Countries Engaged In Demographic Terrorism: Morocco, Turkey, Israel, United States

Morocco, Turkey, Israel, and the United States are violating international norms and threatening the political stability of Europe by engaging in demographic terrorism against it. 

Their use of refugees and migrants as political bargaining chips against their political and geopolitical enemies has no precedence in history. 

Rulers of the past have relied on demographic engineering to stay in power, fight off invasions, and consolidate territorial gains, but they almost always used their own subjects or acquired slaves and prisoners of war for these purposes. 

What these nations are doing today is more barbaric and unprecedented.

They must be penalized and sanctioned.

As frontline states in the Mediterranean Spain and Greece must coordinate militarily and impose harsh penalties on Morocco and Turkey. 

So far they have done the exact opposite by rewarding their illegal demographic practices. 

II.

An excerpt from, “Turkey’s demographic terrorism” by Ioannis Kotoulas, ahramonline, March 17, 2020:

Turkey is taking advantage of the fact that since the eruption of the Syrian Civil War it has become the largest transit country for mass illegal migration. Concerning Greece, Turkey’s objectives are to check the operational readiness of the Greek administration and military apparatus and to create regional zones of demographic instability in the Aegean Sea and land borders. Turkey is openly revisionist towards Greek state sovereignty in the Aegean Sea, disputing not only Greece’s right to extend its territorial waters to 12 miles, but also Greek sovereignty over small islands in the Aegean Sea. 

Concerning the EU, Turkey aims to blackmail diplomatic support in its confrontation in Syria and to extract additional financial aid for the accommodation of migrants and refugees and further concessions, such as visa liberalisation for Turkish citizens travelling in the EU.

Allowing the mass movement of illegal migrants through its territory towards the territory of Greece, Turkey de facto violates the EU-Turkey Agreement that was concluded in March 2016 with the goal of averting the massive influx of illegal migration to Europe. The agreement was concluded after the dramatic mass migration crisis of 2015, when over one million illegal migrants entered the European Union through the Mediterranean routes. According to the provisions of the deal, Turkey continues to receive generous payments in order to house and accommodate refugees and migrants, thus stopping further mass influxes into European territory.

The Turkish government was granted by the EU a payment of approximately six billion Euros, three of which were used for the accommodation and services offered to migrants residing in Turkey. Turkey assumed the obligation of stopping the mass influx into Europe and thus of controlling the outflow of migrants towards EU territory. In the years after the 2016 deal, Turkey violated the agreement constantly, however, and Turkey continues to allow the departure of migrants heading for Greece either through the land route in Thrace or by sea towards the nearby lying Greek islands in the eastern part of the Aegean Sea. 

. . .With its act of demographic terrorism against Greece and the EU, Turkey is more and more acting as a revisionist state actor that undermines fundamental notions of the international order, such as state sovereignty, border control and the legitimacy of a state’s actions to safeguard its territorial integrity. A radical change of approach among European decision-makers vis-à-vis Turkey’s destabilising and revisionist behaviour should now become a top priority for regional stability in the Mediterranean and Europe itself.