Prisons in the Aegean
Yiannis Baboulias
Last Thursday, President Erdoğan announced that he was going to open Turkey’s borders to refugees fleeing to Europe, apparently in order to put pressure on Nato to back him against the Syrian regime and its Russian allies. The Greek media were quick to whip up fear of invading ‘hordes’ of refugees. A four-year-old Syrian boy drowned in the early hours of this morning after a boat capsized off Lesvos. Those who make it to shore are often met by a mob that won’t let them land. Others are freezing on the Greek-Turkish border along the river Evros. Those who get across are pushed back by the army and border guards, firing tear gas and stun grenades. Greece has announced that it won’t process any new asylum claims for a month.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the leader of New Democracy and prime minister of Greece since last July, calls himself a centrist. In the run-up to the elections that brought him to power, he made the abominable conditions in the islands of the Eastern Aegean a focal point of his campaign. New Democracy accused the left-wing Syriza administration of ‘inviting’ refugees to Greece, of being too soft. (Never mind that the number of arrivals was an order of magnitude lower than at its peak in 2015.) Mitsotakis and New Democracy promised a swift solution to the problem.
In Lesvos, 25,000 people were crammed mostly into the Moria camp (official capacity 3000) and all around it, in tents set up in muddy fields. The Greek residents, who years ago had shown solidarity with the refugees (and voted for Syriza in both general elections in 2015), felt abandoned by the state. They voted ND in hope of a solution. But with no effective way to redistribute refugees among EU states, and mainland Greece refusing to take in any more, ND announced in late January that they would build closed detention centres on the islands.
The people of Lesvos rejected the solution, asking how a second Moria would help with the overcrowding. In response, the government adopted its preferred tactic, sending in scores of riot police. They arrived on the islands under cover of darkness on 24 February and disembarked in military formation and full riot gear. The authoritarian move was met with fierce resistance, and the police had to barricade themselves inside the Kyriazis army camp on Lesvos, as islanders attacked the gate with stones and petrol bombs.
There were never any easy answer to the situation in the Greek islands. Other EU states refuse to do their part, and suffer no consequences; Turkey (which is supposed to have stopped these ‘migratory flows’ under the terms of the deal it made with the EU in 2016) is using the situation as a bargaining chip; and the Union as a whole is locked in a fight over the common budget that makes it look ridiculous, petty and weak. No solution is on the table. Instead, following Turkey’s announcement, Germany refused to condemn the move and officials said they expect Turkey to stick to the deal.
‘Our top priority at this stage,’ Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, tweeted yesterday, ‘is to ensure that Greece and Bulgaria have our full support. We stand ready to provide additional support including through Frontex on the land border.’ It is being made clear, however, that the EU as a whole has given up on the idea of treating its frontiers as a common concern. The wholesale acceptance of Greece and Italy as de facto prison states for refugees trying to cross to the ‘core’ countries makes it clear that the leaders of those countries don’t see Greece’s borders as their own. They have no problem with people dying, or with the historic islands of the Eastern Aegean Sea being turned into prisons.
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