EU and migrations - a Balkans perspective, and the need for Left answers

Nikola Radi Lucati

After 2010 expulsions of Roma and migrants from France and other EU countries, the
actions taken by the EU and its Balkan partners, especially Serbia, have shown a trend
toward comprehensive outsourcing of migration management. In this, the risks of human rights violations are outsourced to non - EU countries, such as Serbia, while the EU
remains as the party that has established the legal framework to which the outsourcing
countries have adapted their own laws. The seemingly legitimate demand for the
standardization of the legal systems of the candidate countries, has evolved into outright
ordering of laws that violate human rights by invoking repressive measures on entire
populations, by the regimes willing to become the guardians of the EU perimeter.
The diplomatic blackmail handed out to Serbia was to curb migration or face losing the
White Shengen status, and, have the date for negotiations for ascension to EU pushed
back. (This is the only EU demand, apart for the settlement of conflict with Kosovo, and
even that can be viewed in the light of migration issues.) These demands have generated
not only the restrictive laws, but have established international agreements, such as the
Agreement on readmission as acting laws with their associated repressive mechanisms
of police rules of engagement, and bylaws establishing the holding centers for the
detainees. The agreements have engendered their own terminology and euphemisms.
Deportation has become re-admission, and asylum-seekers have become false asylum
seekers.
Not recognizing the practices of mass economic discrimination as the substitutes for, and
part of the practices of war as legitimate causes for asylum has resulted in rights to
migration and asylum being severely eroded, the UN charter of rights is being made
effectively void. Organizations in the field that are cooperating with the state of Serbia
(group 484) are citing single-digit number of cases of granted asylums for the entire 20082012 period. Migratory lifestyle as the ancestral tradition of non-state bound nations is
being repressed and severely restricted.
The concept of a safe third country, as the country through which the asylum seeker has
passed though on the way to EU, and in which he/she does not face persecution or
deportation to the country of origin, is applied on the basis of a government-issued list of
safe countries. For EU, Serbia is on that list, regardless of its recent wars and unfinished
war-crimes trials. Its non-recognition of Kosovo, or the refusal to allow the return of
Albanian refugees back into the northern Kosovo under its control. (Kosovska Mitrovica).
From Serbian point of view, their list includes all of Serbias regional neighbors, including
Greece and Turkey, as well as other problematic countries, such as Bialorussia. The
application of the list as the simplification of, or replacement for, the procedure of
individual, case by case process of determination of causes for asylum is severely

restricting the asylum-seekers rights, and is becoming a tool of choice for wholesale
bypass of asylum process. It can, and does lead to the cases of asylum seekers, and
people identified as false asylum seekers are being sent to any of the states that keep
each other on mutual safe lists, without regard for the safety or rights of the people they
process.
This system, has helped create permanent wave of refugees, both political as well as
economic, caught in the legalized revolving doors policies of EU and its peripheral and
satellite countries. The case of some 120.000 Roma refugees from some 12.000-14.000
burnt down homes in Kosovos 1998-1999 war, (Alle Bleiben), that are still treated, under
the re-admission agreements, as economic false asylum seekers, between Serbia,
Kosovo and the EU, and are not legally accepted by neither, nor have they been restituted
for the loss of their property. Instead, their lives revolve as plaintiffs, around the migration
offices, judicial and police systems of the three guilty parties, that are perpetuating the
betrayal of their own citizens, still unwilling to accept the responsibility for the
consequences of their actions.
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Should the european Left address the migration and asylum as fundamental human rights,
the course of action would include the delegitimization and withdrawal of the Safe third
country system and other restrictive laws, and international agreements, and the provision
for the basic needs and rights of the people where they are currently located, regardless of
their transit status or the point of origin. These immediate measures, should be
immediately followed by the comprehensive social assistance projects in candidate and
peripheral countries, as well as the set of measures motivating the regimes (including EU
members and candidates) not to break human rights or do actions, military or economic,
that would result in mass-exodus of their population. These measures could be either
punitive, or affirmative, but would serve to gradually reduce of the flow of refugees, in the
only way possible - by eliminating the causes of distress that always forces the families to
abandon their homes and countries.