humanitarian assistance. Plowright has more than ten years managing humanitarian operations in such countries as Afghanistan, Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, and Libya.
Plowright applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The War on Rescue: The Obstruction of Humanitarian Assistance in the European Migration Crisis, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit William Plowright's website.Many European governments had violated the principles of non-refoulement (that refugees should not be forcibly pushed back), including Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, Serbia, and Spain. Many governments arrested individuals for distributing assistance in public, including in Italy and France (Ferstman 2019, 30). In Serbia, the distribution of assistance outside of official state-run centers was banned for many organizations, and organizations were compelled to apply for permission to enter them through a complex bureaucratic procedure that was not transparent and rarely granted access. In Switzerland, police entered a church in the middle of Sunday service to arrest a priest who preached compassion toward refugees. He was detained for hosting a refugee in his parochial house (Amnesty International 2019b). In Spain, documentation of interventions by security forces into humanitarian programs was banned, with fines up to six hundred thousand euros (Legislacion Consolidada 2015). In North Macedonia, investigations were opened into fourteen organizations, and they were required to provide a complex set of documentation and information about all activities, grinding most humanitarian activities to a halt. Naturally, the investigation was eventually stopped, and no charges were filed. As with almost all the other cases listed here, there was no evidence of any form of law-breaking by humanitarians (Ferstman 2019, 39). In Greece, small NGOs including Team Humanity and Emergency Response Centre International (ERCI) were the targets of arrests and investigations which destabilized operations for the former, while forcing the latter to cease operations permanently.Overall, page 99 gives a pretty good idea of what the book is about. The previous part of the book looked at how aid was blocked, which led to boats full of people being stranded at sea. This section turns to some of the ways that refugees and migrants were targeted by European governments in ways that were often illegal. The main point is that democracies can and will violate rights, including the right to receive humanitarian assistance. During the Migration Crisis in Europe, there were countless examples of this, and page 99 of my book only lists a few of them.
Many organizations found themselves the victim of aggressive ticketing and fines from local authorities. Refugee Rescue, an organization founded by professional lifeboat rescuers, worked on Lesbos from January 2016 to assist the local Hellenic Coast Guard with the rescue of calls that the Coast Guard could not respond to. Despite this, it was regularly cited and fined for such petty offenses as failure to have a license to clear garbage from beaches when it cleared life jackets away following rescues. Eventually, organizations like Refugee Rescue would feel compelled to leave Lesbos and cease operations due to the sustained harassment and insecurity from local authorities and right-wing anti-humanitarian groups (Refugee Rescue 2020).
In the Czech Republic, the offices of the Prague Autonomous Social Center (an organization helping refugees) were attacked by masked men and received bomb threats on multiple occasions. Female humanitarians were publicly identified, doxed, and threatened with rape and throat-slitting. In Germany, in 2016 eight people were arrested for attempted murder and bomb attacks on refugees and organizations supporting them (ABD1 2018). Across the country, there were more than 3,500 attacks reported against migrants in 2016 and 2,000 in 2018 (Wallis 2019). In Greece, vigilante groups often led by the far-right party Golden Dawn attacked NGO workers, destroyed property, and blocked access to camps…
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
