SUMMARY: The EU deal with Turkey to stem the tide of migrants crossing the Aegean Sea has seen more and more asylum seekers flocking to the western Mediterranean, with deadly results. More than 1,000 have drowned there in the past several weeks, and the ones that do succeed face an uncertain future. Gwen Ifill talks to Amin Awad of the UN refugee agency for more on how Europe is combating the crisis.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Mr. Awad, welcome.
On this program, we have seen the terrible stories of the hundreds of thousands of refugees coming, especially from the Mideast and Africa, trying to get to Greece, trying to get to Turkey, trying to get into Europe.
Has that problem, has it gotten worse or gotten better since this whole crisis began?
AMIN AWAD, Director for Middle East and N. Africa Bureau, UNHCR: I think this problem of migrants and refugees and secondary movement is persisting.
I wouldn’t say it’s getting better or it’s getting worse, simply because the conditions that people are fleeing are getting worse. The serious situation is not better than it was before. Cessation of hostilities ended. The resumption of fighting continued. And as a result, people are fleeing.
The poverty and impoverishment that people fleeing sub-Saharan Africa continue to persist. There isn’t a south-north collaboration, as used to be before. People are fearing — fleeing Niger, where there is conflict. There is poverty. And they seek opportunity, new places, market and labor and mobility.
And some of them are fleeing conflict, coming from East Africa, the Horn of Africa, or the central part of Africa or the western part of Africa. So the root causes for flight are still there. And the world has to come up with more mechanisms and better mechanisms to tackle the root causes of these conflicts or poverty.
GWEN IFILL: So the root causes are still there, but the welcome mat is not there anymore. In fact, it’s certainly not there in Turkey, and it’s certainly not there in Germany like it once was. So how does that affect the flow?
AMIN AWAD:People — the flow will persist. People will continue to try all they can to make it to safety, to make it to better places, to find opportunity or protection.
If the welcoming mat is not there, then there ought to be equal investment in the communities where conflicts are and where poverty is, and try to stem the flow in a more dynamic and cooperative manner.
But you also have to uphold all international instruments, the international protection, international national refugee law, the international human rights law. We have to rally around these and similar, because that’s what makes the world also orderly.
SUMMARY: The mysterious disappearance of EgyptAir Flight 804 and its 66 passengers somewhere over the Mediterranean Sea has left the international community scrambling for answers. For more on what could have happened to the flight, Hari Sreenivasan talks to former National Transportation Safety Board chair Deborah Hersman and former Deputy National Security Adviser Juan Zarate.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): We return to EgyptAir Flight 804 and what could have happened to it.
Deborah Hersman served as chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board from 2009 to 2014 and is now president of the National Safety Council, a nonprofit organization devoted to reducing preventable deaths and injuries. And Juan Zarate was deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism during the President George W. Bush administration. He's currently the chairman of the Financial Integrity Network, a consulting firm.
Deborah Hersman, I want to start with you.
At this stage, what are investigators thinking about? What are they looking for?
DEBORAH HERSMAN, Former Chairman, National Transportation Safety Board:Really, the first 24 hours, they're focused on response, recovery, and search for the aircraft, and so you can see clearly that's something that was a focus in this investigation.
But you want to gather any perishable evidence that might exist. You want to make sure you know who needs to be interviewed, that you're able to connect all of the dots very early in the investigation and grab any of that information.
Analyzing the radar data is going to be important, because what they need to do now is pinpoint where that aircraft is, so they can identify not just the aircraft, the parts and take care of the humans, but also get those black boxes, which are really important to the investigation.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Juan Zarate, given what little evidence has come out so far, what are the signs that point to fowl play?
JUAN ZARATE, Former Deputy National Security Adviser: Well, there aren't many signs.
And part of the reason you want to gather as much data and forensics as possible early on is try to give you clues. But authorities are indicating there weren't signs in terms of intelligence that a threat was pending or threatening this particular airline or this route.
There has been no claim of responsibility yet, and certainly we don't have any evidence that we have seen physically that would demonstrate this is terrorism. But we know terrorists have historically targeted aircraft. It has psychological, human and economic impact.
We know that al-Qaida and ISIS have been perfecting technologies and trying to hit us on aircraft over the years, whether it's the underwear bomb plot out of Yemen, the shoe and liquid bomb plots out of the U.K., or even the downing of the Metrojet, the Russian airliner out of the Sinai by ISIS.
They have been trying to do this. And they have had expert bomb-makers trying to figure out ways of evading the security technology that we have, Ibrahim al-Asiri, the master bomb-maker in Yemen who has been training individuals for years, as well as the Khorasan group, a senior group of al-Qaida figures in Syria that up to 2014 were trying to perfect non-metallic devices that could get on aircraft.
SUMMARY: Authorities on Friday said they found debris from EgyptAir Flight 804, which a day earlier plunged 38,000 feet into the Mediterranean Sea. Relatives of the 66 people on the plane mourned as harsh reality set in. Mystery still surrounds the cause — terrorism or catastrophic mechanical failure? John Yang reports, and science correspondent Miles O'Brien gives his analysis of what we know so far.
HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour): With all the talk the past many months about a possible military conflict between Israel and Iran, a new source of conflict might be emerging. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the Islamic militant group, Hezbollah, is getting more advanced weaponry that could be far more precise in their attacks. Charles Levinson was one of the authors of the piece and joins us now. So, there has been this arms race under the guise of the Syrian war that has been happening in the neighborhood. Who is getting what kind of weapons?
CHARLES LEVINSON, Wall Street Journal: Right. So, when Assad starts losing control in Syria in 2012, Iran and Syria want Hezbollah to lend its expertise to the fight. Hezbollah was reluctant because of its own domestic political considerations inside Lebanon. To sweeten the deal, Iran basically offered Hezbollah to upgrade its weapons arsenal from having tens of thousands – about a hundred thousand unguided, dumb bombs and rockets and missiles to having smart, guided missiles that can hit precise targets inside Israel. So, the weapons transfers that we are looking at so far are the SA-17. It is an anti-aircraft, sort of highly mobile, advanced anti-aircraft missile that would really threaten Israel’s dominance in the skies above Lebanon, especially its helicopters. You are talking about the Fato-110, which is very precise within a… I cannot remember the exact… but within a few dozen/few hundred meters let’s say. A surface-to-surface missile that can reach basically all of Israel, and the same thing called the surface-to-ship/anti-ship missile, which can basically take out any Israeli (or U.S.) ship patrolling the Mediterranean off the coast of Lebanon.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
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