The Road Before Me Weeps: On the Refugee Route Through Europe by Nick Thorpe

Author:Nick Thorpe [Thorpe, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 21st Century, Europe, Austria & Hungary, Social Science, Emigration & Immigration
ISBN: 9780300241228
Google: Sw-LDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0300241224
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2019-03-26T00:41:26.859000+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

THE STREET OF THE FOUR WINDS

Yes, Europe has Christian roots and it is Christianity’s responsibility to water those roots. But this must be done in a spirit of service, as in the washing of the feet.

Pope Francis1

Just as the deal with Turkey was being announced in Brussels on 18 March, 5 kilometres away across the clustered streets of the Belgian capital, police captured twenty-six-year-old Salah Abdeslam in the rue des Quatre-Vents, the Street of the Four Winds. The place could hardly have been better named. The EU in the spring of 2016 was buffeted by the four winds of climate change, migration, terrorism and populism. For the first time since its foundation, serious voices were doubting its capacity to survive the challenges it now faced from all directions.

Abdeslam was given away by an unusually large order of pizzas and a fingerprint on a glass found at a flat in the Forest district of Brussels three days earlier. Wearing a white hoodie, limping from a bullet wound in the leg, he was dragged from the house by heavily armed policemen, the only one of the ten attackers in Paris the previous November caught alive. His survival, both of the attacks and of the police attempts to arrest him, may not have been accidental, according to a report in the London Independent.2

The first IS communiqué, claiming responsibility for the Paris attacks, also mentioned an explosion in the 18th arrondissement of the French capital. But there was no terror-related incident there at all. A French police source told John Litchfield of the Independent that that was the district from which Abdeslam rang two friends in Brussels, to come and rescue him from the French capital, after dropping off his older brother Ibrahim. Ibrahim detonated his suicide vest outside the Comptoir Voltaire Café, causing only one other injury. According to that report, Abdeslam may have been just as worried about IS killing him in revenge for not carrying out his part in the atrocity as he was about Belgian police catching him. A Belgian website reported him telling a friend four days after the 13 November attacks that they had gone ‘too far’ and that he regretted taking part in them.

For four months he was the most wanted man in Europe. Until a few weeks before the Paris attacks, he used to enjoy a drink and a smoke in the bar in the rue Etiennes in the Molenbeek district of Brussels he ran with Ibrahim. Hardly the usual profiles of religious fundamentalists.

The big fear in Italy about the Turkey–EU agreement was that the island of Lampedusa and the rugged coast of Sicily would become the main point of entry for migrants to Europe, as the Aegean became too difficult. The fear was realised in so far as this ‘central Mediterranean’ route did become the most crowded. But the crowds were different. It was not as if a Syrian, fearing for his life in Damascus, would have chosen to travel through Turkey and Greece in 2015, but Libya and Italy in 2016.

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