In its latest lurch to the far right, Denmark plans to send some refugees back to Syria kake.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kake.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By demonising asylum seekers, Denmark reflects a panic in social democracy Kenan Malik
What do you call a government so hostile to refugees that it wants to send them back to a country that tortures and “disappears” its critics on a mass scale? Reactionary? Monstrous? In Denmark, they call it social democratic.
Denmark is the first European nation to insist that Syrian refugees should return to their home country because Bashar al-Assad’s regime is now in control and there is little conflict. It has revoked the residency permits of dozens of Syrian refugees and started detaining those it wants to deport. Yet it cannot actually deport anyone because it has severed diplomatic relations with Damascus. Assad’s regime is, apparently, despotic enough for Copenhagen to abjure relations but not so bad that Syria is unsafe for returning refugees.
It felt like paradise when Dania and Hussam first moved to Denmark.
They did not speak a word of Danish yet the Scandinavian country was an outpost of calm for the siblings, who fled the destruction and death that followed the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011.
“I can hardly remember anything but war in Syria,” Dania, 22, told CNN of her time growing up on the outskirts of the country’s capital, Damascus. She said what drew her family of five to Denmark was its reputation for welcoming refugees being the first country in the world to sign the United Nations Refugee Convention in 1951.
Forcing Syrians to return home shows the left apeing the far right in a race to the bottom
Refugee children await a visit by Queen Margrethe to their camp on the Danish island of Langeland in 2016. Photograph: Ole Jensen - Corbis/Corbis/Getty Images
Refugee children await a visit by Queen Margrethe to their camp on the Danish island of Langeland in 2016. Photograph: Ole Jensen - Corbis/Corbis/Getty Images
Sun 18 Apr 2021 03.30 EDT
What do you call a government so hostile to refugees that it wants to send them back to a country that tortures and “disappears” its critics on a mass scale? Reactionary? Monstrous? In Denmark, they call it social democratic.
In its latest lurch to the far right, Denmark plans to send some refugees back to Syria
By Tara John, CNN
Siblings Hussam and Dania have been told by Danish authorities to return to the Syria. (CNN)It felt like paradise when Dania and Hussam first moved to Denmark.
They did not speak a word of Danish yet the Scandinavian country was an outpost of calm for the siblings, who fled the destruction and death that followed the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011. I can hardly remember anything but war in Syria, Dania, 22, told CNN of her time growing up on the outskirts of the country s capital, Damascus. She said what drew her family of five to Denmark was its reputation for welcoming refugees being the first country in the world to sign the United Nations Refugee Convention in 1951.