The year 2015 will go down in history for the massive exodus of people fleeing war and poverty in North Africa, most of which are Syrian. Let’s take a look of the statistics from the UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, regarding the arrivals across the Mediterranean Sea and the Syrian Regional response:
- 477,906 arrivals in Europe by the sea only in 2015, with 2,962 people resulting dead or missing;
- 4,086,760 Syrians registered as Refugees in the neighboring countries, of which 2.1 million in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, and 1.9 million in the only Turkey.
Travelling by unsafe boats, being victims of smugglers and traffickers, they also found out that not everybody was ready to welcome them. Nevertheless, thankfully, someone stood up and opened them the doors. Frau Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany.
On the 24th of August, after over five years of Syrian civil war, Berlin took the lead in efforts to resolve the European refugee crisis, declaring all Syrian asylum-seekers welcome to remain in Germany, no matter which EU country they had first entered.
Suddenly, all current expulsion orders for Syrian asylum-seekers were withdrawn. The fresh Syrian arrivals were no longer be forced to fill in questionnaires to determine which country they had first arrived in, as established in the Dublin III Regulation (No. 604/2013), approved in June 2013.
This move let Mrs. Merkel in the hearts of the asylum-seekers, who went as far as to send her cheerful messages filled with love.
A cheerful tweet to Mrs. Merkel
Probably, they don’t know that she’s behind some of the weapons they fled, especially the chemical ones.
On the 23th of January 2015, Gunther Latsch, Fidelius Schmid and Klaus Wiegrefe, three journalists of the illustrious German magazine Der Spiegel, published a piece called “Decades of Suspicions: Did German Companies Aid Syrian Chemical Weapons Program?“
In this benchmark of investigative journalism, the three report:
For more than 16 months, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has been in possession of a list containing the names of German companies thought to have helped Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and his father Hafis build up Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal over the course of several decades. […]
Normally in such a situation, German agencies or ministries would establish a committee of historians to explore their own histories and air out any dirty laundry they might find. The Merkel administration, though, has shown zero interest in clearing up this episode of Germany’s postwar history.
The lack of motivation is hardly surprising. The issue is not only that of unscrupulous German companies. Rather, it also exposes the hypocrisy of a number of German chancellors, particularly that of Helmut Kohl, the father of reunification and long-time head of the Christian Democrats, the party currently led by Angela Merkel. Kohl was the chancellor of West Germany in 1983 when the issue of chemical weapons arose. […]
The documents recently released by the Foreign Ministry contain much more information about the construction of chemical weapons production facilities in Iraq than they do about the efforts being undertaken in neighboring Syria. In both cases, the documents suggest that successive German governments protected companies that — knowingly or unknowingly — colluded with mass murderers. The practice extended from Kohl to Merkel, from Kohl’s Economics Minister Otto Graf Lambsdorff to current SPD Economics Minister Gabriel.
Helmuth Kohl back in 1983, by Engelbert Reineke
The article really digs down deep inside the issue, and it’s worthy of a full, attentive read.
Don’t miss the Part II of this article. Chunks of dirt never come up to surface alone!