The New Odyssey Quotes

“Europe, he says, is frightened that an influx of foreigners will erode European values. But what values will there to be uphold if we abandon our duty to protect those less fortunate than ourselves? Wat incentive do we give to refugees to maintain the fabric of our society if that fabric is so ragged in the first place? "If Europe is not able to show a better way of life to them, then they will think that their morality is better than ours."

"They need to face some higher standards of morality, " he says. "If not, they will set their own."

[Quoting Serbian priest Tibor Varga]”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

“In the process, you obscure the actual reasons why people might risk their life to cross the sea – the wars and dictators that forced them from their homes. By denying the existence of these real root causes you simultaneously absolve yourself from the duty of providing sanctuary to those fleeing from them. Acknowledging this duty would prove very problematic: it would be an admission that your own failure to do so previously was the reason why so many thousands then turned in their desperation to smugglers – and why so many of them then drowned in the ocean. It would be an admission that a Syrian boards a boat only when he realises that there’s no realistic means of winning asylum from the Middle East. And an admission that Libya’s current predicament is in part the result of NATO’s (justifiable) airstrikes against Gaddafi in 2011 – and subsequent (and unjustifiable) failure to help Libya’s post-Gaddafi transition.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“The choice is not between the current crisis and blissful isolation. The choice is between the current crisis and an orderly, managed system of mass migration. You can have one or the other. There is no easy middle ground”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

“The story of humanity is essentially the story of human movement. In the near future , people will move even more, particularly if, as some predict, climate change sparks mass migration on an unprecedented scale. The sooner we recognize the inevitability of this movement, the sooner we can try to manage it.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

“The writer Jeremy Harding made this point best in 2000, writing in the London Review of Books: ‘We think of agents, traffickers and facilitators as the worst abusers of refugees, but when they set out to extort from their clients, when they cheat them or dispatch them to their deaths, they are only enacting an entrepreneurial version of the disdain which refugees suffer at the hands of far more powerful enemies – those who terrorise them and those who are determined to keep them at arm’s length.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“At a time when travel is for many easy and anodyne, their voyages through the Sahara, the Balkans or across the Mediterranean – on foot, in the holds of wooden fishing boats and on the backs of land cruisers – are almost as epic as those of classical heroes such as Aeneas and Odysseus. I’m wary of drawing too strong a link, but there are nevertheless obvious parallels. Just as both those ancient men fled a conflict in the Middle East and sailed across the Aegean, so too will many migrants today. Today’s Sirens are the smugglers with their empty promises of safe passage; the violent border guard a contemporary Cyclops. Three millennia after their classical forebears created the founding myths of the European continent, today’s voyagers are writing a new narrative that will influence Europe, for better or worse, for years to come.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“There are two obvious conclusions. First, whether we like it or not, people will – to some extent – keep coming. Second, given this fact, Europe’s current approach to migration benefits no one. Not the refugees, who’ll keep on drowning at sea and suffocating in the back of smugglers’ vans. And not the Europeans, who in their refusal to admit the inevitability of the situation are making things far more chaotic than they need to be.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“To deport refugees from Greece to Turkey, Europe has therefore ridden roughshod over the 1951 convention – a charter created in the aftermath of the Second World War, partly to ensure that the continent did not repeat the mistakes of the Holocaust. Just as we did in the 1930s, Europe is once again sending thousands of people back to places where they risk considerable danger and hardship. We risk unravelling the progress we have made as a continent since 1945. The very identity of post-war Europe is at stake.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“It is, however, the likes of Fico who need to wake from their fantasies. Europe’s isolationists may not feel the ethical need to protect people who’ve fled from Paris-style attacks that occur every day, rather than once a decade. It’s nevertheless time for them to recognise the practical problems with the security solution they seek.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“When I’d previously asked Syrians where they wanted to end up, I drew a range of answers: Holland, perhaps, or Sweden, Austria or the UK. Now almost everyone says they just want to reach Germany. The pragmatism of the lower Balkan countries is also increasingly apparent. Having previously tried to block the path of refugees, or slow them down, Macedonia, Serbia and Greece have now bowed to the inevitable and created a de facto humanitarian corridor to Hungary.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“And Merkel is certainly courageous, promising to welcome any Syrian, regardless of whether they’ve already been fingerprinted in Greece, Hungary or any other EU country.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“after a series of bad-tempered meetings, the countries of the EU finally agree in September to share 120,000 of the refugees who’ll land in Italy and Greece over the next two years, and to resettle 40,000 of those still languishing in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Britain opts out of the agreement, but promises to admit 4000 refugees every year for the next five years. Wonks in Brussels hail all this as a huge step forward, given Europe’s previous intransigence.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“The point of delineating between different kinds of migration is to draw a line between who has the right to move and who doesn’t – and in turn to identify which people should be prevented from moving in the first place. But, in reality, history proves that prevention may not be possible, and so too does the current crisis. People have always moved. The story of humanity is essentially the story of human movement. In the near future, people will move even more, particularly if, as some predict, climate change sparks mass migration on an unprecedented scale. The sooner we recognise the inevitability of this movement, the sooner we can try to manage it.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“Firstly, it’s more accurate. When you’re describing a large group of people whom you don’t know, it makes sense to define them by what they’re doing (which you can be reasonably sure of) rather than why they’re doing it (which you can’t). Migrant is the most efficient way of achieving this: in its purest sense it simply means someone on the move – and casts no aspersions, positive or negative, on why they set out in the first place. Secondly, many of those who push for the use of ‘refugee’ do so by defining refugees in opposition to migrants. Refugees, they say, deserve rights, whereas migrants don’t. Refugees had good reason to leave home; migrants did not. This is a problematic differentiation. In attempting to separate the two groups, we imply that it is easy to distinguish between them. In reality, as I’ve attempted to explain in earlier chapters, it is increasingly hard to do so. There is often overlap, and many people’s experiences might fit the definitions of both categories.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“The first is in late August, when seventy-one refugees are discovered dead in the back of a smuggler’s truck parked at the side of a road in Austria, with putrid juices dripping from the door. The second comes a week later, when the body of a Kurdish toddler, Alan Kurdi, is photographed face down on a beach in Turkey, having drowned with his brother and mother in a failed attempt to reach Kos. Suddenly Europe cares.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“The number of refugees walking through the Balkans has exploded. Back in June, around 1000 people were landing every day on the Greek islands, which was itself unprecedented. Now in mid-September, the average is 5000, and later in the year, it will rise to as high as 9000.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“Fleeing your home isn’t just physically draining, says Nasser, who knows better than most. It’s emotionally exhausting too, and no one does it unless they absolutely have to. ‘My father went out of Palestine, we had to leave another time from Kuwait, and now we’ve left Syria,’ Nasser says. ‘Every time you travel from one place to another you have to make new friends, find new houses, new memories.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“Just as Hashem al-Souki found, the sheer act of leaving Syria was exhausting and financially depleting. Fattemah and Nasser headed north towards Turkey, which required going through a litany of regime checkpoints. At each, the soldiers always wanted bribes – sometimes as much as 1000 Syrian pounds. At the last one, Nasser had only 450 left, and the soldiers were satisfied. Others who had less were beaten till their teeth fell out. The Isis checkpoints weren’t any better: if the jihadists found any women who were travelling alone, they arrested them, perhaps to keep them as slaves. Travelling as a family, Nasser, Fattemah and Hammouda made it through – and reached Turkey in November 2014. Turkey shoulders a bigger burden of”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“Big profit’, as Vasilis the activist would later summarise. But the barwoman is having none of it, keen to foster the impression of Simos as the worst businessman of all time. ‘Profit?’ she says. ‘You can’t make a profit here. Yes, he takes more money, but he also has to pay more staff. He’s just the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time.’ I’m almost convinced, until I remember the missing receipts.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“No one really knows how widespread this kind of fraud is. Inevitably, though, it casts doubt over the precision of UN data, which is the main source of information about the origins of refugees. If the UN gets its statistics from the Greek police, and if the Greek police themselves rely on people’s identification documents (and sometimes just on people’s word), then how can we be sure that so many of the refugees are from Syria?”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“The Greek government has spent the last few months simultaneously begging the EU to ease up on its austerity measures, and contemplating whether to leave the EU entirely. It has no time or energy to devote to the secondary crisis in its islands, which worsens by the day. The number arriving in places such as Kos and Lesvos is now four times higher than the entire 2014 total, causing a huge logjam. When the flow was slower, refugees would be given temporary documentation within a couple of days – paperwork that would then allow them to change money, buy a ferry ticket to the mainland, and then work their way towards the Macedonian border.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“This is something that Europe’s chief border guard refuses to grasp. Fabrice Leggeri is the head of Frontex, the agency that patrols the borders of the European Union. Frontex sends agents to some of the land borders, and patrol boats to the maritime ones. A square-jawed former head of the French frontier police, Leggeri is ideal for the job. When the EU decided not to replace Mare Nostrum in October 2014, it claimed that Leggeri’s teams were more than able to pick up the slack in the southern Mediterranean, thanks to a Frontex operation there known by its codename of ‘Triton’. This was an inspired piece of window dressing. Unlike Mare Nostrum, Triton’s mandate was not to search for and rescue people. Its role was merely to patrol the continent’s nautical borders – in waters far to the north of where Italian ships used to station themselves during Mare Nostrum. It had fewer ships at its disposal, and a budget that was just a third of its predecessor’s. The assumption was that a smaller-scale border-patrol mission would indirectly save more lives.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“Why do we keep going by sea?’ Abu Jana asks me. ‘Because we trust god’s mercy more than the mercy of people here.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“This belief, tragically, turned out to be completely wrong. In the spring that followed the end of Mare Nostrum, more people attempted to cross the Mediterranean from Libya than during the equivalent period in 2014, which itself was a record year. And around eighteen times as many people died. Between January and April 2015, 28,028 people tried to reach Italy from Libya, according to the International Organization for Migration – compared with 26,740 in the first four months of 2014.2 And more than 1,800 died, compared with 96 the year before.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“People turn their heads. A Greek plane? Are they still in Greek waters? It’s another cruel setback. Greek waters mean Greek coastguards and a Greek rescue mission, and no one wants to go to Greece. As absurd as it sounds in retrospect, given the thousands of refugees who would arrive in the Greek islands later in the summer, Greece is still largely an unknown route for Syrians, full of potential pitfalls. To get to Germany from Greece would mean walking through two countries that lie outside the EU (Macedonia and Serbia) and then a third that is in the EU but behaves as if it isn’t (Hungary).”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“The ship looks like a complete community, with families and individuals, young and old, white and black,’ he writes that day. ‘It’s a small mixed community where everyone cooperates with everyone else.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“Nizar claims, complicit officials are paid up to 100,000 Egyptian pounds (about £8,900) a trip. By agreement with the smugglers, police arrive after most of the migrants have managed to leave the beach. At that point, the remaining passengers are arrested and taken for a few days’ detention in police cells, to maintain the pretence that Egypt is playing its part in ending the smuggling trade. ‘It’s normal that if I want to smuggle three hundred [migrants],’ says Nizar, ‘the authorities will take fifty and let two hundred and fifty go, to show the Italians that they are doing some work.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“An accidental smuggler, he fell into the trade because the demand suddenly spiked in 2014, as Syrians realised that Egypt would never offer them the long-term future that they need. Providing alternatives to smuggling communities should be part of any sensible response to the migration crisis. But, in the end, where there is a demand for their services, there will always be smugglers.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“If you’re not protecting me, I will not protect you,’ Hajj himself had warned the EU, back in April. ‘I am the guard protecting your outer gate. If you neglect me, then anyone can get in.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“Until 2011, the business was a comparatively low-level affair. In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the smugglers of Libya and Tunisia might collectively send around 40,000 people2 each year to Lampedusa, the southernmost Italian island, and the Italian mainland beyond. Spain had built not one nor two but three fences around its pair of enclaves in north-west Africa, so Morocco was finally no longer the best option for those trying to reach Europe. The”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis