http://www.adn.com/article/20160211/nato-will-send-ships-aegean-sea-deter-human-trafficking-0
NATO Will Send Ships to Aegean Sea to Deter Human Trafficking
February 11, 2016
The New York Times
BRUSSELS — NATO will deploy ships to the Aegean Sea in an attempt to stop smugglers moving migrants from Turkey to Greece, the military alliance’s secretary-general said Thursday.
The ships will focus on monitoring the waterways and on providing intelligence to the European Union, which is taking the lead in attempting to stem the flow of migrants, according to NATO officials.
NATO will also enhance its surveillance of the Turkey-Syria border to monitor more closely the flow of migrants and the activities of smugglers, the secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, said. “This is not about stopping or pushing back refugee boats,” he said.
The operation puts the military alliance in the position of conducting what amounts to a law enforcement operation in the middle of a humanitarian and diplomatic crisis. Even if the military move ends up being largely symbolic, it represents the heightened concern over a crisis that has also become a geopolitical conundrum.
Gen. Philip M. Breedlove of the U.S. Air Force, NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, has ordered ships to the Aegean, Stoltenberg said. The vessels are from Canada, Germany, Greece and Turkey, officials said.
Breedlove told reporters that many details of the operation were still being worked out, including how to deal with refugee boats that are intercepted and the rules of engagement. It is not clear, for example, how NATO will distinguish between legitimate refugees and the smugglers whom migrants have paid to facilitate their escape.
“This mission has literally come together in the last 20 hours, and I have been tasked now to go back and define the mission,” Breedlove said. “We had some very rapid decision making, and now we have to go out to do some military work.”
Stoltenberg said it was “important to respond swiftly, because this crisis affects us all.”
“And all of us have to contribute in finding solutions,” he added.
Three members of the alliance — Germany, Greece and Turkey — had asked NATO for help with the sea patrols, as they struggle to deal with the number of refugees who have fled violence in Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iraq, Syria and other conflict-torn countries.
About 3,800 people died last year while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach the European Union. An additional 409 have died this year under the same circumstances, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway, announced the deployment after meeting with the defense ministers of all 28 NATO countries at the alliance’s headquarters here.
The United States supported the move. Before Stoltenberg’s announcement, Defense Secretary Ash Carter confirmed on Thursday that Germany, Greece and Turkey had sought NATO’s help to deal with the migrant crisis, Europe’s biggest displacement of people since World War II.
The defense ministers “tasked NATO military authorities to provide its advice for options for implementing it,” Carter said, calling the human traffickers “a criminal syndicate which is exploiting these poor people.”
Also on Thursday, the German government agreed to permit refugees who had entered the country as unaccompanied minors to bring over their families, in cases of particular hardship.
The agreement allows family reunifications only when “urgent humanitarian reasons” justify the granting of asylum to the children’s parents. The question of when reunifications would be permitted has been a point of dispute between Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democratic Party, with which she governs in coalition. Germany, which received nearly 1.1 million applications for asylum last year, has been trying to stem the flow.
In other developments Thursday, a trial opened in the Aegean resort town of Bodrum, Turkey, of two Syrians, Muwafaka Alabash and Asem Alfrhad. They are accused of causing the drownings of a 3-year-old Syrian, Alan Kurdi, and of four other migrants, including the boy’s mother and brother, in September. Images of the boy’s lifeless body lying face down on a beach in Bodrum helped focus world attention on the crisis.
The two men each face up to 35 years in prison if convicted of charges of human smuggling and causing the deaths of five people “through deliberate negligence.”
Received on Thu Feb 11 2016 - 13:51:49 EST