Text/Wasil Schauseil Translation/Zhuang Muyang
From the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan to the war in Ukraine, the refugee problem in Europe has been uneven and rising, and Greece, as the external border of the European Union, has always been an important transportation hub for refugees to northwestern Europe. Under Greece's Nea Demokratia regime, the situation of migrants and refugees in the country is deteriorating rapidly – and the EU is not concerned about it.
Originally published in The Journal of Roar, the author was Wasil Schauseil, a freelance journalist, researcher and filmmaker living in Berlin, who is a member of the migration-control.info of transnational platforms that study the externalization of European borders. The Paper has been authorized by the author to translate this article for Chinese readers.
The fire tragedy in the Moria refugee camp on Lesbos in September 2020 drew worldwide attention to the "hot spot" of Greek migrants – and this is not the first time. Now, more than 18 months later, the situation of refugees, migrants and solidarity in the country continues to deteriorate. The harsh conditions on the Polish-Belarusian border, or the deaths in the English Channel in the winter, brought the daily and outrageous tragedy of the European border management mechanism back into the public eye, yet the media remained relatively silent about Greece and other countries through which major migration routes to north-west Europe must pass. But in those places, policies such as neglect and isolation to prevent refugees and migrants from entering and remaining in Europe are also a fact that occurs all the time.
On September 10, 2020, the Moriá refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesvos was burned down, leaving more than 12,000 refugees and migrants homeless.
The current situation in Greece illustrates how the policy works systematically and how closely it is linked to the EU's work to solidify an increasingly tough border management mechanism at a larger level: a system with "hard" border protection measures, policing and militarized border guards, biometric and technical surveillance, procedural barriers to the asylum process, detention systems, lowering protection standards, increased deportations and repatriations, and blatant disregard at the national level.
For many refugees and migrants traveling to Europe, Greece was the first stop. The Dublin Regulation stipulates that asylum seekers must submit an application to the first EU country they arrive in. This provision places the responsibility for processing asylum applications – and the possible subsequent granting of refugee status – on the eu's marginal countries of southern Europe. Greece thus plays a central role in this mechanism, serving as a testing ground for Europe's evolving restrictions on entry.
The European Commission's so-called hotspot approach is actually an external expression of disagreement within the EU on the "refugee issue". "Hot spots" have seriously eroded international standards of protection, with devastating effects on the lives of refugees and migrants in Europe, or trying to enter Europe. On the one hand, it significantly increases the influence and power of transnational institutions within the EU, such as the EU Border Agency (Frontex), the European Police Organization and the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), thereby supporting countries with "greater immigration pressure". On the other hand, the move also introduces more complex and restrictive asylum procedures, leaving those arriving on the Greek islands chronically detained in numerous refugee camps in the Aegean Islands.
Greece's years of slump have led to a significant increase in phenomena such as precarious working conditions, poor living, unemployment and homelessness. We need to understand the dispute between policymakers in Greece and northwestern Europe over "migration management" in this socio-political and economic context, as well as the deteriorating conditions faced by asylum-seekers and refugees. Since 2019, the Greek government under the right-wing conservative NDP has taken a tougher stance on refugees, affecting areas including asylum laws, detention systems, camp management norms, food and cash supplies, and health and education.
Erosion of the right of asylum
Since taking power in late 2019, NDP has struggled to tighten its grip on all aspects of migrant life. The legislative changes that began the same year have been far-reaching and have led to a sharp tightening of the right to asylum, the expansion of "administrative detention", the tightening of the criteria for judging "vulnerability", and the increasingly restrictive measures on NGOs.
The new government also took advantage of the escalation of the situation along the Turkish-Greek border in March 2020, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan suspended a key sum in the €6 billion EU-Turkey pact under which Turkey would need to accept repatriated Syrian refugees in exchange for economic compensation from the EU and political concessions in some areas. In response, the Greek government has temporarily suspended the right to provide asylum, intensified its crackdown on "illegal immigration", and adopted illegal deportations and other means to actively target asylum seekers.
According to the UN refugee agency, the number of asylum seekers arriving in Greece has steadily declined in recent years. Stella Nanou, the agency's Athens-based spokesman, said the humanitarian crisis in Greece ended in 2017 and the country was no longer "in the midst of an emergency or humanitarian crisis." As a result, UNHCR began to "reduce its operations in Greece and transition to programmes that we consider to be critical to the Greek authorities". AS a result, UNHCR's work here was phased out or transferred to the Greek authorities, and its staff throughout the country was drastically reduced.
In THE VIEW OF UNHCR, the so-called crisis may be over, after all, the total number of refugees arriving in Greece has dropped sharply since 2015. But when considering that thousands of people have been repatriated and denied the right to register as asylum seekers in Greece, such statistics are debatable. In addition, the living conditions of asylum-seekers and officially recognized refugees in Greece remain very poor, and hostility against this group is spread throughout the country.
In June 2021, the Greek government unilaterally declared Turkey a "safe third country" for refugees from Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, Pakistan and Bangladesh, raising concerns among many that their asylum claims would be judged "inadmissible" because Turkey was a safe place of residence. Regardless of what the Greek government does, Turkey has stopped accepting repatriated refugees since the March 2020 Greek-Turkish border dispute, leaving most asylum seekers from these countries in long-term legal difficulties and at risk of being detained by authorities before eventual deportation.
Everyday violence in refugee camps
A key part of NDP's campaign promise is that it will disband the camps and end the lack of control in previous years, thereby ending the overcrowding in the Aegean Islands camps.
In fact, since the beginning of 2021, thousands of migrants and refugees have arrived on the European continent from places like Samos, Lesvos, Kos, Leros and Chios. The main component of these people is immigrants who are eligible for legal asylum, either those whose applications have been rejected or whose asylum applications in Greece have been temporarily cancelled because of their "geographical restrictions" (a fundamental determinant of the "hot spot" approach) but who can leave the country in the short term.
In the Attica region, about 70 kilometers north of Athens, the situation in Ritsona, the largest refugee camp there, shows that while "de-crowding" offers many a way out of isolation in the camps, the authorities have no plans to create conditions for these refugees who have left the island to live on the european continent. At the same time, the carrying capacity of refugee camps in mainland Greece has begun to be stretched. As of December 2020, most mainland refugee camps are fully loaded or overloaded. The Risona camp has reached the official occupancy of 2,950 people.
A woman and child walk through a prefabricated house in the Ritsona refugee camp on October 22, 2019.
Located between the factory and a crematorium, Lisona has no public transportation and is far from the city. The camp is densely forested, with sporadic shops and open gate entrances, and is generally considered to be better than other, more restrictive police camps. But since the beginning of 2021, the Greek government has been reinforcing refugee camps across the country by building walls and fences, including by enforcing stricter and often rather arbitrary rules for access. In Risona and other camps, such as Diavata or Malakasa, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) is using EU funds to manage the reinforcement of these camps. This is part of the "site management support" provided by the International Organization for Migration to the Greek government, which is also playing an increasingly important role in implementing the EU's border management mechanisms.
In the first months of the COVID-19 ban, in Chalkida, the town closest to the Risona camp, the mayor of the region used anti-epidemic measures as an excuse to prevent children from going to school, even though in the summer of 2020 Greece relaxed the measures across the country. After filing and winning the case against this apparently racist and discriminatory policy, the relevant administrations encountered new obstacles: they could not find school buses because the city streets there were too narrow to drive buses, and the conditions offered by minibus companies through official tenders were too poor to attract contractors.
Pepi Papadimitriou, who is in charge of education at the camp, has been organizing activities with lawyers and activists since the ban was imposed to ensure that young people receive legal degrees in public schools. Commenting on the situation, she said, "The government lacks a system to integrate refugees. It just wants them to leave. They want to make sure that refugees leave and no longer reside there. ”
Children and adolescents in Risona are not the only ones experiencing this: more than 20,000 children across Greece have been deprived of access to education, and less than 15 per cent of children from refugee camps have access to school. And this is just one of many cases ignored by the Greek government that hope to find a way out of Europe – an attitude that is consistent with the deterrent and segregation policy adopted by the Entire European Union against "irregular migrants".
Parwana Amiri, a writer who calls herself a "revolutionary refugee," confirmed that she and her comrades attended school for just one month for more than a year and a half. "It's the best day for us because we don't have to stay in a refugee camp. You can go to Chalkis, you can live like a normal student, you can learn something new. ”
Parwana and his family, from Herat, Afghanistan, first arrived in Lesvos in 2019 to stay at the Moriah camp on the island. They had only just moved to Lisona when Moriah was destroyed by fire in September 2020. Parwana recounts the daily violence she experienced in Moria and Risona, including overcrowded camp living conditions, widespread fear and insecurity, and violence and mistrust among refugees caused by a bleak outlook:
"I thought people were united, but gradually, I realized that this was not the case. So I started trying to figure out how to get people together and let them know why we should be united. Step by step, through education, action, knowledge sharing, and participation, we help each other and work towards a common goal. ”
Together with her comrades, Parwana took matters into her own hands. In a shared space created on her own, she organized girls from all over the world living in Risona to learn together. From drawing to writing to language learning, this space provides a pathway for children to express and teach themselves, and to escape the pervasive sense of stagnation.
Centralized control, compartmentalization, and systematic disregard
An important part of the policy of hostility towards refugees adopted by the Greek Government is to create as much difficulty as possible for migrants entering the country. For example, after taking over unHCR's so-called Residential Resettlement Program (ESTIA), a program that provides financial support to asylum seekers and housing "vulnerable" individuals outside refugee camps, Greek authorities have limited its implementation. In doing so, the country removed trauma-induced stress disorders as a criterion for defining the vulnerability of refugees. In addition, refugees are now required to leave their accommodation provided by ESTIA within a month of receiving the decision on whether to grant asylum or not – whether the decision is passed or rejected – and they also lose financial aid. On these islands, the Housing Support Scheme, the only alternative to life in the camps, was completely abolished.
At the same time, the recent decision of the Greek authorities to include in the granting of cash assistance whether the recipient lives in a refugee camp controlled by escalation has also exacerbated the segregation between asylum seekers and the wider Greek community. In addition, although UNHCR's financial assistance program expired last September, the Greek government had not provided any alternative benefits as of the end of December. Food rationings for refugees not included in the asylum process were also suspended. The consequence of all this is hunger. An open letter jointly signed by 27 non-governmental organizations alleges:
"A rough estimate is that 60 per cent of the camp refugees did not receive food from the European authorities. Subsistence is a fundamental human right. No one deserves to be protected from food insecurity, let alone outright food shortages, and refugees, in particular, should not bear the blame at the national level. ”
As for those who have been granted asylum, they can only take care of themselves. For those identified as refugees, the hostile attitude of the authorities, as well as the bureaucratic and material obstructions that run rampant in aid programs, as well as austerity policies and the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, make their hope of staying here slim.
The (vast majority) of refugees whose asylum applications are rejected lose access to all support services. Changes to the Asylum Law for Refugees in 2020 have made appeals costly and time-consuming. In such cases, refugees face the fate of being detained-waiting-deported, or living on the streets without a residence permit, constantly fearing the arrival of the police. Homelessness is a growing problem for immigrants and Greek citizens. But the authorities ignored the worsening of the phenomenon: they never counted the number of homeless people and provided only sparse shelters, which were not accessible to all those in need.
One notable aspect of the NDP's deterrent policy is the excessive use of so-called administrative detention against asylum seekers arriving in Greece. A recent report by Oxfam shows that in July 2020, 3,000 people, including children, were detained without criminal conviction, nearly half of them for more than 6 months. This phenomenon also affects refugees who have already applied for asylum.
Hope Barker, a member of the Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN), explained how the international protection law implemented by Greek authorities in 2019 laid the groundwork for the excessive use of detention centers prior to deportation, where applicants are held for up to 18 months while their asylum applications are processed. If their application is rejected, they will be subjected to a further 18 months of lawful detention before being deported. Barker concludes, "People are legally detained for up to three years in the process of applying for asylum, being denied and awaiting repatriation. The Greek authorities have turned to mass incarceration in related matters. ”
The combined fist of deterrence and indifference is working, and the facts show that most migrants and refugees, whether their applications are accepted or rejected, want to leave Greece as soon as possible for Central and Northern Europe. This phenomenon has left other governments very upset, because local courts will take into account the harsh conditions in Greece and prevent the government from deporting refugees back to the country. Greece has received financial support to address the problem, but Mitarakis, Greece's immigration minister, who recently stated that "Ukrainians are real refugees," rejected accusations that Greek migrants and refugees live below average and chose to commit to ending so-called "primary flows" altogether:
"Our principles, as we have expressed on many occasions ... It is to focus on preventing "primary flows". If snakeheads can cause us trouble on external borders, they will inevitably cause the same trouble within us. We need to work more closely with the EU Border Agency to support its central role in protecting our external borders. ”
According to the Greek government, their move was a success. Compared to 2015, the country's base flows decreased by 80% in 2020 and by 73% by 2021. What the government is fundamentally proud of is the steady increase in illegal evictions by the country's Coast Guard and security forces, which have significantly reduced the number of legal entrants.
The new "hot spot": the second trauma in open-air prisons
What can be observed on the Greek island of Samos is what better living conditions envisioned by the Greek government and European donors, and how the authorities are guarding against "primary flows".
Refugees and migrants travel to the New Refugee Center in Samos, Greece, on September 20, 2021.
Another so-called "hot spot" is Samos, which, like Lesvos, is within sight from the Turkish coast. Volunteers, lawyers and journalists gathered on September 18 at the newly completed "Closed Controlled Access Centre," which replaced the old camp outside Vathy, the capital of Samos. In Zervou, a two-hour walk from Vasi, there is a new 150,000-square-meter building consisting of white concrete, white containers, cameras, a loudspeaker system, barbed wire and revolving doors that stretch into remote valleys. The facilities are designed to provide security for residents and staff and, as Minister Mithalakis put it, "reduce the impact of migration on local communities". Of course, a warning from an EU human rights body said that these "facilities for the first identification and registration of new residents should not be built like prisons, with barbed wire and prison-like fences" because doing so would ignore "the possibility of secondary trauma to people who have experienced violence and prosecution".
In total, the EU has invested 48 million euros in "closed control" camps in Samos. It served as a pilot project for four subsequent camps at a total cost of €228 million. On 27 November, two more similar camps were inaugurated on the islands of Leros and Kos, and two more camps were still planned, in Chios and Lesvos. Like Zeu's camps, they are far from the city centre: the camp on Lesvos is 50 kilometres from Mytilene, the capital on the other side of the island. At the opening ceremony of the Zeeuv refugee camp, local camp administration, Minister Mithalakis and his EU guests – including French Interior Minister Darmanin, who also signed the aforementioned open letter – praised the good living conditions in the newly opened "closed control" camp.
Two days after the Zeł camp began operations, Greece's immigration minister tweeted pictures of the inauguration of a data control center in Athens, attended by 26 EU ambassadors. Surveillance data from all 36 refugee camps across Greece will be aggregated in real time into this control center and monitored for suspicious people and events with the aid of motion analysis provided by artificial intelligence. The EU is funding this "technosolutionism" as part of a more general escalation strategy to strengthen border controls in Europe through high-tech security and use recovery funding to support member states hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Those who don't live in a world of wishful thinking or trying to decorate the façade will see Zew's pilot project as a new generation of open-air prisons in a "hot spot" in Greece. Thus, a few days before refugees were forced to move to "closed control camps", tension prevailed in the old camps. Daniela Steuermann, Médecins Sans Frontières medical coordinator in Samos, said her patients' mental state had deteriorated severely, with self-harm behaviour and highly lethal hopeless emotions spreading among the camp's residents.
Toure, who came to Samos from Mali two years ago, said: "My living conditions are very bad. I don't even know how to explain it all. Recently they told us they would take us to the new camp. They wanted to assassinate us there. To me, these people are demons, murderers. I don't want to go on like this anymore. I don't want to go to new camp. This place is a prison. This is a crime of inhumanity. ”
As the Samos Advocacy Collective and the Europe Must Act reports in December 2021: "The first three months after the opening of the (Zeeu) camp shows that the assurances of the Greek authorities are not in line with reality, which is unprecedentedly clear". The testimony of camp residents "shows that, far from improving, camp living conditions have tended to converge on prison life, and that there is a stark and not optimistic contrast between the old hotspot area and the new closed camp." ”
The night before the transfer to Zeeu, the old camp was greeted by a fire. It seems that the fire was lit out of protest and despair.
Repatriation, abduction and ill-treatment
The situation is frustrating on Europe's outer borders, where dozens of refugees were illegally deported by the Greek Coast Guard in just four days after Samos' new benchmark camp opened. Soon after, Der Spiegel reported on a horrific incident in which two bodies were washed up on the coast of Turkey and apparently dumped on the high seas by the Greek Coast Guard. As usual, no specific information on the victims and the number of victims could be conclusively confirmed.
According to Hope Barker, the Border Violence Monitoring Network alone registers thousands of repatriated refugees. "In 2020, there were 87 (repatriations) from Greece to Turkey, (about 4683). Since the beginning of 2021, we have collected 54 testimonies (about repatriation) from about 4,007 people; and this is just the information that our organization has. ”
When the government refers to "preventing primary mobility", it means that refugees seeking asylum by land and sea are forcibly repatriated through systematic law enforcement. Contrary to popular belief, repatriation does not mean "just" the Forced Transfer of Vessels by the Coast Guard and violates the principle of non-expulsion. As reported by the Lesvos Legal Aid Centre and the Border Violence Monitoring Network, since March 2020, the Greek government has begun to significantly advance repatriation initiatives on the Aegean Sea and land border to Turkey. On the one hand, after arriving on Greek territory, people are kidnapped almost every day – sometimes in broad daylight, or far from the border, such as in Thessaloniki (a port city in northern Greece); they are detained in secret locations or police stations and tortured, stripped naked, robbed, and finally abandoned on the Greek border with Turkey. On the mediterranean, on the other hand, refugees are abandoned on inflatable life rafts located in Turkish territorial waters. Meanwhile, in the Evros region, where the Evros River is the border between Greece and Turkey, refugees were sent across the river in brittle inflatable boats or abandoned on small islands after crossing the river. Many people died as a result, but only a few were documented.
Amelia Cooper of the Lesvos Legal Aid Centre, for example, explained that in one of the operations, 200 people were repatriated from Crete by seven Greek Coast Guard vessels and paramilitary personnel without badges and abandoned in Turkish waters. The sheer scale of similar operations underscores the absurdity of the CLAIM THAT and NATO claiming to know nothing about such incidents — both of which are stationed in the Aegean sea and equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance technology. Cooper added: "It is important to emphasize that these things, whether it is policy implementation or personal encounters, are not a single event. "Some of the people we visited were repatriated eight, nine, or even ten times, both at sea and on land borders, which is very common." ”
On January 24, 2017, in Izmir, Turkey, the Turkish Coast Guard intercepted an "illegal" migrant vessel that attempted to cross the Sea of Love to Reach Greece, where it was intercepted by the Turkish side and 94 "illegal" migrants on board were taken to port.
Given this systematic approach, and the "deliberate blindness" of such incidents by interested states in the Aegean Sea, UNHCR statistics on the number of refugees arriving in Europe have lost their relevance. Only organizations such as Aegean Vessel Reports, organizations such as Josoor or Mare Liberum, and agencies such as BVMN have made more realistic assessments of the incidents, which has made them targets by the authorities. In addition to the Greek authorities' investigation of Josoor and Mare Liberum, a legal amendment passed in September in the country would prohibit non-governmental organizations from participating in rescue missions without formal authorization from the Coast Guard, which is the organization that carries out the forced repatriation operation. International maritime law, which imposes the obligation to unconditionally rescue persons in distress, has also been trampled upon. This change in the legal dimension further provides the legal basis for the criminalization of the solidarity work of civil society and border watch activities.
Despite the voluminous body of evidence, video footage and countless testimonies, all of the official groups involved in the operations have insisted on their diplomatic rhetoric that at the moment we do not have enough evidence to justify the existence of forced repatriation operations, which are in fact routine border operations. Any other interpretation of such incidents is motivated by "misunderstandings," as Leggeri, head of the EU Border Agency, put it.
The Kafka-like undertone of Europe's border control mechanisms is thus fully exposed: on the one hand, we will find civil society organizations, lawyers and journalists who are denigrated and convicted for disseminating so-called "fake news" about repatriation or for spreading "Turkish propaganda". On the other hand, there are still some Greek officials who bluntly boast of their "rate of deterrence", for example, the Greek maritime minister said in a statement in 2020: "Since the beginning of this year, we have blocked the entry of more than ten thousand people." He added that in August 2020 alone, "we managed to prevent 3,000 people from entering the mainland." ”
The "overthrow of Schrödinger"—as Josoor founder Natalie Grube aptly described—has long since ceased to exist, and forced repatriations are now everywhere on the Greek-Turkish border. Neither the European Commission's "deep concerns" nor calls to the Greek authorities for further but inconclusive investigations will change the status quo.
Instead, the Greek government is working to normalize its aggressive border security and immigration control strategies. One of the ways they do this is to threaten critical reporting. A recent amendment to the country's criminal code stipulates that so-called fake news, if it "arouses public concern or fear, or undermines public confidence in the national economy, the national defense capacity or public health, is punishable by at least three months' imprisonment and a fine." "The freedom and pluralism of the Greek media has been repeatedly violated, and in this case, similar vague regulations have the potential to further stifle freedom of expression and allow journalists and NGOs to avoid reporting on the government's illegal activities." In Greece today, if you express your opinion on an important issue of public interest, as long as the government stamps that it is fake news, then you risk going to jail. Eva Cossé of the Greek Observatory for Human Rights said.
The option between barbarism and solidarity
Adding to the confidentiality provisions for NGOs working in refugee camps, the harsher and intrusive registration process for organizations serving migrants – and the close attention of intelligence services to journalists and NGOs – Greek authorities are cracking down on all opponents of its deterrent policies with unprecedented intensity.
Given that migrants to Greece won't stop anytime soon, the work of civil society organizations and activists makes exactly the difference between a savage Europe and a united Europe. While the European Commission is openly challenging attacks on civil society by some other EU member states, such as Hungary, greece's recent policy changes have remained largely unquestioned.
One way that could address the issues raised by Greece's highly controversial legal amendments is to advocate litigation within the EU for violations of the rule of law, which could also provide a little respite for migrants and refugees stranded in the country, as well as civil society organizations trying to support them. But the Greek government's actions are clearly based on the interests of the EU as a whole and in order to limit the flow of migrants to the continent, so the road does not seem to work very well. The focus, therefore, remains on the need to continue to support the day-to-day work of the dozens of humanitarian and solidarity groups active on the ground; in other words, supporting those who are migrating and trying to migrate, who bear the brunt of the EU's extremely violent and deadly border control mechanisms.
Editor-in-Charge: Wu Qin