meeting of several European leaders for Sunday, 25th. Juncker has invited the leaders of Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia.

Not a single migrant has entered Hungary from Croatia since the border was closed with a fence protected by razor wire, soldiers and police patrols.

Orban said “Hungary’s border fence had been meant to turn migrants back from Europe, not divert them along a different path to Germany, and that he had asked Hungary’s Balkan neighbors to help send the migrants back”.
“The right thing to do is not to ensure their passage into Europe but to take them back to the refugee camps they started out from,” he said. “The further they come from their troubled countries, the more difficult it will be for them to return. Therefore these people must remain and humane conditions must be created for them in those places”.

While EU’s efforts seem to be not-sufficiently able to take control of the situation created during Balcan borders, Orban spaces his far-right way of thinking not considering the fact that what’s happening with millennial migrants is much more than a “migrant crisis”: it’s an anthropological change, a continuum circle of people that keeps on walking countries, borders while trying to make their lifes better and safer.

A price of late globalization, maybe; a war and destabilization of the Middle East’s bill to be payed also by occidental countries, indeed.

Sabiena Stefanaj

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