How Dictators Use Refugees (Part 1)

Erdogan, Lukashenko and Putin have re-introduced the instrumentalisation of refugees, an ancient military tactic, in our time. The effects on our open societies are disturbing.

This article was first published by Liberties Journal. It is reproduced here in two parts.

A refugee picks up a lunch handout from caterers at Ritsona camp, Greece in November 2021.

2014

On September 4, 2014, the top brass of the Hellenic Coast Guard held a rare press conference at their Piraeus headquarters. Commodore Yiannis Karageorgopoulos presented a series of slides showing the Aegean and Ionian seas, plus a portion of the east Mediterranean south of Crete, which comprise the coast guard’s vast jurisdiction. Against this he flashed the number of intercepted entries of migrants seeking refugee status – 1,627 in 2012, followed by 12,156 the following year. Arrivals in 2014 suggested that Greece was on track for 31,000 arrivals. This was an underestimation. The annual total that year would almost quadruple, to 43,938.

The coast guard’s concerns were very clear. Half of all the arrivals were Syrians. A third were Afghans. The Arab Spring that had resulted in regime change in Tunisia and Egypt and plunged Syria into catastrophe three years earlier was compounding the effects of America’s regime change efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which created lengthy insurgencies, to produce unprecedented waves of refugees, and these crises were growing worse. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, which had emerged in Iraq’s insurgency, had that summer taken control of Mosul, was slaughtering Yazidi in northern Iraq, and was marching across Syria. NATO’s destruction of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya had led to civil war there, further inflaming regional instability.