Eastern Bloc s Resistance to Refugees Highlights Europe s Cultural and Political Divisions
By RICK LYMAN

WARSAW — Even though the former Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe have been asked to accept just a tiny fraction of the refugees that Germany and other nations are taking, their fierce resistance now stands as the main impediment to a unified European response to the crisis.

Poland’s new president, Andrzej Duda, has complained about “dictates” from the European Union to accept migrants flowing onto the Continent from the Middle East and Africa.

Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, says his country will accept only Christian refugees as it would be “false solidarity” to force Muslims to settle in a country without a single mosque. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s hard-line prime minister, calls the influx a “rebellion by illegal migrants” and pledges a new crackdown this week.

The discord has further unsettled a union already shaky from struggles over the euro and the Greek financial crisis and now facing a historic influx of people attracted by Europe’s relative peace and prosperity.

When representatives of the European Union nations meet on Monday to take up a proposal for allocating refugees among them, Central and Eastern European nations are likely to be the most vocal opponents. Their stance — reflecting a mix of powerful far-right movements, nationalism, racial and religious prejudices as well as economic arguments that they are less able to afford to take in outsiders than their wealthier neighbors — is the latest evidence of the stubborn cultural and political divides that persist between East and West.

When joining the European Union — as the former Communist countries have done since 2004 — nations are asked to pledge support to a raft of so-called European values, including open markets, transparent government, respect for an independent media, open borders, cultural diversity, protection of minorities and a rejection of xenophobia.

But the reality is that the former Communist states have proved sluggish in actually absorbing many of these values and practicing them. Oligarchs, cronyism and endemic corruption remain a part of daily life in many of the countries, freedom of the press is in decline while rising nationalism and populist political movements have stirred anti-immigrant tensions.

“People must remember that Poland has been transitioning from communism for only 25 years,” Lech Walesa, who led that country’s independence movement, said in an interview. “Our salaries and houses are still smaller than those in the West. Many people here don’t believe that they have anything to share with migrants. Especially that they see that migrants are often well-dressed, sometimes better than many Poles.”

Few migrants, in fact, are particularly interested in settling in Eastern Europe, preferring to head to Germany or Scandinavia, where social welfare benefits are higher, employment opportunities greater and immigrant communities better established. In that sense, migrants are aligned with leaders in Eastern and Central European capitals, who frequently argue that the 28-member bloc should focus first on securing its borders and figuring out a way to end the war in Syria before talking about mandatory quotas for accepting refugees.

But as often as not, the political discourse in these countries has quickly moved toward a wariness of accepting racial and religious diversity.

“This refugee flow has outraged the right wing,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “If you scratch the surface, why are they so upset? It’s not about jobs or the ability to manage them or social welfare. What it is really about is that they are Muslim.”

Unlike countries in Western Europe, which have long histories of accepting immigrants from diverse cultures, the former Communist states tend to be highly homogeneous. Poland, for instance, is 98 percent white and 94 percent Catholic.

“And the countries that have very little diversity are some of the most virulently against refugees,” said Andrew Stroehlein, European media director for Human Rights Watch.

Even mainstream political leaders eager for closer ties to Brussels, the European Union’s headquarters, feel pressure to appeal to this growing nationalist wave.

“By toughening up their rhetoric and showing a strong hand toward the Roma minority, facing down the E.U. and refusing a common solution to the refugee crisis, they are trying to outbid the far right and keep the traditional political parties in power,” said Zuzana Kusá, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

There is also widespread disappointment with the pace of economic change since communism’s fall, and a sense that the countries are too poor to offer substantial support to immigrants.

“There is a long history of victimization in our region,” said Csaba Szaló, a professor of sociology at Masaryk University in Brno. “We are the ones who have always been victims of injustice, the ones who have suffered. And now there is somebody trying to grab that status. People find it very difficult to accept that somebody might suffer more than us.”

While rising xenophobia is playing a role, there are other factors behind the East-West divide, said Marcin Zaborowski, executive vice president at the Center for European Policy Analysis and head of its Warsaw office.

“The primary reason for this difference in attitude is that we come from a region where the tradition of accepting culturally different refugees is very weak,” he said. “And now there is this wave of refugees from another continent that has no precedent, so people don’t know what to think.”

Most of the countries, like Poland, have “no proper infrastructure in place to deal with such cultural assimilation” and little appetite to spend precious resources building one, Mr. Zaborowski said.

As for the region’s seeming indifference to the migrants’ plight, that is partly because unlike France, Britain and Germany, the former Communist states have no history of colonialism, he said.

“The attitude is: We didn’t meddle in these countries that are now sending the refugees, like other nations did, and so we have no sense of guilt about our obligation to deal with them,” Mr. Zaborowski said.

And all of these attitudes blend together into a common aversion to being told what to do by Brussels.

In Hungary, Mr. Orban has taken a particularly uncompromising approach, demanding more help from Brussels in dealing with the tens of thousands who continue to enter his country while insisting that Hungary is under no obligation to endanger its traditional Christian values by accepting large numbers of Muslims.

On Tuesday, a new raft of refugee laws go into effect that will allow the Hungarian government to build new “transit zones” at the border where arrivals would have their asylum requests quickly reviewed — eight days, plus three more for an appeal, a pace that refugee advocates believe violates European Union due process rules.

But Hungary is not the only country that has taken a hard line or seen anti-immigrant protests.

Anti-immigrant marches have become a regular occurrence in Slovakia and some other nations.

In Estonia, the northernmost Baltic nation, which has a population of just 1.3 million, an agreement to accept fewer than 200 refugees over the next two years was enough to set off protests. Right-wing bikers demonstrated outside the country’s only refugee relocation facility in July, and earlier this month it was burned to the ground.

Officials in Latvia said they would continue to resist mandatory requirements that they accept a set number of refugees while the parties in the ruling coalition appear unable to agree on whether to require a parliamentary vote on the issue.

“It would be very wrong and sad if this matter threatened the government,” said President Raimonds Vejonis.

Lithuanian officials said they were open to discussing the acceptance of more refugees, but only on a voluntary basis, and would continue to oppose a “permanent mechanism” that would allocate future refugees.

Bulgaria had agreed to accept 500 refugees, but under a new formula unveiled last week, it could be asked to take up to 2,000.

Talking by phone while driving from an economic conference in southern Poland, Robert Biedron, the mayor of the city of Slupsk, said he was ashamed of the reaction of many to the plight of the migrants. “There is always conflict around the world and people need help,” Mr. Biedron said. “Perhaps, someday again, the Polish people might need help. Do we want to hear, ‘Oh, Poles are a danger to society, you are different, you are not of our culture.’ ”

Already, he said, he has blocked many former friends on Facebook — “even well-educated people, who I thought were my friends” — over anti-immigrant comments they have posted.

“Here I am, driving on a road that was built with European Union money,” Mr. Biedron said. “It was built with money taken from taxpayers in Italy and Germany and France. Now we refuse to do our part? I am really ashamed.”

Mr. Walesa said he intended to do his part. Reacting to a call from Pope Francis that Catholics take in a refugee family, Mr. Walesa said he wanted to do just that, if he can talk his wife into it.

“She is reluctant,” he said. “She had to single-handedly raise our children and she’s exhausted. So I would have to be the one responsible for taking care of the migrants.”

中東歐拒難民 窮國不要穆斯林

歐盟上周公布收容十六萬難民的方案，中歐和東歐分配到相對較少的配額，但波蘭、斯洛伐克、匈牙利等前共產國家強烈反對，成為歐盟對抗難民危機的主要障礙。

紐約時報報導，波蘭總統杜達抱怨歐盟配額方案；斯洛伐克總理費科則說該國只收基督徒，因為國內沒有清真寺，收留穆斯林是「錯誤的團結」。匈牙利總理奧班形容難民湧入形同「非法難民煽動的叛亂」，要求歐盟另謀對策。

歐元危機、希臘金融危機侵蝕歐盟穩定基礎，如今難民問題讓東西歐文化與政治分裂再次浮上檯面。東歐反對收容難民的原因包括強而有力的極右派運動、國族主義、種族及宗教偏見，以及不如西歐富裕的經濟因素。

前共產國家2004年加入歐盟時，被要求恪守「歐盟價值」，包括開放市場、透明政府、尊重獨立媒體、開放邊境、文化多元、保護弱勢和「反對仇外」。東歐顯然未奉行歐盟價值，寡頭政治、任用親信和地方貪腐見怪不怪，媒體自由也因國族主義和反難民的民粹政治運動而受限。

波蘭前總統華勒沙說，「波蘭才脫離共產廿五年，我們的薪水和房子都比不上西歐國家。許多本地人不認為他們還有什麼能分給難民，一些難民穿著甚至比波蘭人得體。」

除了政治因素，還有宗教因素。人權觀察組織的羅斯說，「難民潮惹毛右派，但癥結在於難民是穆斯林。」西歐在歷史上曾接納多元文化難民，但東歐國家並非如此，波蘭白人占總人口九成八，九成四是天主教徒。

基礎建設不足也是一大問題。智庫「歐洲政策分析中心」華沙辦公室主任扎博羅夫斯說，波蘭等國沒有完善的基礎建設應付文化融合，也沒興趣增建。他說，不像英法德等國，東歐國家沒有殖民歷史；東歐自認未干預難民母國事務，無義務接納難民。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/world/europe/eastern-europe-migrant-refugee-crisis.html

2015-09-14．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯陳韻涵