Europe’s refugee crisis unfolds on Greek shores

By David Patrikarakos

Seeking a better life, thousands of migrants remain stuck in dead-end holding grounds, as an ill-equipped country struggles to deal with bureaucratic backlog and dwindling resources.

MYTILENE, Greece — “They treat you like animals in the Arab world.” Hami’s words drip with anger. “In Europe, the police and the army treat you like human beings. That is why we have come.”

The bay of the port of Mytilene, the capital of the Greek island of Lesvos, is a pleasing oval shape. Ringed with bars that cater to the modern tourist’s every need, it is what travel guides would describe as a “Mediterranean paradise.” The latest R&B music throbs through the air; flat screen TVs bolted onto exposed brickwork show soccer and basketball, while modern art hangs alongside prints of the New York skyline. Here, vacationers and locals mix garrulously.

But cross the road and the view changes. In the bay’s inner ring, by the sea, scores of refugees huddle in groups to talk and to sleep. It is there that I meet Hami and his friends, a group of six Syrians from the town of Idlib, near Aleppo, who have fled civil war in search of something — anything — better than the chaos they have left behind. I have arrived at night and the six are sitting on the pavement. They are dressed in incongruously trendy sports clothing and fiddling with smartphones. Four wear baseball caps. In this island of approximately 86,000 people, some 500 to 600 migrants are arriving every single day. Hami’s friend Abdullah tells me their story.

A 55-kilometer walk

The group began its journey with a flight from Latakia in Syria to Lebanon, where they flew on to Istanbul and made their way down to Izmir on the Turkish coast. There, they paid Tunisian smugglers $1,000 apiece to get them to Lesvos in a flimsy boat. The trip was eventful. Turkish Coast Guard boarded them at gunpoint, but after taking photographs and video of the passengers, they allowed them to continue on their journey. The group arrived at a small village on the other side of Lesvos and immediately called the police to come and fetch them. “The people in the village were kind,” Abdullah says. “They gave us apples, sandwiches and juice. The police came and told us a bus would take us to Mytilene, but when it came it took only the women and children. We were forced to walk 55 kilometers to get here.”

Migrants at the harbor in Mytilene | David Patrikarakos

Abdullah’s story is typical. Until a couple of years ago, most migrants making the trek to Europe from the Middle East crossed overland from Turkey into Greece. But in 2012 the Greek government built a four-meter-high, 10.5 kilometers-long barbed-wire fence along a sliver of land on its eastern border (which mostly runs along the Evros River). For years, this corridor was the preferred entry point for migrants into Greece, and they came in tidal waves. In 2011 alone, the authorities arrested around 100,000 people trying to cross over. The fence more than justified its €3 million price tag and by late 2012 the numbers crossing had dropped to zero. The migrants needed a new way in.

Immigration is transitory

They found it in the sea, which proved a boon for human smugglers. Now the majority of migrants, like Abdullah and his friends, arrive from Turkey via smugglers’ boats to Greek islands. The most popular destinations are Lesvos and Kos. Some first land on small islands like Leros, Samos and Symi, which are less policed, being barely more than conglomerations of rocks. From there, the refugees move on to the bigger islands that have organized police forces, which migrants contact immediately on arrival — turning themselves in to be processed and receive papers that allow them to travel to Athens. This is how migrants now seek asylum in Greece.

Like most of the migrants entering Greece, Abdullah’s group did not want to stay in the country.

And it is what the group I met was now doing, Abdullah explains. “The police told us there would be room for us at the detention center tomorrow where they will give us our documents, but tonight we have to sleep on the street.”

Like most of the migrants entering Greece, Abdullah’s group did not want to stay in the country. This point is central to the country’s refugee crisis: immigration to Greece is transitory. The country is merely the entry point to Europe for those who want to travel onward into the heart of Europe. Abdullah made it clear what their intentions were.

“I am an engineering student,” he told me. “After Athens, we will go to Macedonia then Serbia, Hungary, Austria and then finally Germany where I will enroll in university there.”

“It’s good to be here,” adds Hami. “The Arab world is very bad, we hope Europe will be good. And Turkish people are bad, they are like Syrians,” he adds. “They hate us.” I ask why this is the case. “Because there are two million Syrians in Turkey,” he replies.

As we finish our conversation, I offer Abdullah my remaining cigarettes as a gift, but he politely refuses. The refugees, it seems, are determined to retain their dignity.

It’s nearing midnight and the bay is an almost perfect circle of neon lights. As I head back to my hotel, a sign reading “United Colours of Benetton” glows flickeringly at me in the darkness.

***

The day before my trip to Lesvos, I met with Ioanna Pertsinidou, project manager at Praxis, an NGO founded in 2004 that inherited many core projects from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), and offers, among other things, primary health care and legal and social advice to undocumented migrants. She made it clear that Greece is totally underprepared to deal with the refugee crisis it is facing.

“Prior to 2011 Greece had no system in place to deal with migrants apart from a Presidential Decree offering full protection to all those who arrived in the country, as per international conventions,” she explained. “The result was a huge backlog of around 50,000 asylum applications that went back years. Then in 2011 new legislation introduced an asylum and first reception service in Greece for the first time.”

According to the UN Refugee Agency, 43,500 migrants and refugees arrived in Greece by sea in 2014, a 280 percent increase over 2013. (Pertsinidou told me that police records estimate that around 26,500 migrants have arrived in the first quarter of 2015 alone.) Around 60 percent were from Syria but many also come from Afghanistan, Somalia and Eritrea.

In 2012-2013, the Greek government decreed that all those seeking refuge would be rapidly processed through the new 2011 asylum service, but the backlog — of those registered prior to the legislation — remained. The government increased the number of committees to deal with the problem but it made little difference. The financial crisis has meant that Greece has even fewer means with which to process and absorb its refugees. “There are people who have been waiting for asylum for seven years whose case has still not been decided,” Pertsinidou told me. “What this means in practice is that they are not eligible to travel – they are stuck here. They are technically eligible to work but once the crisis began the government became reluctant to issue work permits because it wanted to block migrant access to the already overstretched labor market.”

I asked her about the scale of the refugee crisis. “The crisis is not the number of people arriving,” she replied. “The figure is not massive. But what makes it a crisis is the fact we are totally unprepared. We have no infrastructure to support and protect these people, and this has been going on for years.”

Migrants still technically have the protection of the Presidential Decree that gives them all the rights of Greek citizens except right to vote: They can claim social welfare benefits, for example. But this becomes difficult to do in practice when you have no work permit or tax number. Pertsinidou is angry. “It’s outrageous that someone can stay in Greece for so many years without any real rights to protect them,” she says.

***

The day after I meet Abdullah and his group, I take a short drive around the island with Kalogridis Evris, an academic who works with Praxis. Evris looks after the two apartments on the island that the organization uses to house vulnerable refugees. He also helps new arrivals to access healthcare and legal services.

Evris agrees to take me to the two camps on the island that house newly arrived refugees. First on the list is an overflow camp in which those waiting to be processed by the police are placed until room for them is found in the island’s official detention center — what Evris describes as the “Police Camp.”

A migrant at the harbor in Mytilene | David Patrikarakos

We drive up winding, cobbled streets; on either side of us, buildings lean in to one another while lines of parked scooters narrow the road even further. But the postcard image is quickly shattered by the sight of groups of migrants sitting under trees or walking with heavy rucksacks and bags.

We arrive at the overflow camp. The police are reluctant to allow journalists access and the required bureaucracy for permission is tortuous, so I am here as Evris’ friend. The camp is fenced in with meshed wire. Inside around 1,000 migrants live in army tents, each housing between ten and 12 people. The authorities have clearly just sealed off an urban part of the island as the camp is filled with redundant stop signs and pedestrian crossings. Families, ranging from the elderly to infants, sit lethargically in the 30-degree heat while some of the more energetic children kick a soccer ball around in the dirt. This camp will be their home until they are processed.

Prison camp

Our next stop is the detention center. On the way, Evris is blunt: “Police camp is prison camp,” he tells me. He’s right. Everything here is different. The chaos of the overflow camp, with its varying colors and bustle of human life, is all absent. Instead, I am greeted by a monochrome of gray. Coiled rows of barbed wire top yet more mesh-wire fencing. Inside, rows of huts stand like chicken coops in neat lines. Each hut has tiny windows with bars over them, and each has its own yard surrounded by barbed wire fencing with a padlocked gate. Closed circuit TV cameras quietly survey the scene below.

The camp is totally silent. I cannot see a single person apart from the lawyer and NGO worker that Evris has come to visit. Earlier that morning Evris had told me there were 1,023 people in the camp. “Where is everyone?” I ask. “They are inside,” he replies.

These people are the lucky ones; the ones who, if everything goes right, will be given the necessary papers to allow them to travel to Athens.

According to the Dublin II regulations (which seek to identify as quickly as possible the member state responsible for examining an asylum application) only one EU member state is responsible for examining an asylum application. The objective, according to the statute, is “to avoid asylum seekers being sent from one country to another.” In practice, this means that once an asylum seeker has sought asylum in Greece he or she cannot seek it elsewhere, but must remain in the country until the process is completed, and status either granted or denied.

Degrading living conditions

But in a landmark 2011 court case between Belgium and Greece, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled against Belgium, which had, as per the Dublin protocols, returned an Afghan migrant to Greece where he had first sought asylum. The degrading living conditions to which he had been subjected in Greece caused the court to overrule the statute. The migrant, the court decided, should not have been returned. The court’s decision is understandable to anyone who has seen one of the Greek camps.

To a large degree, the EU sees Greece, by virtue of its geographical location, as a bulwark against what it views as dangerously large numbers of migrants flooding to the continent.

And there lies the catch-22. To a large degree, the EU sees Greece, by virtue of its geographical location, as a bulwark against what it views as dangerously large numbers of migrants flooding to the continent. FRONTEX, the European Agency for the Management of External Borders, has invested heavily in Mediterranean member states like Greece, Spain and Italy that are seemingly protecting the sea borders of Europe. Money has provided training to state security forces to battle the influx of refugees from the Middle East and Africa now washing up on European shores. Fortress Europe appears to be the goal. Greece is now a holding pen for Europe’s undesirables but it is one that the Court of Human Rights itself has ruled is unfit for the job.

There is also a fundamental contradiction at the heart of EU policy on immigration. The Lisbon Treaty, which remains the EU’s constitutional basis, recognizes that Europe as a continent is getting older and needs migrants. But not all migrants, it seems, are created equal.

After Evris drops me off, I take a stroll around the bay in Mytilene once more. It’s early afternoon and migrants fill the streets. Clothes hang on fences to dry while tents have sprung up by the side of the road. A large crowd of people has gathered to queue up outside a building. Here, I meet Chino, a 35-year old Congolese who tells me in French that he has come to Europe to escape the war back home. He sits on the pavement; stretched out in front of him are a pair of jeans and several shirts he has washed and left to dry in the sun. Like Abdullah and his group, he has a quiet dignity. He is determined to maintain standards. Everyone is waiting to receive asylum papers so they can travel. “I want to go to London,” he says. Why? I ask “Because, of its freedom,” he replies. “I am a French speaker but France is full of Congolese. I want to go to London because there is no problem with racism there. I will work and send money home to my family.”

Migrants at the harbor in Mytilene | David Patrikarakos

A Syrian who calls himself “Omar Peace” joins us. Omar is eager to tell what is now a familiar story. He arrived in Greece after spending a year in Turkey, where despite his English language skills he was unable to find anything more than menial work in restaurants and tourism. After a year he was barely able to save enough money to pay the $1,000 smugglers’ fee. He now has only $500 left. Because he speaks English, he has become a de facto translator for everyone in the queue. “It’s terrible,” he says. “Many of these people are Iraqis and Palestinians but they are saying they are Syrians so they can get asylum. The Greeks can’t tell the difference, but I can tell by their accents. It’s wrong.”

Just before I leave, Omar explains why he approached me. “Maybe you can write about me,” he says. “And you can let people know that not all Arabs are bad. We have some bad people, but then so does every country. Most of us have come here because we want to work and to make our lives better.”