Doctors Without Borders Says It Won’t Take E.U. Money for Refugees

Nick Cumming-Bruce, The New York Times 

17 June 2016 

Image: A migrant family sat on train tracks outside their tent in a refugee camp in Idomeni, Greece, in March. Tens of thousands of migrants are stranded in such camps in Greece. Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times

GENEVA — Doctors Without Borders, one of Europe’s biggest charities, said Friday that it was turning its back on millions of dollars from the European Union to protest the bloc’s policies on refugees and migrants.

“We will no longer take funds from the E.U. and its member states in protest at their shameful deterrence policies and their intensification of efforts to push people back from European shores,” the charity said in a statement.

It has sharply criticized the agreement between the European Union and Turkey that will provide more than $6 billion to Turkey in return for stopping the flow of refugees to Europe and taking back migrants who cross the Aegean Sea to Greece. That deal, the charity said, made aid to Turkey contingent on tighter border controls, not on the basis of humanitarian need.

“What we are doing here is taking a decision not to take funds from states and institutions that actually jeopardize the very ability to provide one of the main forms of assistance,” Jérôme Oberreit, the secretary general of Doctors Without Borders, said in a telephone interview.

European Union policies are “jeopardizing the very concept of the refugee,” Mr. Oberreit said. “We’re talking about individual human beings here, we can’t accept the collateral damage of broader policies.”

Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French initials M.S.F., received 56 million euros ($63 million) from European Union institutions, member states and Norway, in 2015; Mr. Oberreit said the decision would not affect the charity’s ability to assist refugees and migrants.

Those contributions — including €19 million from the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Office — make up less than 8 percent of the charity’s global budget, which comes mostly from private sources. Mr. Oberreit said Doctors Without Borders’ operations would continue, drawing on its reserves and an emergency budget.

The European Union’s chief spokesman, Margaritis Schinas, told reporters in Brussels that the bloc took note of the charity’s decision but insisted that its aid was aimed at addressing the basic needs of migrants in Turkey, including protection, and was focused on the most vulnerable.

The number crossing the Aegean Sea has fallen since the agreement with Turkey came into effect in March, and European countries’ decisions to close borders along the main routes taken by migrants has left more than 50,000 people stranded in camps in Greece.

Those who still manage to reach the Greek islands from Turkey are held in overcrowded camps in poor conditions, Mr. Oberreit said.

“We will not be instrumentalized into a system that is doing more harm than good through detention,” he said.

He expressed fears that the deal with Turkey could set a dangerous precedent: Kenya had cited that agreement as a reason for closing Dadaab, one of the world’s biggest and oldest refugee camps with 330,000 people, Mr. Oberreit said.

The European Union is now working on agreements similar to its deal with Turkey with 16 other countries in Africa and the Middle East, from which many of the migrants trying to reach Europe have fled.

“Deterrence policies sold to the public as humanitarian solutions have only exacerbated the suffering of people in desperate need,” Mr. Oberreit said in a statement. “There is nothing remotely humanitarian in hiding this despair offshore.”
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© 2016, The New York Times 

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