Between Morality and Geopolitics, Europe Faces a Tough Choice on Refugee Crisis
As a continent struggles to combat with a deadly virus, the threat of new refugee flow left the E.U. wavering between its commitment to moral values and facing the unpleasant political realities.
Abdullah Ayasun*, Anthony Derisiotis*
Prologue
Only five years after a huge wave of migrant flow unsettled the continental politics, Europe faces a tough moral choice while Turkey and Greece are locked in a dispute over the concentration of a new group of refugees at a no-man’s land across the Turkish-Greek border. The context and the genesis of the latest crisis are, from many angles, significantly different from the previous chapter in 2015 except the unaltered reality of an unresolved conflict that continued to brutally devour Syria.
The tragic scenes of refugees stranded between Turkey and Greece underlie a painful reality about the legacy of an ongoing war that has created humanitarian mayhem as it creeps toward its conclusion phase in the battle over the fate of Idlib, the last big chunk of rebel-held territory. Though the regime assault started last April, the international community only came to realize the gravity and urgency of the matter when a million people have been displaced and pushed forward toward the Turkish border in an…
