Tine Danckaers (° 1970) works for the Belgian magazine MO * since its launch in 2003. She focuses on the turbulent Middle East and follows the theme of asylum and migration, at the micro and macro level.

Danckaers studied Journalism at the Lessius Hogeschool in Mechelen and an additional course in Language & Literature at the Open University. Afterwards she went to work as an independent communications advisor, which she combined with a job with the publication service of 11.11.11. In 2005 she received a scholarship from the Pascal Decroos Fund for a report on illegal houses in East Jerusalem (2005) and the Palestinian Occupied Territories that she visited several times. With a second grant she went to the Iraqi-Kurdish region and Afghanistan for reports on deported asylum seekers from Belgium and Europe. Tine Danckaers also traveled to Turkey for reports about the Kurds and the Fethullah Gülen movement. She followed the illegal migration route from the Greek Evros to Patra, traveled with a tourist visa to Bahrain to report the popular uprising and visited Yemen just before the Arab spring erupted.

Info

Name
Tine Danckaers
Expertise
Middle East, Asylum, Migration
Links

Supported projects

Afghans in the Turkish waiting room

  • Human Rights
  • Migration

ANKARA - One image that will undoubtedly mark 2021 is that of the tens of thousands of desperate Afghans drumming outside the closed gates of Kabul airport to get away. The borders were sealed tight, yet hundreds of thousands of Afghans managed to flee. A number of them reached Turkey in the hope of being able to ask for international protection there. An illusion, as it turns out. After the fall of Kabul, Turkey, with the help of Europe, also sealed its borders and stopped registering Afghan asylum seekers.

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The Mountain against the King

  • Energy
  • Environment
  • Human Rights

IMIDER, MOROCCO - Imider is a very small community, but a world record has set it on the map. Here, in the South Moroccan Atlas Mountains, under a colorful Berber flag, the longest sit-in in the world is ongoing.

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Return to Iraq, a broken country

  • Migration

BAGHDAD - In recent years, thousands of Iraqis have voluntarily returned from Belgium to Iraq. Whoever returns, often did not really choose that, even if it is called "voluntary". The voluntary returnees from our country have often undergone a failed asylum procedure. Others could not handle the long waiting periods, with a high probability of a negative decision - in the years 2015 and 2016 the Belgian asylum authorities could not cope with the flow - and they missed their family.

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New opportunities in the country of origin?

  • Armed conflict

AFGHANISTAN/IRAQ - Tine Danckaers travelled to the Middle East and spoke in Afghanistan and Kurdish Iraq with people who applied for asylum in Belgium but returned to their country of origin 'voluntarily' or after a forced deportation. A dossier on return as part of the European migration policy, the flexible interpretation of security, perspectives or lack thereof, homesickness and paralysis.

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