• Direct witness: Living as animals in Europe: "This is not typical of humans"
  • Migration crisis: Turkey sends a thousand police to the border with Greece to avoid hot returns of refugees

There is no population more subject to false news than the refugee. Despair and uprooting in the countries they pass through make it especially vulnerable to bulls. The traffickers who take advantage of them know it, the politicians who do populism with them know it and so do those ultras who spread xenophobic messages about them. Fake news can be, at the same time, the engine that starts refugees and, at the same time, the irresponsibility that kills them in the middle of the road.

When, on February 28, Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan himself ordered the opening of border crossings for Syrian refugees who wanted to access the European Union from Turkish territory, he also gave free access to the dissemination of false messages in Arabic by the networks that these people usually use. The mobile phone, the compass of the refugee of the 21st century, is the main tool that they have to receive information about the route, especially of people who passed before that point, and it is via WhatsApp, Line, Telegram or Facebook group, as "Station for migrants", where traffickers and transports are announced or new routes not known by the police.

The cell phone, its most precious object, usually travels in inner pockets of the garments and in closed plastic bags if the refugee is going to get into the sea. Sometimes they were not lies, but half truths. Among the messages received were some that offered "free buses from the center of Istanbul to the border with Greece" and at least five of them, without knowing who came to charter them, made that journey with a few hundred refugees, who expanded , in turn, the news among their contacts. Many more people later looked for those same buses, but they didn't go out again and nobody saw them again.

These groups usually include traffickers or simsares , interested in directing the mass of people towards their business . For all of them, Erdogan's words were like returning to the migratory mana of 2015, the year in which Turkish traffickers obtained 300 million euros of profit. The government announcement of open doors set mobile phones on fire. Thousands of refugees, fed up with Turkish limbo where they can only work illegally, packed their bags and headed to the land borders with Greece and the Aegean coast to try to cross. What they did not know (because nobody, interestingly, has told them) is that the Greeks did not plan to open their border crossings.

Just yesterday, the foreign ministers of the European Union (EU) urged Turkey to counter the "false information" circulating among refugees . Ankara has not only not cut that fake news, but his public media have helped to spread it. When the Turkish government opened the border crossings, the agencies began spreading mass images of refugees walking towards the border or embarking on the coast to cross the sea line that separates it from Lesbos and other Greek islands, which further pointed to the idea that the road was free. The information said that they were crossing many boats to Greece , but the reality is that there was not, that day or the next, a significant increase in arrivals.

"Immigrants should not be encouraged to attempt illegal crossings by land or sea. The Council calls on the Turkish Government and all actors and organizations on the ground to convey this message and counteract the dissemination of false information," the ministers said. of EU Foreign Affairs. In those fake news that flood the refugee phones, translated into their own local languages, traffickers insist on something urgent: " You must hurry because the borders are about to close ." The objective is, of course, to pay more, but it is not true, the borders will not be closed because they never opened.

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