Norway to build border fence with Russia to keep out refugees

[GennGreymane]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a7208806.html

Norway is building a steel fence at its arctic border with Russia after an influx of thousands of refugees last year.

The new fence, which will be around 660 feet long and 11 feet high, will stretch from the Skorskog border point, sources in the Norwegian government told Reuters.

Construction of the fence is due to finish before winter frosts set in, making it harder to enter Norway through the forest.

Deputy Justice Minister Ove Vanebo defended the gate and fence, telling Reuters they were "responsible measures".

Although around 23,000 people, mostly from Syria, applied for refugee status in Norway last year, the number of asylum seekers arriving plummeted by 95 per cent in the first third of 2016.

“I can’t see a need for a fence,” Rune Rafaelsen, the mayor of the Soer-Varanger region which includes the border, told Reuters. “There are too many fences going up in Europe today,” he added, citing examples of barbed wire in nations such as Hungary.

Linn Landro, of the Refugees Welcome group in Norway, said: "We've an obligation to be a country people can flee to.

"The fence sends a very negative signal, including to Russia because it says that 'we don't trust you'."

Last year, Russia and Norway battled to repeatedly reject the same refugees.

Norway said it would begin sending refugees who have Russian residency permits back to Russia, arguing it had received no "satisfactory" explanation from Russia as to why it sent so many refugees to Norway rather than Finland.

Refugees used bicycles to cross the Arctic border, because Russian border police do not allow on-foot crossings and it is illegal to cross the Norwegian border if the driver does not have the correct papers.

[TrumpIsPresident]

That's racist!
(did I do it right?)

Wow, surprise surprise, one nation doesn't want invaders from another nation crossing into its territory and they're willing to build a wall to help prevent that from happening.

Its almost like ...like ...somebody used logic here.

[Allarius]

I just hope they make Russia pay for it.

[Antbregante]

Will Russia be paying for it?

[Skroe]

Russia has been weaponizing refugees. How do people think that refugees manage to get across the heavily defended Russian-EU/NATO border? It's because Russian authorities push them across and cart them north.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/artic...abilize-europe

By
Josh Rogin
Some officials in Europe see Russia's hand in the rising migration crisis, accusing the Kremlin of exacerbating anti-Muslim sentiment to benefit right-wing parties at a fragile moment for the European Union.

Even before the latest terror attacks in Brussels, anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiment in Europe had been on the rise. Most of the refugees arriving in Europe are escaping war and poverty in the Middle East and seeking a better life in the West. But according to European officials, other migrants are traveling into the Nordic and Baltic states from Russia and are not fleeing the fighting in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan, but rather have been living in Russia and are being encouraged by the Kremlin to join the tide in Western Europe.

Speaking to an audience at the German Marshall Fund Brussels Forum last weekend, Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves alleged that these migrants often hide their status as permanent residents of Russia.

“You’ve seen several thousand coming from Finland across the Russian-Finnish border,” he said. “There is something very fishy going on.”

Russia encourages these migrants, according to Ilves and other European officials at the forum, because they strain European governments and stoke anti-Muslim sentiment that benefits the far-right parties Russia has supported. Pro-Russian parties have gained influence in Slovakia, Greece, Hungary, France and elsewhere. They tend to support the weakening of European Union institutions and favor closer ties to Russia, including through the end of sanctions.

Russia’s campaign of airstrikes in Syria, which has largely targeted civilian areas, also adds to the waves of Muslim migrants entering Europe through Greece. General Philip Breedlove, NATO's supreme allied commander in Europe, said earlier this month that Russia was “weaponizing migration,” as a means to “overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.”

Ilves added that anti-immigrant fervor is helping to raise support for right-wing populists in “virtually every single European country today” and that if more of them come into power, international agreements that the U.S. values could come unraveled.

European leaders who share some of Russia's goals have capitalized on the anti-refugee momentum. Zsuzsanna Szelenyi, a member of the parliament and the opposition party in Hungary, told me that her nation is one example, as the prime minister has won support for anti-democratic and anti-EU policies.

“There’s not a single refugee in Hungary, but his popularity based on this anti-refugee campaign is rising,” she said. “The Russians use it to distract Europe, and I think it is successful.”

Vladimir Chizhov, Russia’s permanent representative to the European Union, told me that Ilves’s claims about the number of Muslim migrants coming from Russia into Europe were exaggerated. The overall theory that Russia is stoking migration to sew political unrest in Europe, he said, “is the product of a very inflated mind.”

In January, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov publicly accused the German government of covering up a gang rape of a 13-year-old girl by Muslim refugees in Berlin.

Berlin prosecutors said such a rape never occurred. It was first reported in the Russian media, after which Russian-speaking Germans and right-wing activists protested in the streets of several German cities. Lavrov’s comments were seen in Europe as intentionally pouring fuel on the fire.

“That is instrumentalizing a tragedy in Europe,” said Ilves. “And that sums up the situation in Europe right now.”

Even if Russia is not pushing its own Muslim residents over the border, said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Moscow’s goal is to create instability in Europe as a means of creating a relative advantage.

“Whether that’s deliberate or inadvertent, Russia still achieves the same outcome," the New Hampshire Democrat said. "And I think Russia is going to look at agitating wherever they can to create disaffection in Europe.”

Europe has a number of problems, including the radicalization of Muslim youth, the threat of terrorism, the influx of refugees and the economic strains on member states. Russia did not initiate any of these problems, but it is making them all worse.

In destabilizing Europe, Russia is trying to roll back the post-World War II order that Europe and the U.S. built over decades. The end game is to pull as many European countries as possible into the Russian sphere of influence and away from the West.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/wo...eled.html?_r=0

KANDALAKSHA, Russia — So many decrepit Soviet-era cars carried migrants into Europe from this frozen Russian town in recent months that border officials in Finland, who confiscate the rust-bucket vehicles as soon as they cross the frontier, watched in dismay as their parking lot turned into a scrapyard.

To clear up the mess and provide some space for freshly confiscated cars, the Finnish customs service set up a separate dumping ground.

Then last month, as suddenly and as mysteriously as it had started, the parade of migrants in rusty old cars came to an abrupt halt, or at least a pause.

“We don’t know what is going on,” said Matti Daavittila, the head of the ice-entombed Finnish border post near Salla. “They suddenly stopped coming. That is all we know.”

Compared with the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war or hardship who made the trek to Europe last year through Turkey to Greece, the flow of refugees and migrants on the Arctic route through Russia — first into Norway and later into Finland — is tiny.

But the stop-go traffic has added a hefty dose of geopolitical anxiety, not to mention intrigue, to a crisis that is tearing the European Union apart. It has sent alarm bells ringing in Helsinki, Finland’s capital far to the south, and in Brussels, where European Union leaders, at recent crisis meetings on migration, discussed the strange and ever-shifting Arctic route through Russia.

The intrigue flows from a growing suspicion in the West that Russia is stoking and exploiting Europe’s migrant crisis to extract concessions, or perhaps crack the European unity over economic sanctions imposed against Moscow for its actions in Ukraine. Only one of the European Union’s 28 member states needs to break ranks for a regime of credit and other restrictions to collapse.

“Unfortunately, this looks like a political demonstration by Russia,” said Ilkka Kanerva, Finland’s former foreign minister and now the chairman of its parliamentary Defense Committee. “They are very skillful at sending signals. They want to show that Finland should be very careful when it makes its own decisions on things like military exercises, our partnership with NATO and European Union sanctions” against Russia.

Unlike the flow of refugees and migrants into Greece by boat, in which the tempo is largely set by the weather in the Aegean Sea, the flow through Russia is almost entirely dependent on whether Russia’s Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the K.G.B., opens or closes roads in a heavily militarized border region crammed with bases.

In the first two months of this year, nearly 800 asylum seekers crossed from Russia into Finland near Salla, a crossing point west of Kandalaksha in the Finnish region of Lapland, compared with none in same period last year.

Sayid Mussa Khan, a 31-year-old Afghan who had worked for an American security company in Kabul, made it to Finland on Feb. 28, just a day before the traffic suddenly halted after a statement by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to security service chiefs that Russia should “tighten monitoring of refugee flows.”

Along with his family and around a dozen other asylum seekers, Mr. Khan set out at dawn from Kandalaksha in a convoy of old cars and, accompanied by Russian guides, breezed through three checkpoints to reach the Finnish border.

Mr. Khan, who sat with his wife and baby son in the back seat of a wheezing Lada, said he had never even heard of Finland when he left Kabul in 2014 and, after two years in Russia and Belarus, still was not really sure where it was he was going.

But he knew he wanted to get his family to Europe, and had been assured that he would get there once he had paid $6,000 to a facilitator in Moscow, who immediately arranged for the family to be issued with a deportation order by the Russian authorities.

“He asked me where I wanted to go and said: ‘No problem. We will get you to Finland. Everybody is going there now,’ ” said Mr. Khan, who is now in Finland waiting for the authorities to review his asylum application.

Jorma Vuorio, the director general of Finland’s Migration Department, said he had been surprised by the “completely new phenomenon” of asylum seekers arriving from Russia. But he added that there “was no proof, just speculation,” of involvement by the Russian state.

The traffic into Europe through the Arctic, which has involved relatively few Syrians, began late last summer, with more than 5,000 migrants on bicycles suddenly pouring across Russia’s previously tightly controlled northern border into Norway. But that cycle-borne flow ended abruptly on Nov. 30, after the Russian authorities reintroduced tight controls just as Norwegian officials arrived in Moscow for talks on how to stem the flow.

The migrants’ route then shifted southward to Russia’s border with Finland, as Russian guards on roads to two Finnish border crossings stopped blocking travelers without visas.

Finland swiftly banned cycle traffic across its 830-mile border with Russia, allowing only people in cars to cross. This killed a booming market for old bicycles in Russia’s far north but created a new market for cheap and decrepit Russian cars with just enough life left in them to limp across the border to Finland.

Mr. Vuorio said his Russian counterpart had informed him that Russia had more than 11 million foreigners living in its territory, a vast pool of potential migrants to Europe, but added that he doubted Moscow would allow a chaotic flood through sensitive border regions. Criminal gangs, not officials, he added, seem to be largely responsible for managing the scale and direction of migration to Europe through Russia.

He said the last halt in the traffic was not the result of any deal struck by Finnish and Russian officials, who have been engaged in weeks of intensive, high-level discussions. “Our only deal is that we have good relations,” he said, bewildered by the stop-go flow.

But that, said the Defense Committee chairman, Mr. Kanerva, is precisely Russia’s aim — to keep Finland off balance and thus wary of making any move toward NATO or making other decisions that would anger Moscow. Noting that Russia had shown itself adept in Ukraine at so-called hybrid warfare, the use of nonmilitary tools to pursue its goals, he said migrants “are part of a broader strategy.”

“They want to make us nervous and pay attention to their interests,” he added.

Like the conflict in Syria, Europe’s migrant crisis has given Moscow an opportunity to assert itself as an indispensable power that Europe cannot afford to ignore, much less antagonize. When Finland’s president visited Moscow last month, Mr. Putin scolded him over the damage to both Russia and Finland caused by sanctions. The two leaders agreed to bar all but their own citizens and citizens of Belarus at two Arctic border crossings for six months.

While Russian officials have strenuously denied steering migrants toward Europe, the Kremlin has taken thinly disguised delight in Europe’s troubles, particularly those of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who has dominated European policy toward Russia on sanctions and other matters. State-controlled Russian television has served up a daily diet of migrant-related horror stories, including a false report that migrants had raped a 13-year-old Russian-German girl in Berlin.

Mr. Putin, meanwhile, recently hosted visits to Moscow by two of Ms. Merkel’s most vocal critics, President Viktor Orban of Hungary and Premier Horst Seehofer of the German state of Bavaria.

Russia’s military actions in Syria, where the bombing of rebel targets often prompts the flight of civilians nearby, has further added to suspicions, especially in the United States, that Moscow wants to stoke Europe’s migration crisis for political ends.

Speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee recently in Washington, NATO’s American commander, Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, accused Russia of “deliberately weaponizing migration in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.”

A spokesman for Russia’s Defense Ministry, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, dismissed General Breedlove’s allegations as absurd, noting that Europe’s refugee crisis began long before Moscow started its military action in Syria on Sept. 30.

The one group that needs no convincing about Russia’s manipulation of the migrant issue is the migrants themselves.

In interviews in Kandalaksha, stranded migrants from West and Central Africa said they had each paid thousands of dollars to “guides” who promised to get them to Finland and who worked closely with Russian officials. The system was highly organized, the migrants said, with no more than 30 people allowed to make the journey to Finland each day. Who went when, and in which vehicle, was established in advance, they said, with the guides and officials drawing up detailed lists with names, departure dates and cars.

“They are all in the same clique: the officials, the hotel people, the drivers. This is their business,” said Honoré Basubte, a young migrant from West Africa who had come to Russia as a student. Like many of the other migrants who traveled to Kandalaksha, he said he had been issued a Russian deportation order before setting out and been told to leave quickly for Europe.

“Now they say we can’t go because the border is closed,” he said. “This is all an ugly game.”

[Independent voter]

And they make fun of Trump.

[Forogil]

Russia has been weaponizing refugees. How do people think that refugees manage to get across the heavily defended Russian-EU/NATO border? It's because Russian authorities push them across and cart them north.

Makes sense.

That the asylum seekers just randomly suddenly travelled across Russia and appeared at the Norwegian border and bought bicycles (due to a legal loophole) on their own seems pretty farfetched. I'm sure that some Russians make good money on this.

[satimy]

Is Mexico paying for it?

[7-4]

And they make fun of Trump.

Even the right-wing in Europe would be considered left-wing in the US.

[Deleted]

Is there even anyone living in that part of Norway?

[zealo]

Is there even anyone living in that part of Norway?

Some do, but the larger populations is further south.

[Ettan]

Is there even anyone living in that part of Norway?

Yup, most are small communities that are scattered along the coast, old fishing villages and the like. Kirkenes Vadsø Vardø are all towns like these.
Further innland you only find a few sami towns Kautokeino/ Karasjok ect.

But most of the people this far north live @ tromsø or in towns close to the troms region. Its more or less the capital of the north, for both samis/ norwegians I think only Murmansk has anything close to its population. I have been studying here for 4 years now @ the worlds nothernmost uni, my last uni pick..
But I regret nothing, its fucking beautiful and we have a 1-6 student to local ratio + the highest number of bars per capita of any nor city.

Not a very populous region overall yet there is alot more people here if you compare it to say nothernmost sweden/russia/finnland ( swe is much more urban, and utterly desolate this far north).
The actual distances up here are quite massive however, despite not looking like much on most world maps. (tromsø- murmansk looks fairly close but its actually like 1k km while tromsø-stockholm is 1.5k <- this is about the distance from copenhagen to southernmost italy.)

[Deleted]

Some do, but the larger populations is further south.

I am just somewhat curious how they seek asylum so far north.

[Vash The Stampede]

Will Russia be paying for it?

I don't think Russia is going to play along with that idea.

[Deleted]

Yup, most are small communities that are scattered along the coast, old fishing villages and the like. Kirkenes Vadsø Vardø are all towns like these. -snip

Sounds quite nice, thanks for the information

[Deleted]

a fence? sounda pathetic, build a wall or dont build at all!

[May90]

The analogy to a state with asylum system building a fence to contain asylum seekers, would be a shelter for homeless people with two police officers guarding the entrance and not letting the homeless in. Who needs brains, right?

[zenkai]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a7208806.html

Donald Trump approves.

- - - Updated - - -

That's racist!
(did I do it right?)

Wow, surprise surprise, one nation doesn't want invaders from another nation crossing into its territory and they're willing to build a wall to help prevent that from happening.

Its almost like ...like ...somebody used logic here.

Hehe indeed.

[CellarDoor]

Even the right-wing in Europe would be considered left-wing in the US.

People still belive this bullshit? Read a Victor Orban Speech. Read a Geert Wildeers speech. You will never hear Trump spouting such things. If anything, Trump has adopted European right wing ideology almost perfectly. The European right wing simply has not existed for the last 40-50 years, but it is being reborn.

[Saucexorzski]

Good for them, walls help secure boarders from unwanted humans.