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Deteriorating intelligence and the failure to share intelligence services caused gaping holes in the European system of open borders.

The Paris massacre humiliated and effectively defeated all counter-terrorism effort. While the open borders approach was principally relaxed on humanitarian grounds, this approach seem to have paved way for the infiltration of sympathisers.

While the visa free travel cultivated more integration within Europe, it now seems that just about anybody can freely enter and exit European countries without checks. Le Pen said “the absence of national borders is criminal madness. The French elites have given themselves over to this surreal myth of a country without borders.” Now the critical question is how to neutralise?

  • Tougher security and passenger checks,
  • Improvising the current intelligence sharing,
  • Tighter restrictions on arms sales and cash transfers,
  • Eliminating the sympathisers,
  • Fitting radicals with electronic tagging, and
  • Defusing radicalism.

While the current neutralising effort must be encouraged and employed effectively, plotters will sidestep such enhanced measures. Actually all this has now become a social problem and a watertight system has to be engineered with new mechanisms to prevent people in their teens and twenties from getting radicalised.

These are difficult decisions between freedom and security. Europeans must be determined than ever to meet the challenges facing humanity with hope, not fear. There must be human cooperation to extinguish the Paris murderers and they must never be allowed to succeed.

Europe’s inability to protect its vulnerable borders from known threats dangers and indiscriminate decisions has seriously undermined and jeopardised the safety and well-being of Europeans in general.

If Europeans are determined to defeat, cripple and deprive Islamic State which may impact on free movement of people as guaranteed by the Schengen agreement, time is running out and the European countries must with immediate effect regain control of their external borders.

The Paris attack has deepened the sense of insecurity in Europe and have made the refugee crisis more complex and more sensitive to handle.


R KENGADHARAN is a lawyer and an ex-ISA detainee.

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