The exodus of 4.6 million Syrians from their homeland to Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Europe can seem irreversible. It need not be. Families uproot themselves only when the risks of staying put are greater. For five years those risks have been unbearable, but a phone call today could help change the calculus driving so many towards the razor wire fences springing up across the Balkans.
David Cameron, Angela Merkel and François Hollande will hold a conference call with Vladimir Putin to discuss the Syrian ceasefire that came into force six days ago. Against expectations, the ceasefire has brought swift improvements on the ground. Civilian casualties are a fraction of the daily average before it was announced, even though dozens of violations by regime and Russian forces have been reported by moderate rebel groups. Aid is reaching towns and villages where civilians were slowly starving and for the first time since 2011 there are reports of refugees contemplating a return home.
Whether the ceasefire lasts depends chiefly on President Putin. He has single-handedly kept President Assad in power and in the fight for control of Syria. He stands accused by Nato of deliberately “weaponising” the refugee crisis to destabilise the continent. There is little doubt of this. Russian and regime bombing of rebel-held areas is the main reason that more than 11 million Syrians in all have fled their homes. Yet only Mr Putin has the leverage now to keep Assad’s forces as well as his own in barracks.
Mr Cameron and his western counterparts should be under no illusion. Mr Putin’s larger agenda is to muscle his way back to the diplomatic top table and win relief from sanctions imposed after his invasion of eastern Ukraine. He has achieved the former but emphatically not earned the latter. Europe must stand firm on sanctions on moral and strategic grounds. The West has no other way of securing Russia’s co-operation in solving the refugee crisis, and without that co-operation it will not be solved.
The ceasefire is one reason among several for cautious optimism. Europe “has to get its act in order”, as the Turkish ambassador to the EU said this week. There are signs at last that it is doing so. Five large refugee camps in Greek “hot spots” are open and working. Funds to operate them, including £63 million from Britain, have been earmarked by Brussels, albeit after a pointless procedural delay. Border fences from Macedonia to Hungary have drastically cut the flow of refugees and sent a harsh but important signal to others thinking of heading for Europe. That signal was yesterday matched by blunt words from Donald Tusk, president of the European Council. “Do not come to Europe,” he told a press conference in Athens. “It is all for nothing.”
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This is the sort of clarity Chancellor Merkel has failed to provide since her well-intentioned but misjudged decision to open Germany’s borders to all Syrian asylum seekers last summer. She says she wants Europe to unite behind a workable refugee policy by next Monday. If she is serious she should explicitly endorse Mr Tusk’s language and back his call for a return to the longstanding EU policy that asylum seekers must register in the country in which they arrive in the union.
Europe’s internal borders will remain fraught until its external borders are properly patrolled. That is no mean feat in the Aegean, but a new European coast guard and meaningful Greek-Turkish co-operation will be high on the agenda at crunch summits in Brussels and Izmir next week. It has taken a year and shaken the EU to its foundations but a realisation is dawning that the best way to help Syria’s homeless is to make westward migration less feasible and a return to their own country more so. It can be done, but first the ceasefire has to hold.