Smuggling migrants across Europe.
German activists have called for ordinary people to help migrants to crossEurope by giving them lifts in their own cars.
The Berlin-based initiative claims to be based on the West Germans who smuggled people out of the communist East in the boots of their cars during the Cold War.
In a slickly produced online campaign, the Berlin-based activists encourage people to seek out migrants on Europe’s roadsides and give them lifts to the destination of their choice.
It is nothing like the cold war situation. Migrants are not being kept against their will behind a barrier with the threat of being gunned down if they try to cross. Also, those fleeing repressive regimes and war zones are fully entitled to claim asylum in the first safe haven they reach.
The international law on asylum means you don’t get to pick and choose. So, having landed on the Mediterranean coast, they claim asylum and then, if they gain citizenship, they are free to move around in the EU. So, nothing at all like trying to get out of Eastern Germany.
But the Peng-Collective, the group of activists and artists behind the initiative, claim it is a justified act of civil disobedience.
No it isn’t. It’s self-righteous grandstanding.
Good on them I say!
We can all laugh like drains when they discover that the poor migrants have nicked everything from the car that isn’t bolted down…