Germany
must soon close borders to refugees, transport minister tells Merkel
Alexander
Dobrindt says country can no longer show a ‘friendly face’ and
must act unilaterally if fresh arrivals continue
Reuters
Tuesday 19 January
2016 03.04 GMT
Chancellor Angela
Merkel’s transport minister has urged her to prepare to close
Germany’s borders to keep out refugees, arguing that Berlin must
act alone if it cannot reach a Europe-wide deal.
Alexander Dobrindt
said Germany could no longer show the world a “friendly face” –
a phrase used by Merkel as refugees began arriving in Germany six
months ago – and that if the number of new arrivals did not drop
soon, Germany should act alone.
“I urgently
advise: we must prepare ourselves for not being able to avoid border
closures,” Dobrindt, a member of the Bavarian Christian Social
Union (CSU), told the Muenchner Merkur newspaper.
The CSU, the
Bavarian sister party to Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats
(CDU), has ramped up pressure on the chancellor over her open-door
refugee policy that saw 1.1 million migrants arrive in Germany in
2015.
The CSU’s leader,
Horst Seehofer, told Der Spiegel magazine in a weekend interview he
would send the federal government a written request within the next
two weeks to restore “orderly conditions” at the nation’s
borders.
Bavaria is the main
entry point to Germany for refugees.
Dobrindt said: “I
would advise us all to prepare a plan B” in an advance release of
an interview to run in the Muenchner Merkur’s Tuesday edition.
In the Netherlands,
clashes erupted late on Monday in a small town during protests
against the planned opening of a centre for asylum seekers, Dutch
media and officials said.
In a repeat of
scenes seen in several Dutch towns and villages in the past few
months amid growing tensions over the arrival of record numbers of
migrants, police intervened to disperse about 1,000 people who
rallied in Heesch.
It was not
immediately clear from police how many people had been arrested and
whether anyone was injured.
Merkel has vowed to
“measurably reduce” arrivals in 2016, but has refused to
introduce a cap, saying it would be impossible to enforce without
closing German borders.
Instead, she has
tried to convince other European countries to take in quotas of
refugees, pushed for reception centres to be built on Europe’s
external borders, and led an EU campaign to convince Turkey to keep
refugees from entering the bloc. But progress has been slow.
Dobrindt rejected
Merkel’s argument that closing borders would jeopardise the
European project. “The sentence, the closure of the border would
see Europe fail, is true in reverse. Not closing the border, just
going on, would bring Europe to its knees,” he said.
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