EUROPEAN governments are IGNORING the migrant crisis because they can’t “see it or smell it” but it is actually WORSE than last year, campaigners have warned.
A year after hundreds of thousands of migrants snaked their way across the promised land of Europe, the roads through the Balkans are now clear.
However campaigners warn Europe’s migrant crisis is actually worse than last year - with more migrants arriving on the shores and more people dying.
Brussels bureaucrats sealed a controversial deal with Turkey, reached earlier this year, which allows for the return of all economic migrants from Greece.
But human rights charities’ say the accord has lulled policymakers into a false sense of accomplishment by allowing them to believe that Europe's migration problem has been solved.
Gauri van Gulik, deputy Europe director at Amnesty International, said: "By outsourcing the responsibility to Turkey and to Greece, European governments are basically saying 'we have solved the crisis because we don’t see it, and we can't smell it and we can't hear it.
"The crisis is as big as ever, and as yet unsolved by governments.”
Shocking figures also reveal deaths among those trying to get to Europe, mainly due to drowning, are up more than 15 per cent.
IOM data reveals that 258,186 people arrived in Europe by the end of July, compared with 219,854 over the same period in 2015.
There were 3,176 fatalities by August 8, outpacing the 2,754 who died in the first eight months of last year, a slightly longer period.
Migrant crisis in Europe
Mon, August 1, 2016Hundreds of migrants are continuing to arrive in Europe as they flee the scenes of chaos and brutality of the Islamic State in the Middle East.
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A migrant holds his child up to the fence after leaving flowers, on the Greek side of the border fence
Mr Van Gulik added: ”Its absolutely incredible because if you think about the panic this caused last year and the incentive there was to really get some policy changes in place, nothing has happened.”
In Greece, where arrivals plunged in the wake of an agreement between Turkey and the EU to stem the flow in March, an estimated 57,000 migrants were still stuck in the country by August 8.
As part of the agreement, the EU insisted Ankara must meet 72 basic conditions in order to win visa-free access for its 80 million citizens to the Schengen zone. But Turkey has recently been accused of launching a blackmail campaign to attempt to steamroll through the measure without keeping to its end of the bargain.
AFP
Between the border between Greece and Macedonia, summer crops have replaced the city of tents at the border outpost of Idomeni, even if some locals are convinced there is an unseen population hiding in the surrounding forests, waiting for smugglers to assist them on their onward journey.
The tiny Greek village was a focal point of the migrant flow north toward Germany and other wealthy countries, with thousands of migrants squatting for months waiting for sealed borders with Macedonia to open.
Elsewhere in the Balkans empty roads, unencumbered railway tracks and bucolic countryside replace people-backed places.
Some of the mantle of accepting huge migrant flows that was carried by Greece has been taken up by Italy.
AFP
This follows a resurgence of migrant flows from northern Africa.
More than 140,000 migrants are now housed in Italian shelters, a seven-fold increase on 2013, with the migrant crisis in its third year.
David Miliband, a former British foreign minister who now heads the International Rescue Committee, added: "This is not a blip.
"The forces that are driving more and more people from their homes - weak states, big tumults within the Islamic world, a divided international system. None of these things are likely to abate soon."
