#frontière

Europe spends billions stopping migration. Good luck figuring out where the money actually goes

How much money exactly does Europe spend trying to curb migration from Nigeria? And what’s it used for? We tried to find out, but Europe certainly doesn’t make it easy. These flashy graphics show you just how complicated the funding is.
In a shiny new factory in the Benin forest, a woman named Blessing slices pineapples into rings. Hundreds of miles away, at a remote border post in the Sahara, Abubakar scans travellers’ fingerprints. And in village squares across Nigeria, Usman performs his theatre show about the dangers of travelling to Europe.

What do all these people have in common?

All their lives are touched by the billions of euros European governments spend in an effort to curb migration from Africa.

Since the summer of 2015,
Read more about the influx of refugees to Europe in 2015 on the UNHCR website.
when countless boats full of migrants began arriving on the shores of Greece and Italy, Europe has increased migration spending by billions.
Read my guide to EU migration policy here.
And much of this money is being spent in Africa.

Within Europe, the political left and right have very different ways of framing the potential benefits of that funding. Those on the left say migration spending not only provides Africans with better opportunities in their home countries but also reduces migrant deaths in the Mediterranean. Those on the right say migration spending discourages Africans from making the perilous journey to Europe.

However they spin it, the end result is the same: both left and right have embraced funding designed to reduce migration from Africa. In fact, the European Union (EU) plans to double migration spending under the new 2021-2027 budget, while quadrupling spending on border control.

https://i.imgur.com/ZAXFmxr.png https://i.imgur.com/Cz2dO81.png

The three of us – journalists from Nigeria, Italy and the Netherlands – began asking ourselves: just how much money are we talking here?

At first glance, it seems like a perfectly straightforward question. Just add up the migration budgets of the EU and the individual member states and you’ve got your answer, right? But after months of research, it turns out that things are nowhere near that simple.

In fact, we discovered that European migration spending resembles nothing so much as a gigantic plate of spaghetti.

If you try to tease out a single strand, at least three more will cling to it. Try to find where one strand begins, and you’ll find yourself tangled up in dozens of others.

This is deeply concerning. Though Europe maintains a pretence of transparency, in practice it’s virtually impossible to hold the EU and its member states accountable for their migration expenditures, let alone assess how effective they are. If a team of journalists who have devoted months to the issue can’t manage it, then how could EU parliament members juggling multiple portfolios ever hope to?

This lack of oversight is particularly problematic in the case of migration, an issue that ranks high on European political agendas. The subject of migration fuels a great deal of political grandstanding, populist opportunism, and social unrest. And the debate surrounding the issue is rife with misinformation.

For an issue of this magnitude, it’s crucial to have a clear view of existing policies and to examine whether these policies make sense. But to be able to do that, we need to understand the funding streams: how much money is being spent and what is it being spent on?

While working on this article, we spoke to researchers and officials who characterised EU migration spending as “opaque”, “unclear” and “chaotic”. We combed through countless websites, official documents, annual reports and budgets, and we submitted freedom of information requests
in a number of European countries, in Nigeria, and to the European commission. And we discovered that the subject of migration, while not exactly cloak-and-dagger stuff, is apparently sensitive enough that most people preferred to speak off the record.

Above all, we were troubled by the fact that no one seems to have a clear overview of European migration budgets – and by how painfully characteristic this is of European migration policy as a whole.
Nigeria – ‘a tough cookie’

It wasn’t long before we realised that mapping out all European cash flows to all African countries would take us years. Instead, we decided to focus on Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and the continent’s strongest economy, as well as the country of origin of the largest group of African asylum seekers in the EU. “A tough cookie” in the words of one senior EU official, but also “our most important migration partner in the coming years”.

But Nigeria wasn’t exactly eager to embrace the role of “most important migration partner”. After all, migration has been a lifeline for Nigeria’s economy: last year, Nigerian migrants living abroad sent home $25bn – roughly 6% of the country’s GNP.

It took a major European charm offensive to get Nigeria on board – a “long saga” with “more than one tense meeting”, according to a high-ranking EU diplomat we spoke to.

The European parliament invited Muhammadu Buhari, the Nigerian president, to Strasbourg in 2016. Over the next several years, one European dignitary after another visited Nigeria: from Angela Merkel,
the German chancellor, to Matteo Renzi,
the Italian prime minister, to Emmanuel Macron,
the French president, to Mark Rutte,

the Dutch prime minister.

Three guesses as to what they all wanted to talk about.
‘No data available’

But let’s get back to those funding streams.

The EU would have you believe that everything fits neatly into a flowchart. When asked to respond to this article, the European commission told us: “We take transparency very seriously.” One spokesperson after another, all from various EU agencies, informed us that the information was “freely available online”.

But as Wilma Haan, director of the Open State Foundation, notes: “Just throwing a bunch of stuff online doesn’t make you transparent. People have to be able to find the information and verify it.”

Yet that’s exactly what the EU did. The EU foundations and agencies we contacted referred us to dozens of different websites. In some cases, the information was relatively easy to find,
but in others the data was fragmented or missing entirely. All too often, our searches turned up results such as “data soon available”
or “no data available”.

The website of the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) – worth around €3.1bn – is typical of the problems we faced. While we were able to find a list of projects funded by AMIF online,

the list only contains the names of the projects – not the countries in which they’re carried out. As a result, there’s only one way to find out what’s going on where: by Googling each of the project names individually.

This lack of a clear overview has major consequences for the democratic process, says Tineke Strik, member of the European parliament (Green party). Under the guise of “flexibility”, the European parliament has “no oversight over the funds whatsoever”. Strik says: “In the best-case scenario, we’ll discover them listed on the European commission’s website.”

At the EU’s Nigerian headquarters, one official explained that she does try to keep track of European countries’ migration-related projects to identify “gaps and overlaps”. When asked why this information wasn’t published online, she responded: “It’s something I do alongside my daily work.”
Getting a feel for Europe’s migration spaghetti

“There’s no way you’re going to get anywhere with this.”

This was the response from a Correspondent member who researches government funding when we announced this project several months ago. Not exactly the most encouraging words to start our journey. Still, over the past few months, we’ve done our best to make as much progress as we could.

Let’s start in the Netherlands, Maite’s home country. When we tried to find out how much Dutch tax money is spent in Nigeria on migration-related issues, we soon found ourselves down yet another rabbit hole.

The Dutch ministry of foreign affairs, which controls all funding for Dutch foreign policy, seemed like a good starting point. The ministry divides its budget into centralised and decentralised funds. The centralised funds are managed in the Netherlands administrative capital, The Hague, while the decentralised funds are distributed by Dutch embassies abroad.

Exactly how much money goes to the Dutch embassy in the Nigerian capital Abuja is unclear – no information is available online. When we contacted the embassy, they weren’t able to provide us with any figures, either. According to their press officer, these budgets are “fragmented”, and the total can only be determined at the end of the year.

The ministry of foreign affairs distributes centralised funds through its departments. But migration is a topic that spans a number of different departments: the department for stabilisation and humanitarian aid (DSH), the security policy department (DVB), the sub-Saharan Africa department (DAF), and the migration policy bureau (BMB), to name just a few. There’s no way of knowing whether each department spends money on migration, let alone how much of it goes to Nigeria.

Not to mention the fact that other ministries, such as the ministry of economic affairs and the ministry of justice and security, also deal with migration-related issues.

Next, we decided to check out the Dutch development aid budget
in the hope it would clear things up a bit. Unfortunately, the budget isn’t organised by country, but by theme. And since migration isn’t one of the main themes, it’s scattered over several different sections. Luckily, the document does contain an annex (▻https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/begrotingen/2019/09/17/hgis---nota-homogene-groep-internationale-samenwerking-rijksbegroting-) that goes into more detail about migration.

In this annex, we found that the Netherlands spends a substantial chunk of money on “migration cooperation”, “reception in the region” and humanitarian aid for refugees.

And then there’s the ministry of foreign affairs’ Stability Fund,
the ministry of justice and security’s budget for the processing and repatriation of asylum seekers, and the ministry of education, culture and science’s budget for providing asylum seekers with an education.

But again, it’s impossible to determine just how much of this funding finds its way to Nigeria. This is partly due to the fact that many migration projects operate in multiple countries simultaneously (in Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon, for example). Regional projects such as this generally don’t share details of how funding is divided up among the participating countries.

Using data from the Dutch embassy and an NGO that monitors Dutch projects in Nigeria, we found that €6m in aid goes specifically to Nigeria, with another €19m for the region as a whole. Dutch law enforcement also provides in-kind support to help strengthen Nigeria’s border control.

But hold on, there’s more. We need to factor in the money that the Netherlands spends on migration through its contributions to the EU.

The Netherlands pays hundreds of millions into the European Development Fund (EDF), which is partly used to finance migration projects. Part of that money also gets transferred to another EU migration fund: the EUTF for Africa.
The Netherlands also contributes directly to this fund.

But that’s not all. The Netherlands also gives (either directly or through the EU) to a variety of other EU funds and agencies that finance migration projects in Nigeria. And just as in the Netherlands, these EU funds and agencies are scattered over many different offices. There’s no single “EU ministry of migration”.

To give you a taste of just how convoluted things can get: the AMIF falls under the EU’s home affairs “ministry”

(DG HOME), the Development Cooperation Instrument (DCI) falls under the “ministry” for international cooperation and development (DG DEVCO), and the Instrument contributing to Stability and Peace (IcSP) falls under the European External Action Service (EEAS). The EU border agency, Frontex, is its own separate entity, and there’s also a “ministry” for humanitarian aid (DG ECHO).

Still with me?

Because this was just the Netherlands.

Now let’s take a look at Giacomo’s country of origin, Italy, which is also home to one of Europe’s largest Nigerian communities (surpassed only by the UK).

Italy’s ministry of foreign affairs funds the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS), which provides humanitarian aid in north-eastern Nigeria, where tens of thousands of people have been displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency. AICS also finances a wide range of projects aimed at raising awareness of the risks of illegal migration. It’s impossible to say how much of this money ends up in Nigeria, though, since the awareness campaigns target multiple countries at once.

This data is all available online – though you’ll have to do some digging to find it. But when it comes to the funds managed by Italy’s ministry of the interior, things start to get a bit murkier. Despite the ministry having signed numerous agreements on migration with African countries in recent years, there’s little trace of the money online. Reference to a €92,000 donation for new computers for Nigeria’s law enforcement and immigration services was all we could find.

Things get even more complicated when we look at Italy’s “Africa Fund”, which was launched in 2017 to foster cooperation with “priority countries along major migration routes”. The fund is jointly managed by the ministry of foreign affairs and the ministry of the interior.

Part of the money goes to the EUTF for Africa, but the fund also contributes to United Nations (UN) organisations, such as the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), as well as to the Italian ministry of defence and the ministry of economy and finance.

Like most European governments, Italy also contributes to EU funds and agencies concerned with migration, such as Frontex, Europol, and the European Asylum Support Office (EASO).

And then there are the contributions to UN agencies that deal with migration: UNHCR, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), IOM, the UN Development Programme (UNDP), and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), to name just a few.

Now multiply all of this by the number of European countries currently active in Nigeria. Oh, and let’s not forget the World Bank,

which has only recently waded into the waters of the migration industry.

And then there are the European development banks. And the EU’s External Investment Plan, which was launched in 2016 with the ambitious goal of generating €44bn in private investments in developing countries, with a particular focus on migrants’ countries of origin. Not to mention the regional “migration dialogues”
organised in west Africa under the Rabat Process and the Cotonou Agreement.

https://i.imgur.com/uu99r6b.png

This is the European migration spaghetti.
How we managed to compile a list nonetheless

By now, one thing should be clear: there are a staggering number of ministries, funds and departments involved in European migration spending. It’s no wonder that no one in Europe seems to have a clear overview of the situation. But we thought that maybe, just maybe, there was one party that might have the overview we seek: Nigeria. After all, the Nigerian government has to be involved in all the projects that take place there, right?

We decided to ask around in Nigeria’s corridors of power. Was anyone keeping track of European migration funding? The Ministry of Finance? Or maybe the Ministry of the Interior, or the Ministry of Labour and Employment?

Nope.

We then tried asking Nigeria’s anti-trafficking agency (NAPTIP), the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS), the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission, and the National Commission for Refugees, Migrants and Internally Displaced Persons (NCFRMI).

No luck there, either. When it comes to migration, things are just as fragmented under the Nigerian government as they are in Europe.

In the meantime, we contacted each of the European embassies in Nigeria.
This proved to be the most fruitful approach and yielded the most complete lists of projects. The database of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)
was particularly useful in fleshing out our overview.

So does that mean our list is now complete? Probably not.

More to the point: the whole undertaking is highly subjective, since there’s no official definition of what qualifies as a migration project and what doesn’t.

For example, consider initiatives to create jobs for young people in Nigeria. Would those be development projects or trade projects? Or are they actually migration projects (the idea being that young people wouldn’t migrate if they could find work)?

What about efforts to improve border control in northern Nigeria? Would they fall under counterterrorism? Security? Institutional development? Or is this actually a migration-related issue?

Each country has its own way of categorising projects.

There’s no single, unified standard within the EU.

When choosing what to include in our own overview, we limited ourselves to projects that European countries themselves designated as being migration related.

While it’s certainly not perfect, this overview allows us to draw at least some meaningful conclusions about three key issues: where the money is going, where it isn’t going, and what this means for Nigeria.
1) Where is the money going?

In Nigeria, we found

If you’d like to work with the data yourself, feel free to download the full overview here.
50 migration projects being funded by 11 different European countries, as well as 32 migration projects that rely on EU funding. Together, they amount to more than €770m in funding.

Most of the money from Brussels is spent on improving Nigerian border control:
more than €378m. For example, the European Investment Bank has launched a €250m initiative

to provide all Nigerians with biometric identity cards.

The funding provided by individual countries largely goes to projects aimed at creating employment opportunities

in Nigeria: at least €92m.

Significantly, only €300,000 is spent on creating more legal opportunities to migrate – less than 0.09% of all funding.

https://i.imgur.com/F7ng9WA.png

We also found 47 “regional” projects that are not limited to Nigeria, but also include other countries.
Together, they amount to more than €775m in funding.
Regional migration spending is mainly focused on migrants who have become stranded in transit and is used to return them home and help them to reintegrate when they get there. Campaigns designed to raise awareness of the dangers of travelling to Europe also receive a relatively large proportion of funding in the region.

https://i.imgur.com/kM4CltW.png

2) Where isn’t the money going?

When we look at the list of institutions – or “implementing agencies”, as they’re known in policy speak – that receive money from Europe, one thing immediately stands out: virtually none of them are Nigerian organisations.

“The EU funds projects in Nigeria, but that money doesn’t go directly to Nigerian organisations,” says Charles Nwanelo, head of migration at the NCFRMI.

See their website here.
“Instead, it goes to international organisations, such as the IOM, which use the money to carry out projects here. This means we actually have no idea how much money the EU is spending in Nigeria.”

We hear the same story again and again from Nigerian government officials: they never see a cent of European funding, as it’s controlled by EU and UN organisations. This is partially a response to corruption within Nigerian institutions – Europe feels it can keep closer tabs on its money by channelling it through international organisations. As a result, these organisations are growing rapidly in Nigeria. To get an idea of just how rapidly: the number of people working for the IOM in Nigeria has more than quadrupled over the past two years.

https://i.imgur.com/aIeGcoM.png

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Nigerian organisations are going unfunded. Implementing agencies are free to pass funding along to Nigerian groups. For example, the IOM hires Nigerian NGOs to provide training for returning migrants and sponsors a project that provides training and new software to the Nigerian immigration service.

Nevertheless, the system has inevitably led to the emergence of a parallel aid universe in which the Nigerian government plays only a supporting role. “The Nigerian parliament should demand to see an overview of all current and upcoming projects being carried out in their country every three months,” says Bob van Dillen, migration expert at development organisation Cordaid.

But that would be “difficult”, according to one German official we spoke to, because “this isn’t a priority for the Nigerian government. This is at the top of Europe’s agenda, not Nigeria’s.”

Most Nigerian migrants to Europe come from Edo state, where the governor has been doing his absolute best to compile an overview of all migration projects. He set up a task force that aims to coordinate migration activities in his state. The task force has been largely unsuccessful because the EU doesn’t provide it with any direct funding and doesn’t require member states to cooperate with it.

3) What are the real-world consequences for Nigeria?

We’ve established that the Nigerian government isn’t involved in allocating migration spending and that local officials are struggling to keep tabs on things. So who is coordinating all those billions in funding?

Each month, the European donors and implementing agencies mentioned above meet at the EU delegation to discuss their migration projects. However, diplomats from multiple European countries have told us that no real coordination takes place at these meetings. No one checks to see whether projects conflict or overlap. Instead, the meetings are “more on the basis of letting each other know”, as one diplomat put it.

One German official noted: “What we should do is look together at what works, what doesn’t, and which lessons we can learn from each other. Not to mention how to prevent people from shopping around from project to project.”

Other diplomats consider this too utopian and feel that there are far too many players to make that level of coordination feasible. In practice, then, it seems that chaotic funding streams inevitably lead to one thing: more chaos.
And we’ve only looked at one country ...

That giant plate of spaghetti we just sifted through only represents a single serving – other countries have their own versions of Nigeria’s migration spaghetti. Alongside Nigeria, the EU has also designated Mali, Senegal, Ethiopia and Niger as “priority countries”. The EU’s largest migration fund, the EUTF, finances projects in 26 different African countries. And the sums of money involved are only going to increase.

When we first started this project, our aim was to chart a path through the new European zeal for funding. We wanted to track the flow of migration money to find answers to some crucial questions: will this funding help Nigerians make better lives for themselves in their own country? Will it help reduce the trafficking of women? Will it provide more safe, legal ways for Nigerians to travel to Europe?

Or will it primarily go towards maintaining the international aid industry? Does it encourage corruption? Does it make migrants even more vulnerable to exploitation along the way?

But we’re still far from answering these questions. Recently, a new study by the UNDP

called into question “the notion that migration can be prevented or significantly reduced through programmatic and policy responses”.

Nevertheless, European programming and policy responses will only increase in scope in the coming years.

But the more Europe spends on migration, the more tangled the spaghetti becomes and the harder it gets to check whether funds are being spent wisely. With the erosion of transparency comes the erosion of democratic oversight.

So to anyone who can figure out how to untangle the spaghetti, we say: be our guest.

▻https://thecorrespondent.com/154/europe-spends-billions-stopping-migration-good-luck-figuring-out-where-the-money-actually-goes/171168048128-fac42704
#externalisation #asile #migrations #réfugiés #Nigeria #EU #EU #Union_européenne #externalisation #frontières #contrôles_frontaliers #Frontex #Trust_fund #Pays-Bas #argent #transparence (manque de - ) #budget #remittances #AMIF #développement #aide_au_développement #European_Development_Fund (#EDF) #EUTF_for_Africa #European_Neighbourhood_Instrument (#ENI) #Development_Cooperation_Instrument (#DCI) #Italie #Banque_mondiale #External_Investment_Plan #processus_de_rabat #accords_de_Cotonou #biométrie #carte_d'identité_biométrique #travail #développement #aide_au_développement #coopération_au_développement #emploi #réintégration #campagnes #IOM #OIM

Ajouté à la métaliste sur l’externalisation des frontières :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/731749
Et ajouté à la métaliste développement/migrations :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/733358

ping @isskein @isskein @pascaline @_kg_

Back to the border of misery: Amexica revisited 10 years on | World news | The Guardian

▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/08/amexica-revisited-ed-vulliamy-returns-to-us-mexico-borderline

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/qk6a5thgxksha7l/5072.jpg?dl=0

Back to the border of misery: Amexica revisited 10 years on
A decade after publishing his vivid account of the places and people most affected by the US-Mexican ‘war on drugs’, Ed Vulliamy returns to the frontline to see how life has changed

#frontières #murs #mexique #états-unis

BBC - Travel - A US town only reached through Canada
▻http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20191201-a-us-town-only-reached-through-canada

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/live/624_351/images/live/p0/7v/ts/p07vtsc3.jpg

Visitors to the exclave of Point Roberts must drive through Canada to enter the United States. It’s a tiny town with empty beaches, pods of orcas and dozens of gas pumps.

#frontières #états-unis #canada

Facial recognition : A solution in search of a problem ?
▻https://edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/blog/facial-recognition-solution-search-problem_en

“Be water”. This is the evocative and enigmatic phrase of the current mask-wearing protestors in Hong-Kong. It seems to represent the fight of citizens for the right to be shapeless and anonymous among the crowd, including when exercising the right to protest, versus surveillance by the state authorities. It is undeniable that facial recognition, the biometric application used to identify or verify a person’s identity, has become increasingly present in many aspects of daily life. It is used (...)

#algorithme #CCTV #anti-terrorisme #biométrie #éthique #migration #technologisme #facial #reconnaissance #vidéo-surveillance #frontières #Islam (...)

##surveillance

https://edps.europa.eu/sites/edp/files/og_image/logo_560x300_0.png

Agencies test border patrol technologies

U.S. Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) conducted 11 days of exercises and demonstrations in August in Sweetgrass, Mont.

The field test simulated illegal border crossings and evaluated portable, surveillance technologies that provide situational awareness capabilities with the hybrid communications network along the U.S./Canadian border. The network helps U.S. Custom and Border Protection track and prevent border crossings.

Technologies tested include #Small_Unmanned_Aerial_Systems (#SUAS) designed for border security operations, and #Team_Awareness_Kit (#TAK), a federal open source map-based phone and computer application with #GPS tracking capabilities and real-time collaboration.

“The demonstrations at the #Havre_Sector_Field_Experiment showed that communications tools like man-portable surveillance, autonomous surveillance towers, short-range surveillance sensors, SUAS, TAK, and satellite communications are both cost and operationally effective,” Shawn McDonald, S&T program manager, said. “Equally important, they are agile and scalable and serve as significant force multipliers for our agents along the northern border. Once these tools are deployed on a wider scale, our agents will be able to expand all their communications networks, simultaneously monitor remote lower-priority areas of the border while physically monitoring high-priority areas and immediately and effectively deploy resources to areas that need them most.”

▻https://homelandprepnews.com/stories/40730-agencies-test-border-patrol-technologies
#complexe_militaro-industriel #technologie #militarisation_des_frontières #frontières #USA #Etats-Unis #surveillance #gardes-frontières #asile #migrations #réfugiés #contrôles_frontaliers #communication
ping @etraces

The General Court of the European Union ruled that Frontex does not have to disclose information regarding their border operations (▻https://fragdenstaat.de/en/blog/2019/11/27/frontex-judgement-luxemburg-transparency). A joint lawsuit by two freedom of information activists specifically addressed the names, flags and types of ships used by Frontex (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency) in operation #Triton in the central Mediterranean. One of the lawyers in the process commented that the verdict takes for granted Frontex’s speculations about the disadvantages of even the most simple public knowledge about its missions, and noted that European law requires a critical examination of Frontex’s arguments, which was unfortunately missing. Prosecutors are considering an appeal to the Court of Justice.

Reçu via Inicijativa dobrodosli, mail du 04.11.2019.

#Frontex #asile #migrations #réfugiés #frontières #transparence (well...) #Méditerranée #justice
ping @karine4 @isskein

Push-back reports from Croatia with gun violence

https://i.imgur.com/QPDEdji.png https://i.imgur.com/Osj8J8h.png https://i.imgur.com/A01Bkge.png https://i.imgur.com/F9gsbqI.png https://i.imgur.com/X504QFo.png https://i.imgur.com/xCHJBOz.png https://i.imgur.com/8OvUamm.png https://i.imgur.com/pf1p6o0.png https://i.imgur.com/O2AoHIk.png

►https://www.borderviolence.eu/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-of-Firearms-use-1.pdf
#liste #armes #armes_à_feu #arme_à_feu

#migrations #réfugiés #Balkans #route_des_balkans #asile #frontières #refoulement #refoulements #database #base_de_données

Une personne grièvement blessée par la police à la #frontière entre la #Croatie et la #Slovénie, 27-28 novembre 2019

–-------------

Croatie : un policier ouvre encore le feu contre des réfugiés

28 novembre - 22h : Mercredi en fin d’après-midi, un policier a ouvert le feu contre un groupe de réfugiés, près du village de #Mrkopalj, dans le comté de #Primorje-Gorski_Kotar, à 50 km à l’est de Rijeka, blessant l’un d’entre eux. La police affirme que l’homme aurait opposé une vive résistance à son arrestation et tenté de s’enfuir. Il y a onze jour, la police avait déjà ouvert le feu contre un autre groupe de réfugiés dans la même région, située sur la route reliant la région de Bihać, en Bosnie-Herzégovine, à la Croatie.

►https://www.courrierdesbalkans.fr/courrierdesbalkans-fr-fil-info-refugies-2019-novembre

#frontière_sud-alpine #montagne #mourir_aux_frontières #asile #migrations #réfugiés #décès #morts #frontières #Croatie #Route_des_Balkans #Slovénie

Cet accident survient seulement quelques 10 jours après l’autre personne blessée par #arme_à_feu sur la même frontière, 16-17.11.2019 :
Migrante in fin di vita all’ospedale di Fiume, sarebbe stato raggiunto da colpi di pistola esplosi dalla polizia
►https://seenthis.net/messages/811666

#armes #armes_à_feu

–-------

v. la liste des push-back à la frontière avec #armes_à_feu (août 2017-octobre 2019)
►https://seenthis.net/messages/814569

–------

Ajouté à cette liste des morts (même si la personne dont on parle ici n’est pas décédée) :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/811660

Et, indirectement, à la métaliste des migrant·es morts à la #frontière_sud-alpine :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/758646

#Immigrant_Movement_International

Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International, presented by Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art, is a Long-Term art project1 in the form of an artist initiated socio-political movement. Bruguera will spend a year operating a flexible community space in the multinational and transnational neighborhood of Corona, Queens, which will serve as the movement’s headquarters.

Engaging both local and international communities, as well as working with social service organizations, elected officials, and artists focused on immigration reform, Bruguera will examine growing concerns about the political representation and conditions facing immigrants. As migration becomes a more central element of contemporary existence, the status and identity of those who live outside their place of origin increasingly become defined not by sharing a common language, class, culture, or race, but instead by their condition as immigrants. By engaging the local community through public workshops, events, actions, and partnerships with immigrant and social service organizations, Immigrant Movement International will explore who is defined as an immigrant and the values they share, focusing on the larger question of what it means to be a citizen of the world. Bruguera will also delve into the implementation of art in society, examining what it means to create Useful Art2, and addressing the disparity of engagement between informed audiences and the general public, as well as the historical gap between the language used in what is considered avant-garde and the language of urgent politics.

https://i.imgur.com/E7sE3fo.jpg

ping @karine4 @isskein @cede @reka

voir aussi l’oeuvre « Dignity has no nationality » de la même artiste :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/814368#message814372

#Visas_to_happiness

This interactive workshop during the Dhaka Art Summit with children was part of an ongoing project called “Visas to Happiness”, under which key questions related to our notion of happiness or subjective well-being were discussed. How we view the world, our mental state of well-being depending on not just our social environment that comprises of family, friends and community but our natural environment, how our health is closely linked to the ecology, how cultural and biological diversity are essential for ensuring creative, peaceful societies and how each of us can try and re-imagine the world.Although indicators that attempt to measure quality of life in more holistic and psychological terms rather than only economic, reflect a higher happiness quotient for smaller countries due to the strong sense of community and collectivism, Bangladesh however has slipped behind in their rankings on happiness. The project was conceived with two large wall murals that were painted with birds forming the texts (in Bengali and English) on two opposite facing walls along the corridors at the Shilpakala Academy. The children were provided specially produced mock-passports and arrival cards which they creatively filled in with their understanding through personal and cultural values, animating ideas of time, geography, movement, flight and freedom…

https://i.imgur.com/KuiHbE8.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ppi74f5.jpg

#art #art_et_politique #visa #visas #oiseaux #bonheur #migrations #frontières #ouverture_des_frontières #Reena_Saini_Kallat

#faire_monde
voir aussi :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/814368

ping @cede @karine4 @isskein @reka

When Home Won’t Let You Stay

When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art considers how contemporary artists are responding to the migration, immigration, and displacement of peoples today. We are currently witnessing the highest levels of movement on record—the United Nations estimates that one out of every seven people in the world is an international or internal migrant who moves by choice or by force, with great success or great struggle. When Home Won’t Let You Stay borrows its title from a poem by Warsan Shire, a Somali-British poet who gives voice to the experiences of refugees. Through artworks made since 2000 by twenty artists from more than a dozen countries — such as Colombia, Cuba, France, India, Iraq, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States — this exhibition highlights diverse artistic responses to migration ranging from personal accounts to poetic meditations, and features a range of mediums, including sculpture, installation, painting, and video. Artists in the exhibition include Kader Attia, Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Hayv Kahraman, Reena Saini Kallat, Richard Mosse, Carlos Motta, Yinka Shonibare, Xaviera Simmons, and Do-Ho Suh, among others. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with an essay by Eva Respini and Ruth Erickson and texts by prominent scholars Aruna D’Souza, Okwui Enwezor, Thomas Keenan, Peggy Levitt, and Uday Singh Mehta, among others.

▻https://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/when-home-won%E2%80%99t-let-you-stay-migration-through-contemporary-art
#asile #migrations #frontières #réfugiés #monde #art_et_politique #exposition

#Conférence_de_presse « La solidarité n’est pas un crime »
▻https://www.facebook.com/sosf.fanpage/videos/786198595185108/?hc_location=ufi
#délit_de_solidarité #statistiques #chiffres #asile #migrations #réfugiés #frontières #Suisse

Pétition
La solidarité n’est pas un crime ! Pour une modification de l’article 116 de la Loi fédérale sur les étrangers et l’intégration

Mesdames et Messieurs les Parlementaires,

De plus en plus, des individus venant en aide à des personnes en situation de très grande détresse se retrouvent face à un tribunal, parce qu’ils n’ont pas respecté l’article 116 de la Loi fédérale sur les étrangers et l’intégration (LEI) qui interdit l’aide à l’entrée, à la sortie et au séjour illégaux. Lisa Bosia, Norbert Valley ou encore Anni Lanz sont des exemples emblématiques de l’acharnement des autorités à casser l’élan de solidarité envers les réfugié·e·s qui grandit au sein de la population. Au lieu de rendre des comptes à propos de leur pratique de renvoi plus que discutable, elles se servent du droit pénal pour s’attaquer aux personnes qui agissent de manière critique.

La solidarité n’est pas un crime. Elle doit être encouragée et non réprimée. Alors que toujours davantage d’exilé·e·s se retrouvent dans une grande précarité en raison des politiques xénophobes des gouvernements européens, l’assistance à autrui doit aller de soi, peu importe les papiers.

Mesdames et Messieurs les Parlementaires, vous aurez bientôt une occasion de faire honneur à la tradition humanitaire de la Suisse et à des personnages dont nous pouvons être fiers comme Paul Grüninger ou Carl Lutz : soutenez l’initiative parlementaire 18.461 « En finir avec le délit de solidarité », qui vise à modifier l’article 116 de la LEI « pour ne plus criminaliser des individus prêtant assistance, dès lors que l’acte est désintéressé et que ces personnes n’en retirent aucun profit personnel ».

http://user-images.strikinglycdn.com/res/hrscywv4p/image/upload/c_limit,fl_lossy,h_9000,w_1200,f_auto,q_auto/453682/Solidaires_logo_hgfxhn.jpg

Pour télécharger la pétition en pdf :

https://asile.ch/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Petition_Article116_Nouveau-2-page-001.jpg

#Anni_Lanz #Solidarité_sans_frontières

ping @isskein @karine4

’Bangladesh agrees to allow India to construct fence in 13 places’

Bangladesh government has in principle, agreed to allow India to erect barbed wire fencing along the zero-line in at least 13 areas along the India-Bangladesh border in #Meghalaya, a senior Indian official told PTI on Sunday.

As per the Indira-Mujib pact of 1972, no permanent structure can be built within the 150 yards of the border.

In 1975, a guideline for the management of the 4,000 km long India-Bangladesh border was formulated by the two countries which also agreed not to construct any permanent structure within the 150-yard limit.

’Following India’s request, the Bangladesh government has in principle agreed to allow construction of fencing on zero-line in at least 13 areas of the state within the zero line,’ the official said to Press Trust of India.

Fencing at the identified areas along the zero line at #East_Jaintia_Hills district, #West_Jaintia_Hills district, #East_Khasi_Hills district and #South_West_Khasi_Hills district will be taken up accordingly, he said, the Indian news agency added.

The state government had identified those areas where erection of fencing 150 yards away from zero-line would not be feasible and as such approached India to seek permission from Bangladesh, the official said.

The matter is awaiting final nod from the Bangladesh government as all line departments including the BGB has sent their note of agreement on the matter, he said.

Of the 443 km-long India-Bangladesh border in Meghalaya, about 100 km was unfenced. Earthworks have already begun for the remaining patches, the official said, says PTI.

Till date, some problems have cropped up in the erection of fencing on certain stretches of the border due to existence of low-lying areas, human habitations, cemetery and cash crops within the 150 yards of the border, a BSF official.

According to PTI, checking of illegal cross-border activities has been a major challenge for the BSF manning it, the official said.

The Bangladesh government in 2012 had allowed India to erect barbed wire fencing along the zero-line in Tripura’s Mohanpur market, near the international border.

▻https://en.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/news/205887/Bangladesh-agrees-to-allow-India-to-construct
#murs #barrières_frontalières #Bangladesh #Inde #frontières

Localisation:

https://i.imgur.com/X8Bnyzn.png

ping @reka @fil

Council of Ministers amendments on the green line code in violation of the EC Regulation

On 27.11.2019, the Council of Ministers decided, without any consultation with either the stakeholders concerned in Cyprus or with the European Union/ Commission, to proceed to the amendment of the Code for the implementation of the Regulation of the European Council (866/2004/ΕC) on the Green Line. According to this decision:

All people passing through the line (including Cypriot citizens, hitherto not checked) will be checked.
Unaccompanied minors not escorted by parents will not be allowed to cross unless they have written authorisation by their parents.
No third-country nationals (TCN) with temporary residence permit, except family members of Cypriot or other European citizens, and with long-term residence permit, will be allowed to pass through the line.
The passage of people will be permitted for humanitarian grounds, medical reasons, etc
In addition, the Council of Ministers has decided to submit bills to the House of Representatives for imposing administrative fines (in monetary terms) to people using ports and airports in the areas not under the control of the government, without clarifying as to whether these fines will be imposed on everyone or only on TCN.

KISA is of the opinion that the government should have informed both Cypriot society as well as the EC for the proposed amendments to the Code for the implementation of the green line Regulation. It is not coincidental that the EC has already expressed the need for its approval of any amendments.

KISA believes that the decision to restrict and/or prohibit the crossing of legally residing migrants through the green line constitutes prohibited discrimination and is not permitted by the Council Regulation, which renders it a direct violation of the Regulation itself.

From a legal point of view, the government does have the right to impose universal checks of identity verification of persons passing through the line. However, as it has decided to apply the Regulation strictly 15 years later, it should do so after the setting up of the necessary infrastructe and required staff increases at the checkpoints so as to ensure people’s smooth movement. The immediate implementation of the above checks, without all the above, constitutes disproportionate restrictions and obstacles to the free movement of people through the line.

KISA also condemns the government’s attempt to connect, by using misleading and populist rhetoric, the amendments with the management of the rising number of asylum applications, irregular migration and security for domestic audience and impressing the public as, according to point 2 (d) of the decision, «third-country nationals … are not permitted to pass through the line … unless they apply for asylum». The proposed measures that the government has connected with the increasing refugee flows to Cyprus, due to the continuing wars in the area, cannot objectively speaking bring about the objectives pursued by the government (reduction of the refugee flows), as no one can restrict the right to asylum, which is a fundamental right according to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Instead of the government asking for EU’s assistance and support to enable it to meet the severe pressures on the asylum system and the reception of asylum seekers in Cyprus, it will waste European and national resources on the green line checks and undue hassle of legally residing migrants as well as Cypriots at the checkpoints.

KISA is of the opinion that the new policy entails serious risks to the Cyprus question as, on the one hand, it hinders communication and contact between the areas controlled and not under the control of the government and, on the other, it turns the green line into a hard border, which leads to deepening the division of our country, when the objective of the Regulation is to facilitate free movement of people and cooperation between the two communities.

Finally, KISA points out that the inclusion of the Ministry of Defence in the Ministerial Committee for migration and asylum formalises the securitisation policy on migration and asylum, a policy that has contributed substantially to harbouring racism and the rise of extreme right and neo-nazi organisations in Europe.

KISA in cooperation with other civil society organisations intends to do all it can, including through reports/complaints to European and international organisations and agencies, against these new measures.

▻https://kisa.org.cy/ministerial-amendments-on-the-green-line-code-in-violation-of-the-ec-regula
#Chypre #green_line #fermeture_des_frontières #frontières #contrôles_systématiques #libre_circulation #Chypre_du_Nord

–----------------------

Traduction en français:

Une décision du conseil des ministres de la République prise de manière unilatérale sans consulter les institutions européennes visant à amender la manière dont les contrôles sont exercées aux points de passage officiels de la Ligne Verte entre la République de Chypre et la république auto-proclamée turque de Chypre Nord selon un règlement européen adopté en 2004 au moment de l’entrée du pays dans l’Union européenne.

Jusqu’à présent les citoyen.nes européen.nes et les Chypriotes pouvaient franchir la #ligne_verte et exercer leur droit à la libre circulation, ainsi que les ressortissant.es de pays non-membres de l’UE disposant d’un droit au séjour y compris touristes en court séjour) délivré par la République de Chypre.

Désormais toutes les personnes passant par la ligne (y compris les citoyens chypriotes, jusqu’à présent non contrôlés) seront contrôlées. Le passage de personnes sera autorisé pour des raisons humanitaires, médicales, etc.

De plus,

Les #mineurs_non_accompagnés qui ne sont pas escortés par leurs parents ne seront pas autorisés à traverser sans l’autorisation écrite de leurs parents
Aucun ressortissant de pays tiers (RTC) titulaire d’un permis de séjour temporaire, à l’exception des membres de la famille de Chypriotes ou d’autres citoyens européens, et titulaire d’un permis de séjour de longue durée, ne sera autorisé à franchir cette ligne.

« En outre, le Conseil des ministres a décidé de soumettre à la Chambre des représentants des projets de loi visant à imposer des amendes administratives (en termes monétaires) aux usagers des ports et aéroports dans les zones non contrôlées par le gouvernement, sans préciser si ces amendes seront imposées à tous ou seulement aux resortissant.es d’Etats non-membres de l’UE ».

Selon le gouvernement, ces interdictions de passage par la ligne verte n’affecteront pas les demandeurs d’asile ainsi que le rapporte cet article du Cyprus Mail. Le parti communiste AKEL a dénoncé la mise en place d’une frontière dure (hard border).

KISA souligne que, juridiquement, de tels contrôles systématiques et sans discrimination aucune sont légaux. L’ONG poursuit en critiquant l’absence d’infrastructure et de personnel pour ce faire, alors que le règlement autorise de tels contrôles depuis son édiction, il y a 15 ans de cela, et interprète ceci comme une décision qui restreint la mobilité de manière disproportionnée qui met en danger la liberté de circulation. KISA condamne le lien fait explicitement par le gouvernement entre l’augmentation du nombre de demandeurs d’asile, de personnes migrantes en situation irrégulière, de préoccupations sécuritaires à Chypre et la nécessité de cette décision. L’association constate que demander du soutien à l’UE pour mieux accueillir ces personnes auraient été plus judicieux que de renforcer des contrôles sur la ligne verte, une démarche coûteuse, populiste et qui met à mal les efforts de coopération entre les deux communautés de chaque côté de la ligne entamés ces dernières années.

Pour rappel, les points de passage de la ligne verte ont été ouverts en 2004 au moment de l’entrée de l’île dans l’UE. La République de Chypre n’exerce sa souveraineté que sur une partie de l’île, mais tou.tes les Chypriotes, qu’ils/elles soient Chypriotes turcs ou grecs, sont des citoyen.nes européen.nes.
Cette décision unilatérale donne un signal peut prometteur aux (énièmes) négociations de paix en vue d’une solution engagées sous l’égide de l’ONU et relancées à Berlin le mois dernier.

ping @reka

DEEP DIVE : EFF to DHS : Stop Mass Collection of Social Media Information
▻https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/deep-dive-eff-dhs-stop-mass-collection-social-media-information

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently released a proposed rule expanding the agency’s collection of social media information on key visa forms and immigration applications. Earlier this month, EFF joined over 40 civil society organizations that signed on to comments drafted by the Brennan Center for Justice. These comments identify the free speech and privacy risks the proposed rule poses to U.S. persons both directly, if they are required to fill out these forms, and (...)

#DHS #frontières #surveillance #migration #EFF

https://www.eff.org/files/banner_library/social-media-surveillance-1b.jpg

Carte. De l’adhésion au rejet (parfois) : géohistoire des frontières de l’Union européenne

▻https://www.diploweb.com/Carte-De-l-adhesion-au-rejet-parfois-geohistoire-des-frontieres-de-l-Union

https://www.diploweb.com/IMG/jpg/thomas-merle-carte-ue-entrees-_sorties-diploweb.jpg

Comment les frontières de l’#UE évoluent-elles dans le temps, entre élargissements, candidatures délicates et rejets ? T. Merle répond brillamment avec une carte commentée disponible sous deux formats. En pied de page, vous trouverez la carte en grande taille format JPEG... et un lien secret pour la télécharger au format PDF.

#europe #union_européenne #frontières

What Are Borders For ?

For most of history, they marked sovereignty or self-determination. Now their purpose seems to have changed.

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5dcb20a1eaad300008d73378/master/w_649,c_limit/Jelly-Schapiro-borders.jpg

In northern Vermont in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, where I grew up in a town whose name was French but where everyone spoke English, the nearby Canadian border was not imposing. Dirt roads crossed the line where New England’s maples become Quebec’s, with no signs to warn passing hikers when they were under foreign trees. On the main highway north to Montreal were a pair of what looked like tollbooths, adorned with flags stitched with a big red leaf or stars and stripes. And when bored customs officers asked you to halt your vehicle, the inquisition to which you were subjected—at least if your Saab or pickup truck bore Vermont plates—was perfunctory. Documents often weren’t required. You could expect to be asked two questions: where you were headed and if you had any liquor.

There were benefits, in high school, to living near a province more libertine than our wholesome state. On Monday mornings, louche upperclassmen sometimes turned up in the cafeteria with tales of having dashed north, over the weekend, to where the drinking age was eighteen, for a case of Molson Ice. But the pull of difference was matched with a sense, at least as strong, that the border didn’t so much divide two nations as amble over a contiguous region. Sure, people on our side of the line pronounced Gallic place names in mountain English. (Calais sounded like “callous.”) But our shared climate and past helped feed a sense, among humans who also shared the complexion of February snow (this no doubt helped), that we had more in common with one another than with citizens of our vast nations who lived in far-off Vancouver or Phoenix.

Such cross-border ties are extremely common, of course, among the many millions of people who live near one of the hundreds of boundaries on earth. Most of the oldest borders date from a couple of centuries ago; many count their age in decades. And the ease with which many people straddled them was until very recently exemplified along the now notorious gran linea to our south, which before the nineteen-nineties neither the United States nor Mexico saw fit to mark with anything more forbidding, along most of its length, than an occasional rock pile in the desert. In a part of the continent once thought too dry to cultivate, that porosity was no less vital for Hispanic ranchers and Native Americans than for the builders of what became an agricultural juggernaut, in California and across the U.S. West, which has long depended on willing workers from the south.

Now Donald Trump’s dream of “sealing” that border has pulled it into the center of our national life. But as the scholar Matthew Longo underscores in “The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security and the Citizen after 9/11,” although the policies that Trump is pursuing may stand out for their cruelty, they aren’t nearly so much of a departure as we may like to think—either from aims held by his predecessors, or from larger trends in how borders have been changing. In fact, Trump has revealed a new consensus among our political classes—and among hundreds of nations on earth—about what borders are, and what they’re for.

For most of the twentieth century, the “hard boundaries” that did exist were militarized for actually military reasons. These included contested frontiers like Kashmir and a few Cold War hot spots, like the D.M.Z. crossing the Korean peninsula, where opposing armies and world views stared each other down through rolls of concertina wire. Now such scenes are replicated along borders dividing countries whose shared system of government is democracy and whose armies are at peace. This is seen in the more than two thousand miles of heavily guarded barbed wire that India has erected between itself and Bangladesh; or the electrified fence with which South Africa confronts Zimbabwe; or the potato fields that Hungary has laced with menacing barriers to keep out refugees. Since the start of this century, dozens of borders have been transformed from mere lines on a map into actual, deadly features of the landscape. These are places where, as the geographer Reece Jones notes in his book “Violent Borders,” thousands of people each year are now “losing their lives simply trying to go from one place to another.”

The once obscure field of “border studies” has won new impetus from the global refugee crisis. But a surge of recent scholarship, of which Longo’s book is perhaps the standout, makes clear that there’s much to be gained from zooming out to examine the history and present of borders everywhere. The ways that borders are evolving in the twenty-first century, in step with changing technology, have profound implications for the future of human rights and international relations—and for the vision of sovereignty that’s shaped both since the first governments embraced the principle of jurisdiction over a strictly defined area of earth.

Many ancient cultures espoused ties to particular landscapes and the resources or fishing holes they contained. But for several millennia after our species’s first city-states flourished along the Tigris, few such seats of political power presumed to identify precisely where, in the no man’s lands between their cities’ walls, one’s realm ended and another’s began. This continued as certain of those city-states, later on, became empires. When, in the second century A.D., Rome’s legionaries lodged a ribbon of limestone across Britannia’s north, they cared little if Scottish shepherds ambled south with their sheep or hopped Hadrian’s Wall. That boundary, like the famous Ming-dynasty battlements outside Beijing that we call the Great Wall of China, was a military installation—erected to slow invaders from adjoining lands, yes, but also to project power outward.

The builders of these walls never presumed their domains’ edges to be anything more than provisional; they were less concerned about preventing people from crossing or inhabiting their realms than with maintaining access, when they did, to their taxes and toil. The Mayans may have walked the fields and forests, in Meso-America, to mark where one of their ahawlels’ lands ended. But Malaysia’s negeri city-states—in which rulers maintained firm control over the river systems but made little effort to control the hinterlands beyond their banks—were more indicative of a planet whereon, until several hundred years ago, few people conceived of political territory as exclusive real estate. As medieval fiefs evolved into early states in Europe, their edge-lands were still comprised of what their minders called “marches,” and what we came to call frontiers—contested zones where who was in charge, and whether laws obtained at all, was often in doubt.

The key moment in the transition to what scholars call the modern state system arrived in the middle of the seventeenth century, with the famous treaty that ended the Thirty Years’ War. The Peace of Westphalia was signed by a hundred and nine principalities and duchies and imperial kingdoms, all of which agreed, in 1648, that states were now the only institutions allowed to engage in diplomacy and war, and that they would also now be accorded the right to “absolute sovereignty” over their territory. There’s a reason that the great majority of political maps we’d recognize as such date from this era: Westphalia gave states a vested interest in laying claim, with the help of the mapmakers they employed, to jurisdiction over a defined patch of sod. This led to some beautiful maps—and implanted in people’s minds, for the first time, shapes like the one we now associate with France. But few efforts were made to make those maps’ borders clear to inhabitants. The question of whose sovereignty certain shepherds lived under, in notoriously liminal zones like the Pyrenees or Alsace, would remain murky well into the era when sovereignty began to be transferred from kings to laws.

As the Harvard historian Charles S. Maier recounts in “Once Within Borders,” a factor that helped change this, in the nineteenth century, was the spread of new technologies—the telegraph, the railroad—that enabled central governments, even in countries as vast as the United States, to think that they might actually be able to govern all of their territory. Another was a series of increasingly bloody wars in Europe and elsewhere that culminated, between 1914 and 1918, in a conflict that saw humankind kill off some sixteen million of its members. Near the end of the First World War, Woodrow Wilson proposed that the international community might prevent such horrors if it followed his Fourteen Points, which became central, in January, 1919, to the Paris Peace Conference. Key among them was the principle that some of the globe’s borders be redrawn “along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.”

This vision was born from a war fuelled by the desire of Bosnians and others for self-rule. It also reflected an idea—that any national group should aspire to and defend a sovereign bit of land—that’s animated countless struggles since, for “self-determination” or its opposite. But this idea also had its drawbacks. One was the danger, as another world war soon made clear, of imagining a map of Europe that furnished for each of its language groups what the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel termed a Lebensraum, or “living space.” Another was that Wilson’s dictum pointedly did not extend beyond Europe—and especially not to Africa, whose vast acreage had only recently been carved into territories. Those territories were anything but “clearly recognizable” to the colonial owners who tacked a big map of the continent to the wall of a Berlin ballroom, in 1884, and drew their borders with scant regard for the language groups and ancestral homelands they crossed.

Such are the tortured roots of our current international system. The United Nations’ expectation that each of its member states respect the territorial sovereignty of its neighbors has formed, since 1948, the core of its efforts to maintain world peace. That most of the U.N.’s members have bought into this notion is why, in the late twentieth century, many of the world’s borders came to resemble the United States and Canada’s. In the nineties, there was a brief turn from this project, as celebrants of globalization hailed a borderless world augured by, for example, the European Union’s opening of internal frontiers. Now that vision has collapsed, eroded by mass migration and anxiety. For scholars like Longo, we have entered an era of “bordering” without precedent.

What changed? For Longo, the answer, in large part, is 9/11. Since the attacks in New York, he argues, there has been a profound shift in how borders are conceived, installed, and sustained. The most obvious change has been a physical escalation. Over the past eighteen years, for example, the U.S Border Patrol grew to employ twenty thousand agents, becoming the nation’s largest enforcement agency. Throughout the world, anxiety about terrorism has helped drive a trend toward states erecting boundaries to deny entry to potential bad actors. It has seen one prominent U.N. member state, Israel, build some four hundred and seventy miles of barriers, through the territory of its Palestinian neighbors, whose purpose is “security” but which in effect seizes land not regarded by the U.N. as its own. These developments have occurred at a time when the number of people worldwide who’ve been displaced by violence is at an all-time high—some seventy million, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Many of those refugees hail from a region destabilized by the United States’ invasion of Iraq, in 2003, and its War on Terror. In the early two-thousands, Mumbai, Madrid, Bali, and London experienced their own terrorist attacks, and, as Longo details in his book—which is distinguished by his efforts to actually speak with the officials responsible for executing the ideas that he’s interested in—those countries gladly followed the United States’s lead. Dozens if not hundreds of states around the world turned questions of customs and immigration enforcement, once left to anonymous bureaucrats, into pressing matters of national defense.

Not a few scholars of politics and law, in those years, began to try to understand what was happening to the world’s borders. Perhaps the most prescient was Wendy Brown, whose book “Walled States, Waning Sovereignty,” was published in 2010. Brown noted the burgeoning popularity of walled borders, years before Trump’s rise, and predicted that nativist politicians would continue to build boundaries that, she argued in a preface to the 2016 edition, would “not merely index, but accelerate waning state sovereignty.” What she meant was that nation-states were reacting to their dwindling ability to control the movement of information, money, and humans over their territory by building “visual emblem[s] of power and protection that states increasingly cannot provide.” But by doing so, they only highlighted their lack of control, enriching the traffickers and syndicates that have profited from having to find new ways to get their desperate clients and wares, obstacles be damned, where they want to go.

About the latter point, Longo can’t disagree. But he has a different argument to make about what “bordering” tells us about the future of states. Sovereignty, to his mind, hasn’t so much waned as transformed. Governments today have never known so much about the people they govern, or been more determined to know more about those entering their territory. For these same reasons, they’ve come to share the once indivisible responsibility for policing their edges. This is the second plank of the post-9/11 shift: with the hardening of physical barriers came the rise, unprecedented in history, of cross-border collaboration in the name of surveillance. This obtained even in the most neutral of boundaries. In the summer of 2003, I returned home from a visit to Canada and was asked for the first time, by an officer dressed in the stiff new duds of the Department of Homeland Security, to hand over my passport. I can still recall being struck, as he scanned its barcode into a computer, by a thought that now seems quaint: the government was endeavoring to track and store data, accessible in real time, about every time any person left or entered the U.S.

Borders were once where sovereignty ended, or began. Now they’re places where states partner with their neighbors to manage and monitor who and what moves between them. This trend toward “co-bordering”—the joint management of overlapping jurisdictions—is a momentous change, Longo writes. It’s also a product of our era, in which national defense has become a matter less of confronting rival states than of working out more efficient ways to, in the words of one Pentagon official, “magnify our focus down to the individual person level.” At the U.S.-Mexico border, one U.S. official says, this means working with his Mexican counterparts to build a “layered detection system that focuses on risk-based screening, enhanced targeting and information sharing.” Another puts it this way: “The wider we make our borders, the more effective we’ll be.” The quote neatly summates what Longo calls the trend to “thick” borders, witnessed around the world.

In the U.S., these trends have been formalized in treaties to which we’re now party with both Mexico (the 21st Century Border Initiative, signed in 2010) and Canada (the Beyond the Border agreement, from 2011), which allow for joint surveillance and policing hundreds of miles to either side of where the respective countries meet. The agreements also foster more electronic forms of coöperation: the building of “inter-operable” databases that contain biometric and biographical data for the hundreds of millions of people who call the continent home or have visited its shores. In a 2012 report, D.H.S. put it tersely: “Our vision for the northern border cannot be accomplished unilaterally.” The fact that Canadian Mounties are now empowered, with cause, to board an American vessel off the coast of Maine suggests a rather different vision of sovereignty than the one conjured by “America First.”

Europe is even further ahead. The E.U.’s member states haven’t merely banded together to head off migrants—whose fingerprints whatever E.U. state they land in is rule-bound to collect. They’ve also made data on the inhabitants of the Schengen Area, which lacks border checks, available to one another. Across the sea in North Africa, Tunisia and Egypt have been pushing for regional border-security arrangements to confront continued instability in Libya. The member nations of the East African Community—Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan—now maintain shared patrols around Lake Victoria. Even India and China, never models of trusting bonhomie, have since 2013 had an accord in place “to improve security along their 4,056-kilometer border . . . [and increase] cooperation on a military-to-military basis.”

As in the nineteenth century, technology is what has enabled the state to maintain—or aspire to—control. In recent months, a few U.S. cities banned the use of facial recognition on their streets. But an arguably bigger story about the same technology—by which F.B.I. and ICE agents have been making extensive use of millions of driver’s-license photos culled from state D.M.V.s—highlights how our laws will struggle to keep pace with overreach. (Another example can be glimpsed in the D.H.S.’s push to legalize and expand its officers’ practice, recently revealed, of collecting DNA from detained migrants.) In China, facial recognition is already being used on a mass scale. And in Xinjiang, the home region of the oppressed Uyghur minority, the state has even taken to installing an app on the smartphones of everyone who resides in or enters the region. The app transmits to Communist Party police users’ private habits, as well as their daily travels around the Internet.

Data has already made tech companies rich, and its strategic import to modern governments is plain. “Data is the new oil,” one Brazilian researcher explains. “Every government has become dataholic.” This emerges, in Longo’s account, as the reason that borders, quite apart from their use for the staging of populist or authoritarian dramas, have become so important: they’re where it’s legal for the government to capture the information that its bureaucracies covet. There was a time when you had to commit a crime, or be suspected of committing one, to have your fingerprints and photograph taken by an officer of the state. Now all you need to do is take a trip.

For many scholars, the solution to all this lies in addressing the violent inequality that’s pushed a quarter billion people to leave their countries for a better life. This, for anti-capitalist academics like Reece Jones, would entail some familiar-sounding steps. The most prominent is open borders—one of those odd issues where, less for moral than for macroeconomic reasons, libertarian and left-wing positions congrue. Lifting limits on migration has been espoused by writers as divergent in outlook as the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, the author of the 2008 book “Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders,” and Suketu Mehta, whose important new book “This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto” cites the same strong evidence: more immigrants means more jobs. In rich countries where productivity is declining as fast as the birth rate, Mehta insists, “the immigrant armada that is coming to your shores is actually a rescue fleet.”

But even if we begin to understand this, the main reason that hard borders aren’t going anywhere, Longo argues, has nothing to do with either economics or populism. It has to do with technology’s still-growing role in what nation-states do. In 1975, Michel Foucault famously identified what he called the “oldest dream of the oldest sovereign,” the panopticon: that circular prison whose sight lines were such that a warden at its center could keep tabs—or pretend to—on every subject in his realm. Now even the world’s most liberal governments have tools for gathering information that would have made the Stasi blush. Governments controlled by data, rather than vice versa, begin to process people as “readable texts” rather than as citizens. Borders, in turn, become the places in which those bureaucracies can most easily produce the “data double” that we’ve all become. Longo underscores what this means. “A central aim of this book,” he writes, “has been to identify the grand strategic shift away from nation-states and toward individuals. But what if this foretells the end of the individual too, now at the expense of the sub-individual, a subject composed of data points?”

It’s a troubling suggestion, not least because of the stark divide that’s already emerged between countries willing to share those data points and those that aren’t. This digital “firewall,” invoked by several of Longo’s sources, excludes anyone whose government doesn’t have the capacity or will to issue passports whose chips and barcodes possess their holders’ vital information. It threatens to turn humans without data, in a word, into humans without rights. With rich countries now admitting foreign nationals based on how much they “trust” the data attached to their passport, such divides will only further inflame the perceived split between nations that have joined modernity and those outside it.

To explain what this all portends, Longo turns to another hazy episode from history that Foucault used to illuminate his theories of modern society. It involves the moment when many medieval towns were spurred by rapid growth, in the eighteenth century, to do away with their walls—losing their ability to down their gates at night and to monitor, during the day, entries and exits. This change, in Foucault’s account, introduced to those towns a new anxiety about vagrants and outsiders. The shift gave birth to modern policing; armed guards turned their gaze from the horizon to the streets below them. The question for the sovereign state, then as now, wasn’t whether or not to have walls—it was where to put them. The answer, in the centuries since, has evolved with shifts in ideology and geopolitics and technology alike. But the conclusion reached by our republic and most nation-states today, whether spurred by populist strongmen or their own bureaucracies’ needs, about whether to wall their territories’ edges or more aggressively surveil what they contain, is plain: do both. In our new age of “bordering,” the border is drawing nearer, all the time, to the edge of the body itself.

▻https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/what-are-borders-for
#frontières #souveraineté #droits_humains

ping @mobileborders

Syria’s Kurds and the Turkish border

https://singularthings.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/index_map-excerpt.jpg?w=994&h=897#.jpg

The news from Syria has been nothing but bad for several years now, but things have been particularly desperate in the last few days—since Turkish forces, with a green light from the American president, invaded the region of northern Syria that had been under autonomous Kurdish rule, as Rojava. (You can read an overview of the situation and what is at stake in this Guardian article: What is the situation in north-eastern Syria? —> ▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/09/what-is-situation-north-eastern-syria-turkey-kurds)

Although I mainly work on refugee history these days, earlier in my career I was a Syria specialist, and I spent a lot of time researching the history of the area that Turkey has just invaded. The demarcation of the Syrian-Turkish border in the 1920s and 30s was crucial to the constitution of state sovereignty on either side of it. Turkey and Syria were newly established states, though they were quite different: Turkey was ruled by a nationalist government that had successfully fought off multiple invasions, while Syria was only nominally independent under French colonial ‘supervision’. What I was really interested in, though, was how these interconnected processes shaped the political identities of the people living in what became the northern Syrian borderlands. A lot of them were Kurdish, and the border made them a minority in a new Syrian nation-state.

As a historian, I don’t have privileged knowledge about current events, and I’m feeling pretty helpless and hopeless about them. But if it’s helpful for anyone reading this to get some background on how this part of the world came to be divided between Syria and Turkey, and what that meant for Kurds living there, with permission from the publishers I’m making some of the things I’ve written on the subject freely available.

First, here is a PDF of a chapter of my book (2011) on ‘The border and the Kurds’ (▻https://singularthings.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/chapter-4.pdf). It explains the impact that the demarcation of the border had on Kurds across the new Syrian nation-state. Right through the 1920s and 30s, Syria’s borders didn’t have much meaningful physical presence on the ground. But increasingly, the border as a line between two state jurisdictions made it a meaningful presence in people’s lives (and in people’s minds) nonetheless. The drawing of Syria’s borders tended to make all Kurds in the country—whether they lived in the borderlands or in Damascus—into one ‘minority’ community.

Second, my article ‘Refugees and the definition of Syria, 1920-1939’ (2017) (▻https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtw048) argues that the arrival and settlement of refugees brought the geographical borders of Syria into much sharper definition, and accelerated the spread of effective state authority across its territory—as well as raising questions about whether Syrian national identity should be defined to include or exclude the incomers. Kurdish refugees from the new Turkish Republic were one of the three main groups of refugees entering Syria in this period, and the places that became Syrian included the areas that Kurds have governed autonomously for the last few years. The Turkish army’s invasion has prompted the Kurdish government to invite the Syrian regime back in.

Finally, an older article in French, ‘Frontières et pouvoir d’Etat: La frontière turco-syrienne dans les années 1920 et 1930’ (2009) (▻https://www.cairn.info/article.php?ID_REVUE=VING&ID_NUMPUBLIE=VIN_103&ID_ARTICLE=VING_103_0091#), written with my colleague and friend Seda Altuğ, goes into more detail on the process of how the border was drawn on the ground, and what role it played in the constitution of state authority on both sides. For Turkey, a national frontier was being created, that needed defending against local populations that were viewed as a threat (especially Kurds and Armenians) as well as against French imperialism. On the Syrian side, where the border was both a Syrian national and French imperial frontier, the situation was more complicated.

▻https://singularthings.wordpress.com/2019/10/15/syrias-kurds-and-the-turkish-border
#Kurdistan #kurdistan_syrien #Syrie #Turquie #frontières #Kurdes #histoire
signalé par @isskein

Conférence - La tentation du mur

Trente ans après la chute du mur de Berlin, que reste-t-il des #murs_frontaliers dans le monde ? Quel constat peut-on dresser alors que les murs redéfinissent les lignes frontalières à travers le monde, durcissant des frontières autrefois poreuses et ouvertes ?
#Élisabeth_Vallet, directrice de l’Observatoire de géopolitique de la Chaire Raoul-Dandurand, a répondu à ces questionnements lors d’une conférence organisée dans le cadre des journées académiques allemandes à l’UQAM, le 11 novembre 2019

▻https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/conf%C3%A9rence-la-tentation-du-mur/id1483631088?i=1000457926931&l=fr
#murs #frontières #conférence #audio #podcast #barrières_frontalières #fermeture_des_frontières

#Achille_Mbembe : peut-on être étranger chez soi ?

L’#Afrique doit être la première à libérer les circulations, à élaguer les frontières héritées de la colonisation, à refonder entièrement la politique des visas d’un pays à l’autre du continent. Pour ne plus dépendre des diktats de l’Europe et fonder enfin un droit à l’#hospitalité.

De nos jours, l’une des manières de vulnérabiliser des millions de gens est de les empêcher de bouger.
De fait, la structuration contemporaine de notre monde est de plus en plus fondée sur une répartition inégale des capacités de mobilité et de circulation, ainsi que de cette ressource qu’est désormais la vitesse.
De ce point de vue, l’Afrique est doublement pénalisée, du dehors comme du dedans.
Elle est pénalisée du dehors parce que les Africains ne sont les bienvenus nulle part dans le monde. Il n’y a pas un seul pays au monde où des Africains ou des gens d’origine africaine arrivent, peu importe par quels moyens, et sont accueillis au son des tambours et des trompettes. Partout où ils font leur apparition, ils sont les plus exposés à toutes sortes d’entraves, à l’incarcération et à la déportation (1). En vérité, très peu de pays au monde veulent des Africains ou des personnes d’origine africaine parmi eux.
Elle est pénalisée du dehors parce qu’un nouveau régime global de mobilité est en train de se mettre en place. Il participe d’une nouvelle partition de la Terre. Il est une dimension fondamentale de la nouvelle course pour la domination du cosmos (des régions polaires, des océans, des déserts, des continents extraterrestres).
Un pacte continental

Ce nouveau régime de gouvernement des mobilités humaines repose sur des dispositifs de sécurité qui sont de plus en plus électroniques, biométriques, de plus en plus militarisés. Ces dispositifs sont aussi et de plus en plus somatiques, dans le sens où leurs cibles principales, ce sont des corps rendus abjects, jugés de trop, qui ne comptent pas, et que l’on est en droit de neutraliser. De gré ou de force, ces corps sont donc appelés à déguerpir des espaces qu’ils occupent.
Ce nouveau régime repose enfin sur l’externalisation des frontières. Ainsi de l’Europe dont les frontières s’étendent désormais bien loin de la Méditerranée. En étendant ses frontières au-delà de la Méditerranée et en les rendant mobiles, l’Europe cherche en réalité à abroger la souveraineté des Etats africains sur la gestion de leurs populations, qu’il s’agisse de la gestion du nombre (d’où la relance des débats sur la démographie africaine) et de la gestion des mouvements (qui peut bouger, qui ne doit pas bouger, qui ne peut bouger qu’à certaines conditions).
Mais l’Afrique est aussi pénalisée du dedans par le fait que nous sommes le continent au monde qui compte le plus grand nombre de frontières internes. C’est ici que la taxe sur la mobilité est la plus chère au monde. Il faut donc élaguer les frontières.
Libérer les circulations est devenu un impératif. Il y va non seulement de la survie de millions de nos gens, mais aussi de la réaffirmation de notre souveraineté. Comment le faire de façon pragmatique ?
Il faut rouvrir le débat sur le principe de l’intangibilité des frontières héritées de la colonisation. Ce principe fut ratifié par les Etats africains en 1963 au moment de la fondation de l’Organisation de l’unité africaine (OUA). Ce faisant, les Africains endossèrent la partition du continent opérée lors de la conférence de Berlin en 1884 par les puissances européennes.
Il faut rouvrir ce débat dans la mesure où ce principe d’intangibilité, qui était supposé consacrer la souveraineté des Etats nationaux, est désormais un facteur d’émasculation de cette souveraineté dans le contexte des politiques antimigratoires poursuivies par l’Europe.
Il faut le rouvrir non pas pour abolir dans l’immédiat les frontières héritées de la colonisation, mais pour définir des étapes concrètes visant à atteindre cet objectif d’ici à 2050.
Nous avons besoin de définir, pour nous, notre propre politique migratoire. Celle-ci ne doit pas dépendre des diktats de l’Europe. Ceci exige la mise en place d’un pacte continental sur les migrations intra-africaines. L’objectif de ce pacte serait de transformer le continent en un vaste espace de circulation pour tous ses enfants.
Des expériences ont déjà cours et vont dans ce sens, notamment dans plusieurs parties de l’Afrique de l’Ouest.
Dans l’immédiat, il nous faut déclarer un moratoire sur les déportations. Il nous faut mettre un terme à la longue histoire des déportations et des déplacements forcés sur ce continent. Il faut arrêter les déportations. Nous devons, en ce siècle, mettre un terme à cette horrible pratique qui aura confiné les Africains à ne jamais se déplacer que dans des chaînes. Il faut désenchaîner les corps noirs, arrêter de les souiller, et ouvrir, pour nous-mêmes, une nouvelle page de notre longue lutte pour l’affranchissement et la dignité.
Plus concrètement encore, nous devons procéder à une refonte générale de la politique des visas à l’intérieur de l’Afrique. Les nouvelles technologies nous permettent, par exemple, de passer à un nouveau stade où chaque détenteur d’un passeport africain qui voyage à l’intérieur du continent se verrait octroyer un visa à l’arrivée.
Il nous faut encourager les Etats à passer des accords réciproques qui permettent d’abroger les visas entre eux.
Cette phase de détente devrait ouvrir la voie à des changements plus structurels et à long terme. Elaguer puis moderniser les frontières, dans le sens de les rendre plus fluides, afin qu’elles puissent favoriser le passage et la flexibilité.
Un énorme travail est à faire de ce point de vue en matière de modernisation des régimes d’identité. Que d’ici à 2050 chaque Africain puisse disposer d’un acte de naissance, d’une carte d’identité, bref de documents biométriques virtuellement infalsifiables. Si au passage un tel effort aboutit à élargir le champ des surveillances, ce sera le modique prix à payer pour intensifier les circulations internes.
Aller au-delà des lumières

Le recours aux nouvelles technologies nous permettra également de mettre en place des bases de données que les Etats pourront partager entre eux dans le but de diminuer les risques, car ceux-ci existent. En matière d’échanges commerciaux, l’une des priorités est l’instauration de postes douaniers uniques qui permettraient d’alléger la contrebande aux frontières.
L’Afrique doit sortir du paradigme de la clôture et de l’enfermement qui anime la politique antimigratoire de l’Union européenne. Nous devons aller au-delà des notions héritées des Lumières, à l’instar du « droit d’hospitalité ». En matière de traitement des étrangers et des hôtes, nos traditions philosophiques ont toujours reposé sur un socle anthropologique élargi. Le sociologue marocain Mehdi Alioua a ainsi montré comment, dans les oasis du désert saharien, une tradition multiséculaire d’hospitalité a longtemps prévalu.
Elle reposait sur une agriculture qui soutenait cette hospitalité. Faute de palmiers, arbres fruitiers et légumineuses étaient mis à contribution. Une partie des récoltes était toujours épargnée. Des protéines et calories étaient réservées pour les voyageurs, mais aussi les oiseaux et les insectes qui arrivaient à l’improviste, surtout en cas de disette.
Que dire du droit à une demeure (right of abode) inscrit dans la Constitution ghanéenne ? Il s’agit du droit à un abri, le droit sinon à un chez-soi, du moins à un lieu que l’on peut habiter en tout repos.
Dans le cas ghanéen, les bénéficiaires d’un tel droit sont essentiellement des personnes de descendance africaine dont les ancêtres furent autrefois déportés à l’époque de la traite des esclaves. Il s’agit donc de personnes qui, à un titre ou à un autre, sont nos parents, des êtres humains avec lesquels nous lient des liens de parenté lointains et, au besoin, fictifs. Ces parents ne sont pas des allogènes. Mais ils ne sont pas non plus des autochtones ou des natifs d’un lieu.
Il existe donc dans nos traditions des bases pour élargir le débat contemporain sur les migrations et le sortir des impasses philosophiques d’une Europe qui tourne en rond. Le droit à l’hospitalité suppose un visiteur qui vient d’ailleurs, qui n’est pas un parent, qui est un allogène, et un hôte, un autochtone, qui le reçoit, l’héberge et au besoin prend soin de lui. Ce droit est supposé bénéficier non seulement aux visiteurs, mais aussi aux réfugiés, à ceux et celles qui fuient une menace. Dans ses considérations sur la paix perpétuelle, Kant affirme que ce droit à l’hospitalité est un droit universel.
Il est inconditionnel dans le sens où, à supposer qu’un étranger frappe à notre porte et demande à rentrer, nous sommes dans l’obligation de lui ouvrir la porte et de lui accorder un abri si, en le renvoyant chez lui, il risque de perdre sa vie. Kant précise cependant que nous ne sommes pas obligés de faire de cet étranger un membre à part entière de notre communauté. Son séjour parmi nous ne peut pas être permanent par définition. Ce séjour est appelé, à un moment donné, à prendre fin car il est de la nature de l’étranger de devoir repartir à un moment donné.
Le droit ghanéen à une demeure peut être élargi au-delà des parents réels ou fictifs. Le rêve est que chacun puisse affirmer : « Le chez-moi, c’est le cosmos. » C’est l’ensemble de l’univers dont je suis l’un des habitants parmi d’autres habitants. Alors que notre monde devient chaque jour plus petit et que le temps nous est désormais compté, il nous faut réhabiliter cette appartenance première à l’univers. Elle doit primer sur l’appartenance seconde à un Etat territorial donné.

▻https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2019/11/13/achille-mbembe-peut-on-etre-etranger-chez-soi_1763182
#Mbembe #frontières #ouverture_des_frontières #immobilité #vulnérabilité #vulnérabilisation #immobilisation #capacité_de_mobilité #capacité_de_circulation #Africains #contrôles_frontaliers #corps #externalisation_des_frontières #externalisation #frontières_internes #liberté_de_mouvement #liberté_de_circulation #souveraineté #colonisation #intangibilité_des_frontières #déportation #visas #régimes_d'identité #circulation_interne #droit_d'hospitalité #droit_à_une_demeure (#right_of-abode) #chez_soi #chez-soi

En lien avec le thème de #faire_monde :

Le rêve est que chacun puisse affirmer : « Le chez-moi, c’est le cosmos. » C’est l’ensemble de l’univers dont je suis l’un des habitants parmi d’autres habitants. Alors que notre monde devient chaque jour plus petit et que le temps nous est désormais compté, il nous faut réhabiliter cette appartenance première à l’univers. Elle doit primer sur l’appartenance seconde à un Etat territorial donné.

ping @karine4

Les visas : #inégalités et #mobilités à géométrie variable

L’année 2019 a été marquée par l’expansion, avant tout médiatique, du no-fly movement. En août dernier, le fait que la jeune activiste du climat Greta Thunberg choisisse le bateau pour rallier l’ONU a suscité d’innombrables commentaires, la traversée Plymouth-New York évoquant l’époque des grandes émigrations européennes vers le Nouveau Monde.

Or, depuis une trentaine d’années, des centaines de milliers de voyageurs, souvent aussi jeunes que la militante suédoise, sont privés de la possibilité de prendre l’avion. Chaque année, ils/elles sont contraints de traverser mers et continents, en bateaux et à pieds, car des barrières de papiers et des contrôles multiples les empêchent d’approcher des aéroports. L’accès aux vols internationaux demeure un privilège de riches, auquel seuls les riches ont le choix de renoncer. Jusqu’aux années 1980, rallier l’Europe depuis l’Afrique, l’Asie du Sud-Est ou le Moyen-Orient n’était pas une odyssée : la mobilisation financière des proches suffisait à financer l’achat de billets d’avion qui, bien que coûteux, n’atteignaient pas les sommes faramineuses aujourd’hui réclamées pour monter sur un rafiot ou à l’arrière d’un camion. L’obligation de détenir un visa, qui n’est jamais accordé aux personnes dites « à risque migratoire », est ainsi la principale cause de l’hécatombe qui s’abat sur celles et ceux qui tentent de mettre en oeuvre leur droit à émigrer.

Faire converger les luttes ou se mobiliser pour une mondialisation soutenable et égalitaire passe donc par un renversement des flux aéronautiques : la décroissance des trajets nord-sud restera un repli européocentré si elle ne s’accompagne pas d’un accès sans discrimination aux lignes qui permettent d’aller du sud vers le nord. Des visas pour tou·te·s, ou plus de visas du tout, pour que chacun·e puisse librement choisir de partir ou de rester, sans être illégalisé·e ni mis·e en péril.

https://i.imgur.com/q1g6AFe.png

Pour télécharger la note en pdf :
▻http://www.migreurop.org/IMG/pdf/note_10_fr.pdf

Maroc : Les refoulements des Subsahariens vers la frontière avec l’Algérie reprennent

Cette semaine, les autorités marocaines ont mené à nouveau des raids sur des camps de migrants à #Nador, procédant par la même occasion au #déplacement_forcé d’un groupe de 90 Subsahariens vers la frontière avec l’#Algérie. Une action qui indigne les associatifs et militants des droits humains, dont l’AMDH et le GADEM.

https://static.yabiladi.com/files/articles/85882_4794a8657b6cafae8bbf0467e4910a1320191122132546_thumb_565.jpg

Les conditions météorologiques difficiles en ce début d’hiver ne semblent pas empêcher les autorités marocaines à Nador de poursuivre les campagnes de #déplacements_forcés de migrants subsahariens loin des côtes méditerranéennes.

Jeudi, la section Nador de l’Association marocaine des droits humains (AMDH) a affirmé avoir « constaté deux bus devant le centre d’enfermement d’Arekmane à Nador, au bord desquels 90 #migrants_subsahariens viennent d’être éloignés de nuit et dans un #froid glacial vers la région désertique de la frontière algéro-marocain ».

« Ces bus ne s’arrêtent qu’une fois à l’extrême sud de #Jerada ou #Oujda, dans une désertique où il #neige des fois et où il fait très froid actuellement », compète Omar Naji, président de l’AMDH-Nador, joint ce vendredi par Yabiladi.

https://i.imgur.com/t5Ml3xL.png

▻https://twitter.com/NadorAmdh/status/1197587135072747522?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E11

Conditions difficiles et risques sécuritaires sur une frontière théoriquement fermée

Pour le militant, « ce ne sont plus des déplacements vers le Sud, et notamment Tiznit et nous n’avons pas encore d’explications ». Il rappelle que c’était déjà le cas en 2013 et 2014 lorsque ces migrants étaient plutôt renvoyés vers les frontières Est du royaume. « Ces déplacements avaient pourtant cessé pour une période. Si ces migrants ne sont pas interpellés par l’armée algérienne, ils retournent à Nador et dans le nord », déplore-t-il.

Cette campagne de déplacements forcés depuis les villes du nord semble reprendre. Mercredi, l’AMDH a dénoncé un assaut mené par les autorités marocaines sur des maisons louées par des migrants dans l’optique de les déplacer aussi. Il risquent tout autant un déplacement forcé vers le Sud ou éventuellement vers la frontière avec l’Algérie. Le même jour, des attaques nocturnes contre les campements des migrants à Nador ont été dénoncées par l’ONG via sa page Facebook.

Contactée par Yabiladi, la coordinatrice général du Groupe antiraciste d’accompagnement et de défense des étrangers et migrants (GADEM), Camille Denis, précise ne pas avoir plus d’informations sur cette nouvelle campagne. Mais elle rappelle que ces déplacements forcés vers la frontière avec l’Algérie ne sont pas une pratique nouvelle. « Déjà l’année dernière, le GADEM avait soulevé cette question pour le cas d’un groupe de migrants et en 2016 aussi. La pratique avait diminué depuis l’annonce de la politique migratoire du royaume mais n’a jamais cessé », nous rappelle-t-elle.

« Au-delà des conditions météorologiques difficiles actuellement, ces déplacements forcés soulèvent de sérieuses questions sur les risques sécuritaires pour ces migrants qui, pour certains qui passent du côté algérien, peuvent être renvoyés vers le Niger », déplore-t-elle.

Des migrants déplacés de Nador qui finissent au Mali ?

Et c’est d’ailleurs le cas. Jointe par notre rédaction, Aimée Lokaké, présidente de la Communauté congolaise au Maroc et membre du Conseil des migrants subsahariens au Maroc rapporte le cas d’une migrante subsaharienne. « J’ai l’appelée et elle m’a indiqué qu’elle était à Nador avant d’être déplacée avec d’autres migrants vers l’Algérie, qui les a à son tour expulsés vers le #Niger. Elle se retrouve actuellement au Mali », informe-t-elle. « Ce qui se passe en route et ce qu’ils subissent, on ne le sait pas. Mais nous sommes dans le devoir de protéger les humains », ajoute-t-elle.

« J’ai appelé des ressortissants à Oujda qui m’ont indiqué qu’il s’agit de migrants en situation administrative irrégulière qui voulaient faire la traversée », informe-t-elle encore. Aimée Lokaké insiste aussi sur la nécessité d’encadrer ces personnes et les sensibiliser « au lieu de les déplacer comme ça, surtout qu’un drame peut leur arriver alors que leurs familles croient qu’ils se trouvent ici au Maroc ».

Président ODT-I (syndicat pour les travailleurs migrants), Amadou Sadio Baldé dénonce aussi ces déplacements. « A l’état où nous sommes, soit une phase de l’intégration de migrants, nous déplorons ces déplacements et la précarité qu’ils occasionnent. Nous ne pouvons pas cautionner ces actes », affirme-t-il.

Pour lui, « l’intégration étant un processus long, le Maroc doit prendre en considération la situation de ces migrants et leurs conditions ».

▻https://www.yabiladi.com/articles/details/85882/maroc-refoulements-subsahariens-vers-frontiere.html

#Algérie #renvois #expulsions #migrations #réfugiés #asile #abandon #désert #frontières #refoulements #push-back #refoulement

ping @isskein @karine4

Voir aussi le fil de discussion commencé en 2017, qui relate des mêmes refoulements jusqu’en 2018 :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/627118

EU aid and development funding has provided €215 million for border security in Morocco since 2001

Since 2001, almost €215 million has been provided to Morocco by the EU to finance border security projects. Human rights abuses against migrants and refugees committed by Moroccan authorities call into question whether financial support from the EU to Moroccan border security should continue.

▻http://www.statewatch.org/analyses/no-347-eu-morocco-aid-border-security.pdf

Initial EU funding efforts worth some €68 million took place between 2001 and 2010 and, despite an interlude in which financial support was concerned with reform of the country’s migration policy, in 2018 funding for border security returned with a vengeance, with €140 million promised to Morocco - half of which comes from the EU Trust Fund for Africa.

The strengthening of the EU-Morocco relationship on migration control has coincided with a crackdown on migrant presence in the north of Morocco, during which at least 8,000 people have been arrested and internally displaced to the south by the Moroccan police.

People on the move have often faced violence at the hands of the Moroccan authorities in the name of enforcing the country’s migration policy. Nevertheless, the European Commission is reticent to acknowledge that it may have contributed in some way to operations by the Moroccan security forces in which human rights have been violated - an official told Statewatch that Morocco “advocates for a humanistic approach that considers human rights and integration as its first priority.”

There is little publicly-available information on the results of these funding programmes and the evaluation report for just one project is publicly available. However, the activities foreseen for each project - contained in documents released to Statewatch - indicate that development aid has been used to increase the capacity of Moroccan state institutions to control the country’s land and sea borders, to exchange and coordinate information with both African and European partners. It seems like that the projects currently being implemented will continue in this vein.

▻http://www.statewatch.org/news/2019/nov/eu-morocco-borders.htm
#Maroc #externalisation #externalisation_des_frontières #asile #migrations #développement #aide_au_développement #coopération_au_développement #fermeture_des_frontières #frontières

ping @isskein @karine4

Ajouté à cette métaliste sur développement et migrations :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/733358#message768702

La grande muraille États-Unis-Mexique

Camarades cartographes, on s’intéresse aujourd’hui au mur qui sépare les États-Unis et le Mexique. Il s’agit en fait d’une séquence cartographique réalisée dans le langage R avec Ronan Ysebaert et présentée mercredi dernier dans le cadre d’une journée d’étude organisée par la commission Géomatique du CNFG, la plateforme Géotéca et l’UMS Riate. J’en résume ci-dessous les grandes lignes. Les liens vers l’ensemble des cartes, la présentation et les programmes R sont disponibles en fin de billet.

"Borders and lines on maps are not a representation of preexisting differences between peoples and places ; they create those differences." (Reece Jones, 2016)

Le mur

La ligne séparant les Etats-Unis du Mexique a été définie en 1848, à la fin de la guerre entre les deux pays, dans le traité de Guadelupe Hidalgo. Au départ, la frontière était marquée sur les cartes mais pas nécessairement sur le terrain. Ce n’est qu’en 1890 qu’une commission regroupant les deux pays fut formée pour installer au sol des bornes de démarcation. En 1924, les Etats-Unis déploient pour la première fois des agents de patrouille frontaliers. Au milieu des années 90, certains points de passages, à El Paso ou San Diego, sont carrément verrouillés. Puis, à la suite des attentas du 11 septembre 2001 qui mettent le pays sur une trajectoire toujours plus sécuritaire, le Secure Fence Act est signé en 2006, actant ainsi le projet fou de construire un mur le long de la frontière ; une matérialisation physique de ce qui n’était au départ qu’une ligne tracée à la main sur une carte…

https://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1381/files/2019/11/fig03.png

Un espace géographique inégalitaire

En terme de richesse, cet espace frontalier est aujourd’hui profondément inégalitaire et discontinu. Le PIB par habitant élevé des Etats-Unis place le pays au 14 rang mondial derrière un certain nombre de petits “paradis” fiscaux (Monaco, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, …) tandis que le Mexique reste dans le milieu du tableau, au 87e rang. Le PIB par habitant des Etats-Unis est 7 fois supérieur à celui du Mexique. Une disparité bien visible sur les cartes et dans la vie des gens.

https://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1381/files/2019/11/fig11.png

Si cette discontinuité spatiale peut se cartographier de façon classique en faisant varier l’épaisseur des frontières comme sur une carte de discontinuité classique, elle peut aussi être représentée en faisant varier la hauteur de cette même frontière en fonction des valeurs de discontinuités. En d’autres termes, plus les écarts de richesse sont forts, plus le mur est haut. Un nouveau mur, invisible, emerge alors pour venir se superposer au mur bien réel, construit par les autorités américaines.

https://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1381/files/2019/11/fig12.png

Une frontière militarisée

Pour protéger la richesse américaine, un simple mur ne suffit pas. Il faut aussi des milliers d’hommes armés prêts à empêcher quiconque de passer. Le long du mur ou le long du fleuve Rio Grande, c’est près de 382 postes frontières qui sont référencées dans la base de données OpenStreetMap. Si on les représente sous formes de barres, ils apparaissent alors comme des tours de contrôle, des miradors disséminés le long de la frontière, pour repérer et intercepter tout intrus.

https://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1381/files/2019/11/fig16.png

Une frontière qui tue

Ici comme ailleurs, la militarisation d’une frontière sur un espace inégalitaire a une conséquence directe : cela tue ! 2245 personnes sont mortes ou portées disparues à la frontière entre les Etats-Unis et le Mexique depuis le 1er janvier 2014. Et même si ce chiffre est loin de rejoindre celui des drames qui se passent aux portes de l’Europe (18 000 morts sur la même période), il est chaque année en augmentation. Sur la carte ci-dessous, chaque point rouge représente un événement où au moins une personne a perdu la vie.

https://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1381/files/2019/11/fig19.png

Ci-dessous, chaque cercle correspond au nombre de personnes mortes ou portées disparues lors d’un événement.

https://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1381/files/2019/11/fig20.png

Sur celle-ci, les cercles sont déplacés pour les rendre tous visibles, et voir ainsi l’ampleur du phénomène, sans rien dissimuler.

https://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1381/files/2019/11/fig21.png

Ici, chaque événement est décomposé de telle sorte qu’un point sur la carte correspond à une vie perdue.

https://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1381/files/2019/11/fig22.png

Enfin, par un choix puissant de couleurs – surimpressions de rouges sur fond noir – cette ultime carte animée tente de rendre compte du massacre de masse qui sévit à cette frontière, comme à tant d’autres, et qui continue, encore, et encore, et encore, et encore…. Jusqu’à quand ?

https://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1381/files/2019/11/animate-2.gif

▻https://neocarto.hypotheses.org/7155

#mourir_dans_le_désert #cartographie #frontières #asile #migrations #réfugiés #frontières #USA #Etats-Unis #visualisation #murs #militarisation_des_frontières #décès #morts #Nicolas_Lambert #Mexique

#PrivacyWins : EU Border Guards Cancel Plans to Spy on Social Media (for now)
▻https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/3288/privacywins-eu-border-guards-cancel-plans-spy-social-media-now

As any data protection lawyer and privacy activist will attest, there’s nothing like a well-designed and enforced data protection law to keep the totalitarian tendencies of modern Big Brother in check. While the EU’s data protection rules aren’t perfect, they at least provide some limits over how far EU bodies, governments and corporations can go when they decide to spy on people. This is something the bloc’s border control agency, Frontex, learned recently after coming up with a plan to (...)

#Frontex #migration #frontières #SocialNetwork #surveillance #web #PrivacyInternational

http://privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/flysystem/styles/large/local-default/2019-11/Screen%20Shot%202019-11-08%20at%2016.59.19%20small_1.jpg