Dear Editor:
This is about a bus that never ran, and perhaps now never will.
But first, consider the Nov. 15 edition of the North Shore News.
The lead article is about the suffering of refugees at, and in the water approaches to, Lesbos, where Greece approaches Turkey across about 15-20 kilometres of sea. Some people drown while others survive the crossing in rubber boats run by people who care much about money but only marginally about the survival of their passengers, if at all.
But Greece approaches Turkey elsewhere, such as in the northwest of Turkey and the northeast of Greece, near Kipoi, Evros (Google Earth will show you the duty-free store). Here people could suffer a little customs delay in their highway journey, but death is quite unlikely. To get there from Turkey, you need cross deep water only on the bridge at Istanbul; and beyond Kipoi, the whole north border of Greece lies ahead.
If Turkey valued its PR enough, and put aside momentarily its historic wounds and gripes, it could be running a bus route, maybe a small fleet of repurposed school buses, relieving itself of all its westbound refugee burden.
If Greece wanted its own PR boost, it could then run another bus service, maybe, by arrangement, with the very same buses, from the Turkish border west to the borders with other European states which would accept their own place on a relay on to those countries, such as Germany, which actually seek the refugees as labourers and valuable workers in general.
But nobody actually set up such an efficient and life-saving service. Death in the Aegean is perhaps more politically convenient. And now, as the slaughter in Paris yields to terrorists and
Putin alike the great gift of the slamming shut of the borders across all of the dream of the European Union, perhaps it will never in our lifetimes be again even a possibility.
Anthony Buckland
North Vancouver
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