Refugee Crisis On Brink Of Catastrophe

The great trek north goes on unabated. Thousands upon thousands heading for the sanctuary of the west; or at least that is what they hope.

This is already an intercontinental crisis but it could turn into a European catastrophe if previously open borders are shut.

It will leave tens of thousands, eventually perhaps hundreds of thousands, trapped and homeless within the confines of at least five unwelcoming countries. It will be chaos.

Over the past few days I have travelled with the refugees through the entire Balkan corridor that begins at the Greek border with Macedonia. Travelling through Macedonia and Serbia to Hungary and eventually Austria.

The sheer numbers of people walking, taking buses, trains and taxis is quite remarkable. But things could soon go badly wrong if the EU does not sort out a strategy it is legally obliged to observe.

Like it or loath it the European Union has a collective responsibility to deal with this refugee crisis. The UK and Ireland have opt-outs of course, but the rest of the countries do not, and that is now putting unprecedented stress on the Union.

We thought the economic bailout issues were bad. This utterly dwarfs that simply because we aren't just talking about banks and economics.

An issue that involves so many people, and it is millions, means that Europe in its entirety could actually be socially reshaped. This is sort of biblical stuff.

Given the hammering me and my colleagues are taking on social media for simply covering a factual story, it is clear that there is a collective ignorance of simple facts and recent history.

The danger is that any reasoned debate is overshadowed by hysterical Twitter bullying that is not based on anything other than prejudice.

These are REFUGEES not the economic migrants who have been dying in their thousands trying to get to Europe from north Africa. It does not matter how many times the tweeters, the bloggers and the political right insist they are, they are not.

The governments who find themselves at the centre of this storm have themselves to blame.

It seems there was a working assumption that millions of people fleeing the war in Syria would stay in the first countries of sanctuary; Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. If that was what they thought then I think we can comfortably conclude it was an absurd notion from the start and was wrong.

The issue of dealing effectively with the murderer Bashar al Assad was dodged and missed.

The arming or supply of weapons to armed groups who had already been totally overwhelmed by jihadists and foreign fighters meant that any hope of trying to engineer a solution without taking an active role was guaranteed to fail.

In essence, by failing to take effective action in Syria in say 2012, European nations actually created and then made worse an already horrendous problem. For the record me and lots of others reported this. It was ignored.

People are quitting the region because Islamic State is spreading, Assad is losing more land and is reacting by bombing more and more civilian areas. There is no likely winner or loser, apart from the Syrian people, so there is no point in waiting in a tent on the Turkish border in the hope one could go home.

Where to go was the question.

The Gulf States are an obvious destination and they have been meddling in this from the very start.

The problem is these "Kingdoms" are predicated on one simple notion: self-preservation.

A bunch of stroppy refugees is not helpful. So they do virtually nothing tangible to help.

Next is Europe.

There was a pretty straightforward rule. Get to any European nation, ask for asylum and stay put. Except Germany drove a coach and horses through that by offering to take in 800,000 people.

The Hungarians have not covered themselves in glory during this whole crisis but they do have a point.

Greece, Macedonia and Serbia are all safe countries ahead of them on the pipeline north to Germany but nobody is stopping there because of the German intervention.

Hungary has serious difficulties with foreigners because its right wing is so fervent. In the coming days they will likely seal the border and try to process the refugees in a field outside the country.

If Germany and Austria do the same then Serbia and Macedonia will likely follow suit.

The many refugees in transit will find themselves stuck and the local populations, already unhappy they are even travelling through, will become aggressive and I suspect violent.

The harsh reality is that the refugees cannot go home. They have to be dealt with.