Arnold Dreyblatt: Last Europeans?

3 lenticular transparent prints
Berlin 2022

An Installation for the Jewish Museum Munich.
With texts in German, English and Esperanto by: Agnes Heller, Ludwik Zamenhof, Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksman, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Jaques Derrida / Jürgen Habermas

Arnold Dreyblatt: Last Europeans?
Photo: Eva Jünger

Daniel Cohn-Bendit
We are still in a phase of overcoming the nation state. Basically, it took us five hundred years to conquer the nation state and the cultural identities that emerged with it, with all their contradictions—revolutions, terrible historical moments—and to transform them into something new. Against this background Europe is a unique project.The question is not whether, but how quickly we accomplish the necessary transfer of national sovereignty to the European level. And how we shape this democratically.For the first time many people are realizing that there is not only their nation state and that the EU is not an abstract playground in the far distance. People are realizing that Europe has a very concrete impact on our everyday life. For the first time we have a European public. This is a decisive step towards a European democracy.

André Glucksmann
The crisis of the European Union is a symptom of its civilization. It doesn’t define itself based on its identity but, rather, on its otherness. A civilization isn’t necessarily based on a common desire to achieve the best but, rather, on excluding and making the evil taboo. In historical terms, the European Union is a defensive reaction to horror.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/philosopher-andre-glucksmann-a-dark-vision-of-the-future-of-europe-a-851266.html

Jacques Derrida / Jürgen Habermas
Today we know that many political traditions, which in the semblance of their naturalness demand authority, have been “invented.” In contrast, a European identity born in the light of the public would have from the beginning a feeling of something constructed. But only something constructed arbitrarily would bear the stigma of arbitrariness. The political-ethical will, which is expressed in the hermeneutics of self-understanding processes, is not arbitrariness. The distinction between the heritage we take on and the one we want to reject requires as much circumspection as the decision on the reading in which we appropriate it. Historical experiences are candidates only for a conscious appropriation, without which they do not acquire an identity-forming force.

Today’s Europe is scarred by the experiences of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and by the Holocaust—the persecution and extermination of European Jews, in which the Nazi regime also implicated the societies of the conquered countries. The self-critical debates about this past have brought to mind the moral foundation of politics. A heightened sensitivity to violations of personal and bodily integrity is reflected, among other things, in the fact that the council of Europe and the EU have made renunciation of the death penalty a condition of membership.

Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, “Nach dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas”, FAZ, Mai 31, 2003 (excerpts)

Ludwik Zamenhof

I call patriotism or service to the fatherland only service to the welfare of all my compatriots, regardless of their origin, language or religion. I must never call patriotism the service to particularly the non-Jewish interests, language or religion of that population which constitutes the majority in the country. In accordance with the principle that citizens—even if they constitute a larger majority in the country—have no moral right to impose their language or religion on other citizens, I must advocate that in my country every people has the right to establish schools and other institutions for their members with their language and their religion if they so desire, but that in all public institutions, which are not exclusively for one people, only a neutral human language and neutral human or state stability should prevail. As long as this is not possible, I must work to ensure that there are schools and other institutions in my country with a neutral human language for those subjects who do not want or cannot use institutions with this or that vernacular; and from all mutual struggles of tongues or religions for supremacy I must abstain, for it is only a struggle between one wrong and another.

I am aware that in countries where the population is more or less ethnically homogenous the injustice that lies in the domination of one language or religion over others will not be understood for a long time, and the population will fight with all means against equal rights for all languages and religions and will persecute and sling mud at those who advocate equal rights. But I will never let myself be confused by this persecution and remember that I am fighting for absolute truth and justice, that no people can know what will happen to them tomorrow, that equal rights for all languages and religions will eliminate the cause of all wars and conflicts between peoples, that any action against the principle of “the empire for the citizens” and violence among citizens will always remain violence, even if committed by an overwhelming majority against a marginal minority, and that lasting happiness for mankind is only possible on the condition of equal and absolute justice for all people and countries, regardless of place and time and strength, and when in every empire there will be only human beings, only citizens regardless of their ethnicity.

I call my nation the totality of all people who live in my homeland, regardless of their origin, language or religion. But to my nationality I must always add the words “human being” to show that I do not count myself among my nation in a chauvinistic sense. The multitude of all people who have the same origin as me I call my people. I must not call my nation by the name of any people, I have always to call it—at least in conversation with like-minded people—by the neutral geographical name of my empire or country. If my interlocutor wants to know not only which political-geographical, but also which ethnic group I belong to, then I name to him my people, my language, my religion etc. separately. Example: Swiss individual, Petersburg individual, Warsaw individual.

Ludwik Zamenhof, Hillelismus, 1901

Ágnes Heller
Nationalism’s victory came in 1914—against the internationalism of the working class and the cosmopolitanism of the bourgeoisie. Europe’s “original sin” was the ugly child of nationalism. All previous empires began to break up into nation states. This trend is being continued to this day.

The exclusionary character of nation states is best illustrated by the history of European Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries and the history of the two world wars. Modern antisemitism (as opposed to earlier anti-Judaism) is a product of nation states. The shift from nationalism to racism was no accident, as the aspect of racism is inherent to ethnic nationalism.

After the devastation of the Second World War, some European states drew the consequences from the dark side of being nation states and established the European Union. The importance of this grand design should not be downplayed. Member states are obliged never to even start a war among themselves. Nonetheless, a sense of European identity has not, to this day, gained the same strength or significance as the national identities of the member states.

The European Union was founded on the decision to uphold certain values. However, even among those values chosen there are contradictions. First and foremost, because the Union is a union of nation states. As a Union, the value of solidarity must prevail; as a Union of nation states, on the other hand, it has to respect national interests due to a nation’s values, so nationalism will usually be stronger than solidarity.

Ágnes Heller, Paradox Europa, Wien 2019

“Libération” / Bernard-Henri Lévy
“Enough of ‘building Europe’!” is the cry. Let’s reconnect instead with our “national soul”! Let’s rediscover our “lost identity”! This is the agenda shared by the populist forces washing over the continent. Never mind that abstractions such as “soul” and “identity” often exist only in the imagination of demagogues.

Europe is being attacked by false prophets who are drunk on resentment, and delirious at their opportunity to seize the limelight.

Europe as an idea is falling apart before our eyes.

For those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante, Goethe and Comenius there will be only ignominious defeat. A politics of disdain for intelligence and culture will have triumphed. There will be explosions of xenophobia and antisemitism. Disaster will have befallen us.

Our faith is in the great idea that we inherited, which we believe to have been the one force powerful enough to lift Europe’s peoples above themselves and their warring past. We believe it remains the one force today virtuous enough to ward off the new signs of totalitarianism that drag in their wake the old miseries of the dark ages. What is at stake forbids us from giving up. Our generation got it wrong. Like Garibaldi’s followers in the 19th century, who repeated, like a mantra, “Italia se farà da sè” (Italy will make herself by herself), we believed that the continent would come together on its own, without our needing to fight for it, or to work for it. This, we told ourselves, was “the direction of history”. We must make a clean break with that old conviction. We don’t have a choice. We must now fight for the idea of Europe or see it perish beneath the waves of populism.

Copyright: “Libération” / Bernard-Henri Lévy (signed by: Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Elfriede Jelinek et. al., 25.01.2019)

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Esperanto:

Daniel Cohn-Bendit
Ni daŭre estas en fazo de lukto por superi la nacian ŝtaton. Fakte ni bezonis kvincent jarojn por venki la nacian ŝtaton kaj la kune kun ĝi disvolviĝintajn kulturajn identecojn kun ĉiuj ties kontraŭdiroj – revolucioj, teruraj historiaj momentoj – kaj transformi ilin en ion novan. Antaŭ tiu fono Eŭropo estas unika projekto.

La demando ne estas ĉu, sed kiom rapide ni efektivigos la necesan transiron de nacia suvereneco sur la Eŭropan nivelon. Kaj kiel ni aranĝu tion demokratie.

Por la unua fojo multaj homoj konsciiĝas, ke ne nur ekzistas ilia nacia ŝtato kaj la EU ne estas abstrakta ludejo en fora malproksimeco. Oni rimarkas, ke Eŭropo tre konkrete difinas nian ĉiutagan vivon. Unuafoje ni havas eŭropan publikecon. Tio estas decida paŝo al eŭropa demokratio.

André Glucksmann
La krizo de la Eŭropa Unio estas simptomo de ĝia civilizacio. Ĝi ne difinas sin per sia identeco, sed, multe pli, per sia alieco. Civilizacio ne devige baziĝas sur komuna deziro akiri la plej bonan, sed, multe pli, sur la volo ekskludi kaj tabui la malbonon. En historiaj terminoj, la Eŭropa Unio estas defenda reago al hororo.

Jacques Derrida / Jürgen Habermas
Hodiaŭ ni scias, ke multaj politikaj tradicioj, kiuj en sia ŝajno de natura deveno postulas aŭtoritaton, estas „inventitaj“. Male eŭropa identeco, naskita antaŭ ĉies okuloj, dekomence surhavus ion konstruitan. Sed nur io arbitre konstruita portus la makulon de ajneco. La politik-etika volo, kiu montras sin en la hermeneŭtiko de procezoj de memkomprenigo, ne estas arbitro. La diferencigo inter la heredaĵo, kiun ni akceptas, kaj tiu, kiun ni volas refuti, postulas samkvantan diligenton kiel la decido pri la interpretado, per kiu ni alpropriigas ĝin. Historiaj spertoj kandidatas nur por konscia alpropriigo, sen kiu ili ne atingas identec-formigan forton.

La nuntempan Eŭropon karakterizas la spertoj de la totalismaj reĝimoj de la dudeka jarcento kaj de la Holokaŭsto – la persekutado kaj pereigo de la eŭropaj judoj, en kiun la NS-reĝimo implikis ankaŭ la societojn de la konkeritaj ŝtatoj. La memkritikaj konfrontiĝoj al tiu pasinto rememorigis la moralajn fundamentojn de politiko. Kreskinta sentemo pri lezoj de persona kaj korpa integrecoj inter alie speguliĝas en tio, ke Eŭropa Konsilo kaj EU rangigis la rezignon pri mortopuno je membriga kondiĉo.

Ludwik Zamenhof
Patriotismo aŭ servo al la patrujo mi nomas nur la servadon al la bono de ĉiuj miaj samregnanoj, de kia ajn deveno, lingvo aŭ religio ili estas; la servadon speciale al la gentaj interesoj, lingvo aŭ religio de tiu loĝantaro, kiu en la lando prezentas la plimulton, mi neniam devas nomi patriotismo. Konforme al la principo, ke unuj regnanoj, eĉ se ili prezentas en la lando grandegan plimulton, ne havas moralan rajton altrudi sian lingvon aŭ religion al aliaj regnanoj, mi devas penadi, ke en mia lando ĉiu gento havu la rajton fondi por siaj membroj lernejojn kaj aliajn instituciojn kun sia lingvo kaj sia religio, se ili tion ĉi deziras, sed ke en ĉiuj publikaj institucioj, ne destinitaj sole por unu gento, regu nur lingvo neŭtrale-homa kaj festoj neŭtrale-homaj aŭ regnaj. Tiel longe, kiel la atingo de tio ĉi estos ne ebla, mi devas penadi, ke en mia lando ekzistu lernejoj kaj aliaj institucioj kun lingvo neŭtrale-homa por tiuj regnanoj, kiuj ne volas aŭ ne povas uzi instituciojn kun tiu aŭ alia genta lingvo, kaj de ĉia reciproka batalado de lingvoj aŭ religioj pro regado mi devas teni min flanke, ĉar ĝi estas nur batalado inter unu maljustaĵo kaj alia.

Mi konscias, ke en tiuj landoj, kie la loĝantaro estas pli-malpli unugenta, ĝi longan tempon ne komprenos la maljustecon de regado de unu lingvo aŭ religio super la aliaj kaj ĝi per ĉiuj fortoj batalados kontraŭ la egalrajtigo de ĉiuj lingvoj kaj religioj, kaj la defendantojn de tiu ĉi egalrajtigo ĝi persekutados kaj superĵetados per koto. Sed mi neniam konfuziĝos per tiu ĉi persekutado, memorante, ke mi batalas por absoluta vero kaj justeco, ke nenia popolo povas scii, kio fariĝos kun ĝi morgaŭ, ke la egalrajtigo de ĉiuj lingvoj kaj religioj forigos la kaŭzon de ĉiuj militoj kaj malpacoj inter la popoloj, ke ĉia ago kontraŭ la devizo „la regno por la regnanoj“ kaj ĉia perfortaĵo de unuj regnanoj kontraŭ aliaj restas ĉiam perfortaĵo, eĉ se ĝi estas farata de grandega plimulto kontraŭ malgrandega malplimulto, kaj ke fortika feliĉo de la homaro estas ebla nur tiam, kiam por ĉiuj popoloj kaj landoj ekzistos justeco egala kaj absoluta, dependanta nek de loko, nek de tempo, nek de forto, kaj kiam en ĉiu regno ekzistos nur homoj kaj regnanoj kaj ne gentoj.

Mia nacio mi nomas la tutecon de ĉiuj homoj, kiuj loĝas mian patrujon, de kia ajn deveno, lingvo aŭ religio ili estas; sed al mia nacia nomo mi devas ĉiam aldoni la vorton „Homarano“, por montri, ke mi alkalkulas min al mia nacio ne en senco ŝovinista. La aron de ĉiuj honoj, kiu havas saman devenon kiel mi, mi nomas mia gento. Mian nacion mi ne devas nomi per la nomo de ia gento, mi devas ĉiam nomi ĝin – almenaŭ en parolado kun homaranoj – per la neŭtrale-geografia nomo de mia regno aŭ lando. Se mia interparolanto deziras scii ne sole al kiu politike-geografia, sed ankaŭ al kiu etnografia grupo mi apartenas, tiam mi aparte nomas al li mian genton, lingvon, religion k.t.p. Ekzemploj: Sviso-Homarano, Peterburgia Homarano, Varsovilanda Homarano.

„Libération” / Bernard-Henri Lévy
„Sufiĉe de ‘konstrui Eŭropon’!“ estas la krio. Anstataŭe ni rekonektiĝu kun nia „nacia animo“! Ni remalkovru nian „perditan identecon“! Jen la komuna agendo de la popolismaj fortoj, kiuj inundas la kontinenton. Ne gravas, ke abstraktaĵoj kiel „animo“ kaj „identeco“ ofte ekzistas nur en la imago de demagogoj.

Eŭropo estas atakata de falsaj profetoj, kiuj estas ebriaj pro rankoro, kaj deliras pro sia ŝanco okupi la spotlumon.

Eŭropo kiel ideo disfalas antaŭ niaj okuloj.

Por tiuj, kiuj ankoraŭ kredas je la heredaĵo de Erasmus, Dante, Goethe kaj Komenio, estos nur hontiga malvenko. Politiko de malestimo kontraŭ intelekto kaj kulturo estos triumfinta. Estos eksplodoj de ksenofobio kaj antisemitismo. Katastrofo estos trafinta nin.

Nia fido estas en la grandioza ideo, kiun ni heredis, kiun ni kredas la sola forto sufiĉe potenca por levi la popolojn de Eŭropo super ili mem kaj super ilia militema pasinteco. Ni kredas, ke ĝi restas la sola forto aktuale sufiĉe virta por kontraŭstari al la novaj signoj de totalismo, kiuj kuntrenas en sia kil-ondo la malnovajn mizerojn de la mallumaj epokoj. Tio, kion ni riskas, malpermesas al ni rezigni. Nia generacio eraris. Kiel la adeptoj de Garibaldi en la 19-a jarcento, kiuj mantre ripetis „Italia se farà da sè” (Italio faros sin mem), ni kredis, ke la kontinento kuniĝos memstare, sen nia bezono batali por ĝi, aŭ labori por ĝi. Jen, ni diris al ni mem, „la direkto de la historio“. Ni devas fari klaran rompon kun tiu malnova konvinko. Ni ne havas alternativon. Ni devas nun batali por la ideo de Eŭropo aŭ vidi ĝin perei sub la ondoj de popolismo.

Raphael Lemkin: Giving the Crime a Name

by Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek

European Diary, 24.6.2021:  In August 1941, the year of the systematic establishment of the Nazi extermination camps, Winston Churchill reacted disturbed in the face of the beginning mass murder of the European Jews with the words: “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” The man who was to give the crime a name and ensure its future punishment by the International Criminal Court was born 121 years ago on this day in a village in Belarus, near Wilna: Raphael Lemkin.

Lemkin was awarded a doctorate in law from the University of Lemberg (today Lviv). His choice of studies was prompted by the self-imposed question of why the Turkish massacre of a million Armenian women, children and men was not considered a crime, but the killing of a single person was very much a crime under universal law.

In January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the German Reich, the Weimar Republic was crushed, and a centralist dictatorship was introduced. Opponents were interned in specially established camps as early as March. By this time, Lemkin was already a respected lawyer in Warsaw, well-versed in international law and well-connected. And he suspected that this was only the prelude to something much worse.

Lemkin drafted a proposal that would define the extermination of national, “racial,” and religious groups internationally as a crime, and sent it to an international conference. But it found little support, even as anti-Semitism became Germany’s national policy. The fascist frenzy that had gripped much of the world left many blind and deaf. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin knew his premonitions would be fulfilled.

He fled Warsaw, made his way to his parents, only to say goodbye to them forever. Together with 38 other family members, they were murdered as Jews by the Nazis. He himself managed to escape to the United States, where a friend got him a job at Duke Law School in North Carolina.

Raphael Lemkin searched feverishly for a term that would do justice to the crime that took place before the eyes of the world. The term mass murder, he argued, was not adequate for the murder of European Jews because it did not incorporate the national, ethnic, or religious motivation of the crime. Nor, he argued, did denationalization capture the crime, since it was aimed at cultural, but not necessarily biological, extermination. His reflections eventually led him to a neologism: genocide. The word is composed of the ancient Greek genos (clan, race, offspring, gender) and the Latin caedere (to kill), the German translation being genocide. However, the conceptualization was only the prerequisite for the actual goal. Lemkin did everything he could to ensure that genocide would be treated and condemned as an internationally justiciable crime.

Lemkin was bitterly disappointed by the Nuremberg trials, in which little happened to codify genocide as an international crime – and nothing to prevent it in the future. But he did not give up, corresponding, lobbying, drafting, and revising the text for a genocide convention. And indeed, after a tireless struggle, he was successful. On December 9, 1948, the United Nations Organization adopted his proposal for a genocide convention. A short time later, Lemkin fell so seriously ill that he had to be hospitalized. Doctors did have trouble finding the cause. He happily diagnosed himself with “genociditis. Exhaustion from working on the Genocide Convention.”

The man who gave a name to the greatest crime of the 20th century and precisely defined the crime of genocide under international law died poor and alone in a one-room apartment in New York in 1959.

 

Hersch Lauterpacht and the Convention on Human Rights

by Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek

The Greek Stoic Zeno (336-270 BCE) postulated that all people are equal simply by virtue of being human. In practice, however, this theoretical insight played no role. For the longest time, its reflection was left to the philosophers. It was not until the American Declaration of Independence that human rights found their way into a political format. These rights, however, stopped at the indigenous population and the enslaved. On the European continent, the French Revolution made human rights a political concept. And the French Constitution of 1791 even included Jews – though by no means women. Of course, these rights did not apply to people outside the European continent.

It would take until December 10, 1948, for the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” to be adopted by the United Nations. And it was not until September 3, 1953 that the European Convention on Human Rights was ratified.

Not all of those in authority saw the necessity of a legal approach to international law, human rights, guilt and responsibility in 1945. Fritz Bauer’s work “Die Kriegsverbrecher vor Gericht” (War Criminals on Trial), published in that very year, in which he demanded “a lesson in applicable international law” for the Germans, fell on deaf ears, at least in the perpetrator societies. And yet, the drafting and passing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sprang from a direct reaction to the atrocities committed in connection with World War II, particularly against civilians and especially against European Jews and other minorities. Hersch Lauterpacht played a not insignificant role in the development of a universal human rights code.

Lauterpacht, a native of what is now Ukrainian Shovkva in 1897, studied with the Constitutional Law scholar and legal philosopher Hans Kelsen in Vienna, then at the prestigious London School of Economics. From 1938 to 1955 he held the Chair of International Law at Cambridge, from 1951 to 1954 he was a member of the United Nations International Law Commission, and from 1955 until his death in 1960 he was a judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

As a young man, Hersch Lauterpacht had experienced the catastrophes of the First World War. They were the trigger for his lifelong preoccupation with international law as well as human rights. The parental family of Hersch Lauterpacht had been murdered in the “Old Austrian” city of Lemberg. This may have motivated his focus on the status of the individual in international law and on the question of the proportionality of nation-state supremacy. It was in this context that Lauterpacht developed the terminology “crimes against humanity” to frame the egregious atrocities committed against civilians, a formulation that gave international law a decisive expansion. At the Nuremberg Trials, it legitimized the prosecution and conviction of Nazi actions against millions of civilian citizens. The definition was “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation or other inhuman acts committed against any civilian population before or during war; persecution on political, racial or religious grounds, committed in the commission of or in connection with a crime over which the Court has jurisdiction, whether or not the act was contrary to the law of the country in which it was committed.” Since then, the protection of the individual against the state can also be claimed in the EU. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is legally responsible for this.

At the supra-European level, the International Court of Justice in The Hague is responsible for questions and proceedings under international law. When Hersch Lauterpacht, who played a key role in drafting the European and International Conventions on Human Rights, was to be appointed as a judge by the British in 1954, voices were raised criticizing this decision with the argument that the renowned international lawyer was not “British” enough for this office, which was clearly indicated by both his origin and his name.

Hersch Lauterbach died on May 8, 1960, fifteen years after the end of WW II  in London.

Olaf vs. Frontex

European Diary, 13.1.2021: The news has hit home. The EU’s anti-fraud agency (Olaf) is investigating the EU border agency Frontex.

For many months, Croatian border guards have been trampling EU law and forcibly driving refugees back to Bosnia at the EU’s external border. They do this with the applause of some governments in Europe. Hungary and Austria are at the forefront of covering up this open violation of the law, or approving it when covering it up no longer works in the face of so much evidence. Finally, Austrian border officials are not squeamish when it comes to covering their ears at the Slovenian border when refugees ask for asylum – and instead forcibly push them back into Slovenia, from where they are deported to the Croats, who then dump them at the Bosnian border. In return, the EU then pays Bosnia money to take care of these illegally deported refugees. In Bosnia, this money ends up in invisible channels – but obviously not in refugee care. For example, hundreds of refugees were allowed to spend the end of the year outside in the freezing cold because the improvised Lipa tent camp still had no electricity, no water and no heating and was therefore closed down by the International Organization for Migration. Since then, not much has happened. Except what is now called “on-site assistance”: a few new, unheated tents, with no water and no electricity. 2000 refugees are now squatting in the forest, mostly under plastic sheets. In sub-zero temperatures. Many of the cases are well documented.
To this day, the European Court of Human Rights does not dare to address this ongoing breach of law by EU member states and aspirants. But at least Frontex, the border protection agency run by the EU itself, is now under investigation. For a long time, countries like Hungary, Poland and Austria placed high hopes in Frontex. Then Orban and Kurz realized that Frontex, too, must abide by laws. And Frontex fell out of favor.
But Frontex Director Fabrice Leggeri apparently wanted to save his reputation in Budapest, Warsaw and Vienna in 2020. So Frontex is now, as has been known for months, in the eastern Mediterranean involved in illegal refoulements off the Greek coast. And there are other things that seem to be going wrong at the agency, from intimidation of employees who have concerns to irregularities in tenders. Whether the ongoing investigations will have any consequences remains to be seen.

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/ermittlungen-gegen-eu-grenzschutzbehoerde-frontex-17142763.html

https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/lipa-lager-bosnien-101.html

https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000121752241/berichte-ueber-illegale-pushbacks-von-migranten-an-oesterreichischer-grenze

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Bosnian New Year

European Diary, 2.1.2021: The European crimes against refugees are richer by one facet. For many months, Croatia in particular has been protecting “our” external borders in an illegal but effective manner. Refugees who manage to get to – and across – the Croatian border via Bosnia, for example, are forcibly pushed back again before they can exercise their right to apply for asylum. While this violates European and international law, even the European Court of Human Rights now looks resignedly (or cynically?) under the table when it comes to European “border protection.” Many of the refugees were initially accommodated in the Bira camp in the town of Bihac, then after “protests from the population”, which are now cheaper to buy in Bosnia than bread rolls, they were shipped in September to a tent camp provisionally set up by the army in “the middle of nowhere”, in Lipa. There, international aid organizations were allowed to take care of the stranded people. The Bosnian authorities promised to connect the improvised camp to electricity and water supplies to make it “winter-proof.” But nothing of the sort happened. Out of sight out of mind.
At the end of December, the frost came. But still no possibility to heat the camp, still no electricity, no water. Nothing at all. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) decided to close the camp, where people would otherwise have frozen to death in the onset of winter. And during the evacuation, some refugees set fire to the ramshackle tents they thought they were finally leaving behind.
Negotiations were made with Bosnian authorities to return the refugees to the Bira camp in Bihac or to barracks in other parts of the country. But local politicians announced that there were “protests from the population.” So 900 people spent the Christmas days in the open. Then, however, the evacuation of the homeless camped refugees was on the agenda. 500 of them were loaded onto buses at the end of the year. And they were stuck there. Because the buses did not run. Local and regional politicians bow to the “protests from the population,” which they themselves have done their best to stir up. And the Republika Srpska is not accepting anyone anyway. After all,”it is the Bosniak Muslims who have brought the migrants into the country”. Whatever is meant by this, this populist slogan always gets through. Any attempt by the central government in Sarajevo to enforce law and order (and in this case that means humane accommodation for the refugees) is thus doomed to failure.

So 500 people spent the last two days of the year in unheated buses. For 24 hours. Then they were let off again. They spent New Year’s Eve in the open air. On New Year’s Day, the Red Cross took care of them. Austria promises “help on the spot”. The Bosnian army puts up tents again. There are plenty of tents. Unheatable, like the ones before. The cynical game continues. The winter too.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Christmas on Lesbos

European Diary, 22.12.2020: In two days it will be Christmas. The “provisional” Kara Tepe camp on Lesvos, where the inmates of the burned-down Moria camp were forcibly relocated, is sinking into the mud. Then the water is pumped out. Then it sinks into the mud again. It gets cold. Instead of self-made wooden huts, which they could still build in Moria, 7500 people, 2500 of them children, now live in tents without heating. The inhabitants try to produce a little warmth with their gas camping stoves. More and more often they are treated with burns. It is dark in the tents. After three months, there is still no hot water. There are no sanitary facilities either. From 5 p.m. on, it is pitch dark in the camp because there are no working streetlights. There are also no schools or childcare facilities. The inmates are allowed to leave the camp once a week, for four hours, to go shopping.
The camp is located on a former military training area by the sea. The mud is full of lead-containing practice ammunition. Many children do not drink in the evening because they are afraid of having to go to the “toilet” at night. A toilet that does not exist. Many have massive sleep disorders, panic attacks and nightmares. A three-year-old girl has been raped in the camp. Some children commit suicide attempts. The foreign aid workers who look after refugees in the camp no longer know what arguments to use to talk the children out of committing suicide. Some of the helpers work for SOS Children’s Villages. The organization has been running a small child protection center on Lesbos near the new camp for years, which is actually supposed to be closed down at the end of the year. For months, they have been demanding to be allowed to set up at least one daycare center for some of the children in Kara Tepe instead.
For some time, the inmates of Kara Tepe went for a bath in the sea until it became too cold for that. Since people can no longer wash, scabies spread through the camp. Colds and pneumonia are also rampant. And more and more children, not least babies, are suffering from rat bites, Doctors Without Borders report. Things don’t look much better in the other camps on the islands. In the Vathy camp on Samos, 3700 people live in a camp set up for 600 people. Here, residents recently had to be vaccinated against tetanus because of the increasing risk of rat bites.

The Austrian government continues to prevent provinces and municipalities in Austria from accepting refugees from the Greek islands. Pressure is also growing in the ÖVP on the chancellor to finally abandon the populist blockade. But Kurz announced years ago that there would be “ugly pictures.” His policy relies on deterrence, child abuse, torture, bodily harm and deprivation of liberty. Why should he back away from this at the height of his success?

Hostages of this policy are also the Greens, who in parliament on Monday again practiced coalition discipline and together with turkish-blue-blue rejected an SPÖ motion for the admission of refugees. And yet there now seems to be a Turkish-blue double strategy. After all, there are only a few days left until Christmas. The feast of refugees and emergency shelters. Of innocent children. The warmth of hearts.

A PR advisor to the chancellor, Wolfgang Rosam, has long had the idea for an ingenious PR stunt against frostbite on the heart. Now they remembered the SOS Children’s Village, which has been begging for months to be allowed to do something for the children on Lesbos. After the unsuccessful appearance of bouncer Nehammer, who let himself be filmed wide-legged in front of a fat Russian airplane after the fire of Moria, the cargo of which in the meantime gathers in some Greek warehouse (“Help on the spot”) – now the chief diplomat of the empire has to move out.

A few days ago, SOS Children’s Villages was surprised by the joyful news from the Foreign Ministry. There are to be a few less ugly pictures for Christmas after all. And a day care for children in Kara Tepe. However, there is no approval from the Greek authorities yet, and also otherwise it is not really clear if and when the “safe place” for children – at least a few hours a day – will exist. But Foreign Minister Schallenberg let himself for it on the weekend already once in the news time in the picture celebration. A nice picture, the image of a self-satisfied man doing good. At least to himself and his chancellor.
Whether the diversionary maneuver will allow the children on Lesbos at least a small escape from misery remains to be seen. The director of SOS Children’s Villages would also prefer to bring them to Austria right away. But the search for shelter in this country is probably once again in vain.
Merry Christmas.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Omri Boehm: Rethinking Israel

European Diary, 3.12.2020: Yesterday the Israeli philosopher and political thinker Omri Boehm was our guest, in a Zoom event organized together with the German-Israeli Society of the Lake Constance Region.
His book “Israel – a Utopia” is causing lively discussions and joins a growing number of critical voices that no longer cling to the failed phantom of a “two-state solution” but explores new visions for a binational state.
Our Zoom-webinar with him was attended by 150 guests from Vienna to New York and Berlin to Zurich. Here is the recording of the talk, that was mainly conducted in English.

 

There is a blatant contradiction between a Jewish state and a liberal democracy, says the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm. For a Jew (and thus a fully-fledged Israeli citizen) is only someone who is ‘of Jewish descent’ – or religiously converted. In his great essay, he sketches the vision of an ethnically neutral state that overcomes its nationalist founding myth and thus finally has a future.
Israel has changed dramatically in the last two decades: While religious Zionism is becoming increasingly popular, both leftists and liberals lack convincing ideas and concepts. The two-state solution is widely considered to have failed. In view of this disaster, Omri Boehm argues for a rethink of Israel’s statehood: Only the equal rights of all citizens can end the conflict between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish state and its occupied territories must become a federal, binational republic. Such a policy is not anti-Zionist; on the contrary, it lays the foundation for a modern and liberal Zionism.
Omri Boehm, born in 1979 in Haifa, studied in Tel Aviv and served in the Israeli secret service Shin Bet. He received his doctorate at Yale with a dissertation on “Kant’s Critique of Spinoza.” Today he teaches as professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is an Israeli and German citizen, has conducted research in Munich and Berlin, and writes about Israeli politics in Haaretz, Die Zeit, and The New York Times.
The book:
Omri Boehm: Israel – eine Utopie,
Propyläen Verlag, Berlin 2020, hardback, 256 pages,
€ 20.60, ISBN 978-3-549-10007-3
The English edition, A Future for Israel: Beyond the Two-State Solution, will appear in April 2021 at New York Review Books.

Lesbos: After the Fire comes the Water

European Diary, 16.10.2020: Did something happen? Austria provided “help on the spot” and dumped 55 tons of stuff somewhere on the Greek mainland. That’s it for the federal government of Austria for the time being.

The Greek government has also dumped a smaller part of the refugees from Lesbos somewhere on the mainland, apparently especially those who, as recognized refugees, had the right to do so anyway, a right that they have been denied without any justification so far.
The rest, according to Caritas about 7800 people (40% of them children), are accommodated in a temporary camp, under conditions that are even worse than before. The new camp by the sea is not connected to the local water supply. So there are only chemical toilets, which will probably soon give up. There are no showers, the inhabitants wash themselves in the sea. And they live in tents that are neither wind, water nor winterproof, some of them without floors. Tents that, as the Austrian newspaper Courier reported today, fell down like houses of cards in the massive rainfalls of the last few days. Meanwhile the camp is drowning in water and thus in mud.

Now the winter begins on Lesbos, and it is quite cold, and wet, and windy there, too. And that is exactly what it is supposed to be, obviously. Klaus Schwertner of the Caritas in Vienna looked at the situation on the spot and has the impression that “deterrence is still being worked on”.
And that will probably claim victims in winter. Until then, one leaves it to organizations like Caritas to prevent the worst. After all, the streets on which the homeless refugees slept in the weeks after the fire are now open to traffic again.

The criminals who are to blame for this will probably not have to stand trial for deprivation of liberty, assault and coercion any time soon. Who will dare to take them to court?

Hannah Arendt: Jewish Cosmopolitanism and Broken Universalism

European Diary, 14.10.2020: She was one of the most dazzling Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. Today 114 years ago she was born in Hannover: Hannah Arendt.

She did not want to be called a philosopher. She saw herself as a political theorist. And in her unsparing analyses of political systems of rule and ideologies, her contributions to the theory of democracy and plurality, she saw herself as a historian.
Her studies took her through the German intellectual province, to Marburg, Freiburg and Heidelberg, to Heidegger (with whom she had a love affair that was later much discussed), Husserl and Jaspers, with whom she had a moving, friendly and contradictory dispute about the relationship between Germans and Jews before and after National Socialism. “For me, Germany is the mother tongue, philosophy and poetry,” she wrote to Jaspers before 1933, while at the same time emphasizing the need to keep a distance. She did not want to have anything to do with a “German being” that Jaspers liked to talk about.

As universalistically as she thought in terms of political issues, she always understood herself to be a Jew and took an offensive approach to the Jewish role as the pariah of society.

In 1933 she was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo. And from then on, “If you are attacked as a Jew, you must defend yourself as a Jew,” as she dryly remarked in a legendary television interview by Günter Gaus in 1964. There was hardly anything that burdened her as much as the fact that her own intellectual environment in Germany not only came to terms with National Socialism, but like Heidegger and many others, was even attracted by the new power. She never doubted that such decisions were the responsibility of the subjects. She had nothing but biting derision for the “tragic” self-image of many Germans who, after 1945, had understood themselves in categories of entanglement and doom, as being “guiltless guilty”.
But also for the attempts of Holocaust victims to lend some positive meaning to the mass crimes, as a cathartic event in history, she had no sympathy. “Auschwitz, that must never have happened,” was her bitter résumé, which was also behind her book on the Eichmann Trial, with which she attracted fierce criticism in the Jewish public.

But before that she had experienced flight, internment, and statelessness. In 1933 she fled to France. In Paris, she belonged to the circle of friends around Walter Benjamin and the lawyer Erich Cohn-Bendit (the later father of Dany Cohn-Bendit). In 1940 she was interned in Gurs, now stateless, as an “enemy foreigner” in France, an experience that she dealt with in her essay Wir Flüchtlinge (We Refugees). After a few weeks she managed to escape from the camp, and in 1941 she was able to emigrate to the USA. In her luggage she carries Walter Benjamin’s last manuscript, his theses on the concept of history, his examination of the myth of progress and the growing heap of rubble that the angel of history must look upon, which the storm drives backwards into the future.
She now argues more and more independently as a Jew for Jewish self-defense, and after 1945 she is committed to the rescue of Jewish cultural assets whose real location, the Jewish communities of Europe, have been destroyed – and which must find a new use, especially in the USA and Israel.

She maintained a critical distance from the Zionist project of territorial Jewish sovereignty at the expense of the resident Arab population – and mixed feelings between sympathy, solidarity and political disillusionment. When, under the leadership of Menachem Begin, Jewish militias massacred the Arab population of Deir Yasin in 1948, she issued a fiery call, together with Albert Einstein and others, for a conciliation with the Palestinians. She saw her own place in the USA, a society she believed capable of reconciling universal civil equality and collective rights to belong to particular identities. Later, in private letters, she also expressed her attachment to Israel as a Jewish retreat, at a time when her disappointment about the persistence of anti-Semitic resentment was growing.

In the ever more intense debates about Jewish “identity” and self-confidence, however, she publicly took up a very individual, Jewish-cosmopolitan position, with which she came between all chairs, as Natan Sznaider showed in his book about Memory space Europe. The visions of European cosmopolitanism emphasized. Natan Sznaider will open the European Summer University for Jewish Studies in Hohenems in June 2021 with a lecture on this topic.

Hans Kelsen: Elegance and Forgetfulness

European Diary, 11.10.2020: No, Hans Kelsen, who was born 139 years ago today in Prague, was not the sole “author” of the Austrian constitution, whose “elegance” has been so often attempted lately. But the lawyer, who came from a Jewish family, did indeed have a decisive influence on its formulation. Kelsen studied in Vienna, and first converted to Catholicism in 1905, then to Protestantism in 1912.
With his main work, the Pure Theory of Law, he was one of the founders of legal positivism, which tried to distance itself from the so-called natural law doctrine. A dispute hardly understandable for those not educated in law theory. After all, Kelsen also presumed a “basic norm” – existing beyond the positive legal positions – which he first called a hypothesis, then a fiction. And which nevertheless made him a declared supporter of inalienable human rights.

Hans Kelsen: Bust at the Viennese Constitutional Court

In 1917 Kelsen became a professor in Vienna. Among his students was Hersch Lauterpacht, who turned away from legal positivism and, as a follower of the doctrine of natural law, was to become one of the most important experts in international law of the 20th century – and who had a decisive influence on the creation of international human rights jurisdiction after World War II and the Holocaust.

In his work on constitutional law after the First World War, Kelsen already advocated a theory of democracy based on the respect and protection of minority rights: “The rule of the majority, which is so characteristic of democracy, differs from any other rule in that it not only conceptually presupposes an opposition – the minority – in its innermost essence, but also recognizes it politically and protects it in the fundamental rights and freedoms, in the principle of proportionality.” His dispute with Carl Schmitt on the question of whether the power of the sovereign or the right and protection of minorities deserves priority in a democratic society is legendary.

After his decisive involvement in the Federal Constitutional Law, whose 100th birthday was celebrated a few days ago on October 1, 1920, Kelsen remained the constitutional judge of the young republic. And soon came into the sights of the conservative governments that followed. The performance of Arthur Schnitzler’s play “Der Reigen” in February 1921 was to be the subject of an anti-Semitically charged campaign in Vienna. Vienna’s Social Democratic mayor Reumann refused to ban the play, as demanded by the Christian Social government. The Constitutional Court also ruled against a ban under Kelsen, provoking angry threats against Kelsen.

Finally, in 1929, another conflict broke out, ending Kelsen’s career in Austria. The Constitutional Court had made divorce, which had been forbidden in Catholic Austria until then, possible by recognizing the state “dispensatory marriage” introduced by the Social Democratic governor of Lower Austria as legal. The Christian-social federal government thereupon dismissed the entire constitutional empire by law and appointed new judges.

Kelsen accepted Konrad Adenauer’s offer to move to Cologne as a professor. But already in 1933 the National Socialist assumption of power in Germany put an end to his activities in Cologne. As the only one of his Cologne colleagues, Carl Schmitt did not take part in a petition in his favor.

Kelsen went to Geneva, and in 1936 to Prague, where his appointment triggered the furore among right wing anti-Semitic students. In 1940 he emigrated to the USA and settled in California. In 1945 he was honored by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, but an invitation to return to Austria never came. The elegance of “his” constitution is gladly remembered. But not so much of the laborious struggle for minority rights. Kelsen died on April 19, 1976 in Orinda, California.

René Samuel Cassin and human rights

European Diary, 5.10.2020: 133 years ago today René Samuel Cassin was born in Bayonne, one of the most committed advocates of human rights in the 20th century. In 1968 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his achievements.

René Samuel Cassin

Cassin’s father Azarie Henri Cassin came from a Sephardic, Portuguese-Marran family and worked as a wine merchant in Nice. His mother Gabrielle Dreyfus came from an Alsatian-Jewish family. Cassin was drafted to serve in World War I as a doctor of law and returned seriously wounded in October 1914. Still during the war, he founded the Union fédérale, the French association of war victims, together with other war participants, which he was to preside over from 1922. In 1921 and 1924 he organized conferences of war-disabled and veterans who advocated understanding and peace agreements between the enemy nations. He did so as a French patriot who was convinced of a French universal mission:

“For centuries we have embodied an ideal of freedom, independence and humanity”, and therefore for him the members of the Union fédérale were the “representatives of French morality in the world”.

As professor from 1920 in Lille, then from 1929 at the Sorbonne in Paris, he taught international law. Above all, however, Cassin was active in countless non-governmental organizations and political offices.  From 1924 to 1938 he represented France at the League of Nations. In 1940 he emigrated to London and, together with Charles de Gaulle, founded France Libre, the French exile army in the British armed forces. From 1941 to 1943 he became National Commissioner of the Free French Government in London and in 1944 he was one of the initiators of the French Committee for National Liberation in Algiers and as president of its legal commission prepared French legislation after 1945. In 1944 he became vice-president of the French Council of State (until 1960) and in 1946 also president of the French elite academy École nationale d’Administration.

From 1946 to 1958 he represented France at the United Nations and was one of the founders of UNESCO. In particular, he was one of the closest circle of authors of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, together with Karim Azkoul, the Lebanese diplomat and philosopher.

Finally, from 1959 to 1968 he was vice president, then president of the European Court of Human Rights.

A trip to Palestine in the 1930s, perhaps also his Sephardic family heritage, had motivated him to work for the advancement of the Arab-Jewish population of Palestine. After 1945, in addition to his many other offices, he became president of the Alliance Israelite Universelle (which in the 19th century represented the ideals of the French Revolution and was intended to spread European education among Oriental Jews, not without a certain amount of European-colonial arrogance).

“Hitler’s main goal was the extermination of the Jews,” wrote Cassin, “but their annihilation was also part of an attack on everything the French Revolution stood for: freedom, equality, brotherhood and human rights. Hitler’s racism was essentially an attempt to erase the principles of the French Revolution.”
Cassin supported the Jewish national Zionist project after the annihilation of European Jewry. After 1945, however, Cassin demanded clear limitations on national sovereignty in all matters of human rights, which must take precedence over any national legislation and must also be enforced by means of coercive measures. His advocacy of social rights also aroused distrust of him in the United States. An official of the State Department did not hesitate to call him a “crypto-communist”. But apart from his commitment to human rights and the ideals of equality, Cassin remained a classically conservative liberal in many sociopolitical issues. For example, he had a rather hesitant attitude toward legal equality for women, and in the French parliament in exile in Algiers he even voted against the immediate introduction of active and passive suffrage for women.

Cassin died on 20 February 1976 in Paris.

The Opening

European diary, 4.10.2020:
Our exhibition The Last Europeans. Jewish perspectives on the crises of an idea | The Brunner Family. An estate has begun. Under corona conditions, an unusual opening in front of a small audience – with due distance and limited space, as the situation demands. Everything is just a little different at the moment.
For this, many guests took part in the livestream and now the opening speeches of Mayor Dieter Egger, State Governor Barbara Schöbi-Fink, Aleida Assmann, Ariel Brunner, Hannes Sulzenbacher and Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek – as well as the film by Ronny Kokert about Moria in February 2020 – can be seen on our youtube channel. It’s worth taking a look and listening, there are many surprises to be discovered. We are looking forward to stimulating discussions in our house.
The speeches are mostly in German. Ariel Brunner’s remarkable talk though is in English. It begins at 39’40.

 

Here are some impressions of the first day, captured by Dietmar Walser.

Photo: Dietmar Walser

Photo: Dietmar Walser

“like a ship bringing the plague to Europe”?

European Diary, 3.10.2020: In Catania, the trial against the Italian ex-Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini for deprivation of liberty begins today with the hearing of the radical right-wing leader, who is now in opposition. In July 2019, Salvini had refused a ship of the Italian coast guard entry into the port of Augusta in Sicily. The ship carried 131 boat refugees rescued from maritime distress. The competent court in Catania considered this a crime of deprivation of liberty, punishable by a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. In February, a majority of the Roman Senate voted to lift Salvini’s immunity – when the coalition between Salvini’s right-wing Lega Nord and the Five-Star Movement was already history. Salvini, who crashed in the polls in the wake of the Corona crisis, is in any case using the process for his permanent election campaign. For days he has been mobilizing in Sicily with flaming speeches and Verdi arias from the tape. “Vincerò” – “I will win”. He had only defended the borders and the honor of Italy by taking 130 people hostage in his right-wing extremist politics. A conviction of Salvini is nevertheless considered unlikely – and so the trial will probably also help him to work on his comeback.

European Diary, 3.10.2019: The captain of the sea rescue vessel Sea-Watch 3, Carola Rackete, today gave a speech to the European Parliament in Brussels, at a hearing of the Committee on Home Affairs – and received a standing ovation from part of the MEPs. The Austrian Broadcast ORF reported in detail about this unusual event on the same day:

“‘I was received like a ship bringing the plague to Europe,’ Rackete said on Thursday in the Parliament’s Committee on Internal Affairs. ‘It was hard to be an EU citizen these days. I was ashamed.’

Rackete’s hearing took place on the sixth anniversary of the Lampedusa refugee tragedy in which 366 people died. While the deputies commemorated the tragedy with a minute’s silence, Rackete stressed that not much has changed since then.

The German activist vividly described her experiences as a rescuer at sea, for example when her ship hit a wreck around which bodies were floating. Some had held each other in their arms as they died, ‘the bodies inseparably connected’. She also saw three children ‘holding the body of a baby in their arms. Then some sang for this baby and rocked it as if it was still alive.

None of these experiences were as bad as the ‘frustration’ of spending 70 days with rescued people on the Sea-Watch 3 in the Mediterranean ‘and explaining to people that Europe didn’t want them, Europe, the symbol of human rights’. In this context, Rackete once again defended her decision to go to the port of Lampedusa. This was not a provocation’, said Rackete. ‘I should have done it much earlier’, said Rackete, referring to the protection of human life. ‘Yes, I would do it again any time. People die every day, of course I would do it again,’ she later replied to a corresponding question.

When she landed in Lampedusa against the will of the Italian government, she received ‘a lot of unwanted attention’, Rackete told the MPs. But where were you when we called for help through all possible channels, where were you when we asked for a safe place? If we are really concerned about torture in Libya, Europe must stop cooperating with the Libyan coast guard,’ Rackete demanded, to the applause of the MEPs.

Six years have passed and instead of avoiding similar tragedies, the EU has externalised its responsibilities and delegated them to Libya in violation of international law. But there is ‘hope’, namely the actions of civil society organizations.

Rackete called for a radical change in the way migration is handled. A reform of Dublin is ‘long overdue’, she said, and humanitarian corridors and safe and legal routes to Europe are needed. A landing of rescued persons must be in accordance with the law and must not be left to ad hoc negotiations.

‘After my arrest, there was great interest in sea rescue. I hope that this will be reflected in the deeds. I hope for real progress and not that it will become even more difficult for me and many organizations,’ said Rackete. ‘We must be careful about what is negotiated in the coming weeks and make sure that our demands are enforced,’ she urged MEPs.

At the hearing, representatives of Frontex, the EU Commission, the EU Fundamental Rights Agency and Italian coast guard captain Andrea Tassara made it clear that the rescue of refugees in the Mediterranean should not be criminalized. However, differences emerged during the debate. Conservative members of parliament insisted on putting a stop to the smugglers. Frontex director Fabrice Leggeri repeatedly avoided the question of whether he considers Libya a safe third country.

The Director for Migration of the EU Commission, Michael Shotter, pointed out that since June more than 1,000 people have already been able to land and have been distributed to other member states and Norway in ad hoc actions. ‘We now need a reliable and continuous search and rescue operation instead of ad hoc actions,’ said Shotter. It is therefore ‘important’ that after the Malta agreement, other member states participate and show ‘solidarity’.

The chairman of the interior committee, Spanish Socialist Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar, also insisted on clear rules that prevent the criminalization of sea rescue. The committee will draft a resolution on this issue, which will be adopted at the next plenary session of the European Parliament.

MEPs from right-wing populist parties, such as the Slovakian Milan Uhrik, who himself suggested that Rackete himself should leave for Africa, countered this. I can only identify with Salvini, who says you should be in prison,’ said the member of parliament for the ‘People’s Party – Our Slovakia’. The German right-wing populist Nicolas Fest followed up by asking Rackete if she considers it part of her mission to ‘endanger the lives of Europeans by infiltrating torturers and terrorists’. In the debate, ÖVP delegation leader Karoline Edtstadler voiced little veiled criticism of the activities of the sea rescue workers. I simply wonder how we are going to end this business if the rescue is still the ticket to Europe,” said the former state secretary on the question of the ‘pull factor’ of rescue operations. The EU should not allow itself to be ‘divided into good and bad states’, Edtstadler demanded the establishment of a system ‘that does not play into the hands of the wrong people’.

SPÖ MEP Bettina Vollath demanded an end to the criminalization of sea rescue workers. It can never and under no circumstances be criminal to help people in need, but it is a moral and legal obligation,” she emphasized in a statement referring to current figures of the United Nations, according to which this year already more than 1,000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea and since the beginning of 2014 more than 15,000 people. ‘Legal entry routes, fast and legally secure procedures and local help are needed to combat the causes of flight’, she stressed.

Monika Vana, head of the Austrian delegation of the Greens, wants to launch an EU sea rescue programme. ‘The Mediterranean is a mass grave for those in need of protection, that is a disgrace for the entire EU’, Vana told ORF.at. She is in favor of legal and safe entry into the EU. The trade of smugglers must be stopped and safe escape routes must be created. The EU-Council has to agree to the Frontex-Fund ‘Search and Rescue’, which was proposed the day before yesterday by the budget committee of the European Parliament, demanded Vana.

According to MEP Erik Marquardt of the German Greens, ‘humanitarian aid became part of a political game’: ‘The EU should send ships to the Mediterranean to save people. This is not only a responsibility of the Commission, but of each member state. It is not only the people who are drowning in the Mediterranean, but also our European values’, said Marquardt.” (Source: https://orf.at/stories/3139594/)

A little more is a little less less…

European Diary, 18.9.2020: It works after all. Or at least a little bit. To quote Claude Juncker: “A little more would be a little less less”.

Germany now apparently wants to take in an additional 1553 refugees from the burnt down Moria camp. For a long time, there was no movement between Minister of the Interior Seehofer and the 150 German cities and municipalities (including Berlin) that demanded to be allowed to take in refugees. Again and again there was talk that Germany should not go it alone. After the catastrophe on Lesbos, Chancellor Merkel, Minister of the Interior Seehofer and representatives of the SPD have now agreed on a different approach. The more than 1500 refugees from Moria are said to comprise a total of 408 families, among them already recognized refugees who were stuck on Lesbos despite their asylum status due to Greek asylum policy and the still upheld “Dublin rules”.

In reality, of course, the problem is much greater, because the conditions in the Greek “reception camps” on the islands were and are not only catastrophic on Lesbos, but as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on September 16, also on Chios, Leros, Kos and last but not least on Samos. In the local camp Vathy there are also almost 7000 people housed. About ten times its capacity. The fact that the possible repatriation of migrants whose asylum applications had been rejected – as agreed in the so-called EU-Turkey deal – did not come into effect was, as the FAZ dryly notes, not primarily due to Turkey. Instead Greece did not even build up the resources on the islands to be able to properly examine the asylum applications.

Thus a fatal development took its course, which primarily increased the suffering of the refugees. The FAZ reports alarming conditions. A woman, who has been there for six months with her husband and her small child, tells of her rescue from the sea by the Greek coast guard – “but above all of the torture afterwards: of a housing container with beds without mattresses, of queuing for several hours every day for meals in heat, rain or cold. Of an impassive police force that does not intervene when the weaker ones are beaten or robbed. By a single doctor for several thousand people – and above all by the uncertainty of how long all this will remain their own living environment”. In the camp, frustration grows, competition between different groups whose origins are not always compatible – after all, they come from war zones – and of course desperation breaks out violently, in demonstrations and protests against the guards, and mostly against each other. How could it be otherwise? The inhabitants of the nearby Greek towns also demonstrate, and they too no longer always remain peaceful.

The mayors of the islands demand in vain government solidarity on the mainland, Greece demands, mostly in vain, solidarity with Europe, and even a hardliner like Horst Seehofer meanwhile bursts his collar when he thinks of Austria, and explains in the Spiegel interview: “I am disappointed by the attitude of our Austrian neighbors not to participate in the reception of a manageable number of people in need of protection from Greece. (…) If we do nothing, we will strengthen the political fringes”. Well, the political fringes have long since reached the Vienna Chancellery.

“An Aura of Ghosts”

European Diary, 11.9.2020: Thousands of refugees from the Moria camp on Lesbos are now living on the streets in the dirt. Germany and France, and several other European countries want to take in 400 children and young people. Austria is willing to send some blankets and tents. The day before yesterday, Minister of Foreign Affairs Schallenberg added his very own tone to the Austrian concert of shame.

Jovial as always, in chosen words, he confirms to interviewer Armin Wolff on Austrian TV that the misery on the Greek islands has its purpose: deterrence. And he says that this is something that we do not want to change in the future either. “It is precisely this calm and objectivity” that gives his appearance, as Irene Brickner writes in the Standard, an “aura of the ghostly and unspeakable”. He talks like a good-humored, nice, friendly gentleman who is completely at peace with himself. But he talks about hostage-taking, child abuse, coercion, and bodily injury resulting in death. Just about those things with which he and his colleagues are currently inscribing themselves in the history of violence in Europe. Armin Wolff had no chance to break open this “armour of official mentality and refugee deterrence”, said Brickner. Meanwhile, other European politicians are slowly bursting their collars. Germany’s conservative Minister of the Interior Seehofer “is surprised”. Jan Asselborn, Luxembourg’s foreign minister, is speaking plainly: “The whole of Europe has been taken in by Kurz’ talk that all that is needed is to close the borders so that the refugee problem can be solved.” Even the Kronen-Zeitung thinks that this is now going too far. And it quotes the Austrian chancellor with downright disgust: “Why are the children on the Greek islands closer to us than those in Venezuela?” A telling question…