Friday, October 30, 2015

What Happens When A Small Town In Europe Faces 70,000 Refugees

Rigonce, Slovenia is on the border with Croatia, and has become a passthrough for migrants en route to Germany and Austria. PHOTOGRAPH BY CIRIL JAZBEC, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

National Geographic: What’s It Like to Have Refugees Stream Into Your Town?

Residents of a tiny Slovenian town are welcoming but have mixed emotions as tens of thousands of migrants flood into local roads and fields.

Rigonce, Slovenia was a quiet, bucolic town on the border with Croatia where farmers tended crops and neighbors greeted each other warmly in the street. That changed last week.

Overnight, the sounds of cows mooing, hens clucking, and tractors turning over the land gave way to the roar of military tanks, the buzz of bullhorns blaring commands in Arabic, and the endless whirring of helicopter blades.

Thousands of migrants—mostly refugees fleeing war and violence in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq—crossed over a bridge from Croatia into the town on their way to Germany and Austria. They had already spent months traveling by boat, train, and foot before reaching this spot. They’re weeks behind a flood of others who had passed through Serbia and Hungary. But when Hungary closed its border with Serbia, these later migrants changed their path, leading them to Rigonce, a town of 176 residents, most of them Catholic. Town officials estimate more than 70,000 migrants have passed through the village.

“This is a catastrophe,” said villager Janja Hribar, 19. “Our cows ran away.”

WNU Editor: Most (if not all) of my friends in Europe are not happy with what they are seeing. Everyone knows that this is just the start of a massive influx of refugees from around the world ....  and come spring time next year this influx will be multiple times what it is now. Everyone also knows that Europe's welfare/social/medical /education/and economic institutions are going to be strained to accommodate these millions of  refugees .... and in fact they will probably break a system that many Europeans have gotten use to. As a result .... instead of telling them I told you so .... my advice to all of them is now the same .... you elect the politicians who make all of this happen, and in this case if you are a German the one to blame is is rather easy .... German Merkel invited all of them to come .... so in the next election vote her and her allies who supported her out of office.

1 comment:

RRH said...

Editor,

If only it were true that it is a matter of Merkel.

The Europeans should understand that allowing their governments to take part in NATO escapades (which, by the way, typically violate its own charter), imperialist interventions, and post colonial revanchism has landed them in this sorry state.

Merkel is only doing what class interests dictate. In this case,flooding the labour market in order to drive down wages and claw back social programs. She is the European el supremo of neoliberal bourgeois politicians.

On another note,

I saw the piece about the GULAG. I wonder if there would be a group such as ISIS in the USSR of the 1930s to 53? And, like the 4 million or so US inmates, I hardly believe those camps were filled with innocents. No offence intended.