By
Martin Kreickenbaum
The
character of the prevailing social order can be seen in the way it
treats refugees. The Greek government’s announcement that it is to
erect a three-metre-high fence on the border with Turkey by April, to
stop refugees entering the European Union, is an example of the
contempt with which the ruling class in Europe regards ordinary
people.
The
border fence not only symbolizes “Fortress Europe”, but is a
model for the attacks of the European governments on the democratic
rights of all the people. Built between the two NATO countries Greece
and Turkey, the fence is a deliberate provocation to Ankara’s
aspirations to join the EU, which have been blocked and delayed for
years on the most flimsy of pretexts.
Last
Saturday, Greek Civil Defence Minister Christos Papoutsis, a member
of the ruling social democratic PASOK, told the ANA news agency: “The
limits of patience of Greek society have been exceeded long ago. Now
we are planning to build a fence to ward off illegal immigration.”
In
fact, it is not so much the Greek people who are pushing for this
measure as the EU, which has demanded that the government in Athens
“block up the biggest hole in Europe’s external border”, as a
Greek border guard described the land border between Turkey and
Greece.
The
proposed fence will not run along the entire border, but is meant to
protect sensitive areas. The border between these two Mediterranean
states runs along the river Evros, which in Turkey is called the
Meric. The river is surrounded by minefields, some remaining from the
Balkan campaigns of the First World War, and some that were laid
during the Cyprus crisis in the 1970s.
Only
between the two towns of Orestiada on the Greek side and Edirne on
the Turkish side, does the river bend east, imitating a large arc.
Here, the Evros can easily be crossed from Turkish territory via a
bridge, and the border between Turkey and the EU reached on land. And
it is here that the heavily guarded fence will be constructed, with
motion detectors and heat-sensitive cameras, following the model of
the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa, or the
border between the US and Mexico.
Although
these types of border defences are a clear breach of the European
Convention on Human Rights, according to which no person seeking
protection must be rejected at the border, and is thus contrary to EU
law, the EU Commission has been remarkably restrained. A spokesperson
for EU Interior Commissioner Cecilia Malmström did express some
criticisms of the Greek plans and urged compliance with applicable
standards. However, the Greek government has let it be known that it
was Malmström herself who, during a recent visit to the
Greek-Turkish border, proposed the establishment of barriers to deter
refugees.
Since
November 1, 2010, the border has been secured by a rapid reaction
force (“Rapid Border Intervention Team”—Rabit), part of the
European border management agency Frontex. This is the first
deployment for such a force, comprising 200 heavily armed border
guards from 25 EU countries, including about 40 from Germany. Their
mandate was recently extended until the end of March 2011, when the
border fence is to be completed.
The
European Union decided to deploy Frontex after more and more refugees
sought to enter the EU via Turkey. The coastal borders of Spain,
France and Italy, and also in the Aegean, are now so heavily guarded
that no more refugees can cross the Mediterranean by boat.
According
to official figures, in the first nine months of 2010 more than
130,000 refugees without valid residency documents were apprehended
and arrested. More than 30,000 of these were found on the narrow
border between Orestiada and Edirne, four times as many as in the
same period last year. Through the use of the Frontex force, the
daily number of those apprehended has since halved, but in the eyes
of the EU their number is still far too high.
The
Frontex force serves not only to repulse refugees on the EU’s
external border, it is also directly involved in human rights
violations in Greece, whose asylum system exists only on paper. A
German border guard told a delegation from the human rights group Pro
Asyl that the Frontex operation took place in a “moral abyss”. He
expressed qualms about handing over those apprehended to the Greek
authorities.
The
majority of the refugees come from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia
and North Africa. Regardless whether they are apprehended on the
border or lodge an asylum request themselves with the authorities,
they are arrested under the charge of “illegal entry“ and are
placed in special refugee camps.
Apart
from the fact that refugees have no chance of entering the EU other
than “illegally”, since they are hardly in a position to obtain a
visa and an exit permit beforehand, their criminalization and
arbitrary arrest is a scandal. Conditions in the camps and police
stations in Greece are catastrophic. Only in November last year, the
Council of Europe anti-torture committee made accusations against the
Greek authorities, and documented numerous cases of ill-treatment and
torture in the refugee camps.
Other
organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Pro
Asyl and Welcome to Europe have documented the inhumane conditions in
the Greek camps. There are no interpreters available for the
refugees, who usually do not even know why and for how long they are
being detained, with a detention of several months being not
uncommon. They are denied every opportunity to lodge an asylum
request.
The
camp at the Evros consists of former warehouses, with grid fencing
used to separate the cells, and is hopelessly overcrowded.
Unaccompanied minors, families, women and men are crowded together
indiscriminately. At the now-closed Camp Pagani on Lesbos, there were
only 39 bunk beds made of metal with thin tattered mattresses for
some 250 detainees. Most of the refugees had to sleep on the floor.
“The toilets constantly overflowed, then water poured over the
floors on which people were laying for whom there were no more beds,”
Afghan refugee Aziz Sultani told tageszeitung.
In
other camps, there is not enough food for those stranded there;
medical care is unknown. In Camp Pagani, conditions were so
intolerable that the inmates finally started fires in their cells in
order to force the PASOK government to close the camp.
The
European Frontex troops are now participating in these blatant human
rights violations. They not only hand over refugees they apprehend to
the Greek authorities in the knowledge of the catastrophic conditions
in the detention camps, they are also directly involved in the
process of deportation, including conducting screenings of refugees
to determine their identities and origins. This procedure, which in
Germany can last for days and is still prone to mistakes, is carried
out on the Greek border in only a few minutes. The goal is to
identify as many refugees as possible as being Iranians, Syrians or
Iraqis, as they can then be deported immediately back to Turkey.
Since
May 2010, Greece and Turkey have had a repatriation agreement for
illegal immigrants who come to Greece from the neighbouring state on
the Bosphorus. But Turkey will only accept back refugees that it can
then deport to bordering countries. In this way, refugees are not
only placed back in the hands of the thugs from whom they are trying
to escape by reaching the EU, but Afghans and Pakistanis are swiftly
declared to be Iraqis, in order to deport them as soon as possible.
Despite
the harmonization of asylum law throughout the EU, the asylum system
in Greece is egregiously backlogged. Nearly 50,000 cases have been
waiting for years for a decision. Only 0.3 percent of all applicants
receive a grant of protection; all other applications are dismissed
as “manifestly unfounded”, with the refugees instructed to leave
Greece within 30 days, thrown out on the street, penniless and
illegal.
Some
refugees then try to reach other EU countries, to make a new
application for asylum. These states rely on the Dublin II agreement,
which lays down that asylum can only be claimed in the country in
which a refugee first disembarks. But because of the inhuman
conditions in the camps there, deportation to Greece has been
increasingly prevented by the courts. In 2010, Germany lodged about
2,000 transfer requests to Greece, but only 49 expulsions were
actually carried out. The German Supreme Court has also announced it
will be making a ruling on the legality of deporting refugees to
third states without any prior investigation of their claim to
asylum.
The
hazy legal situation has compelled the European Commission to ask the
government in Athens to make more effort to develop its asylum
system, as the humanitarian situation of the refugees is
“concerning”, as EU Interior Commissioner Malmström put it.
However, the guise of humanitarian “concerns” hides the ruthless
enforcement of the interests of the inner-European states, primarily
Germany. The German government has laid the blame for the increase in
asylum numbers within its borders at the feet of the Greek
authorities. Wolfgang Bosbach (Christian Democratic Union, CDU),
chair of the parliamentary committee for domestic affairs, said that
the “EU and Germany have an overwhelming interest in the third
country rule not being undermined.”
Like
Malmström, Bosbach also sees the planned border fence as only one
building block in the walls of Fortress Europe. “I would place a
big question mark over whether the fence is an appropriate means to
permanently control the flow of refugees”, Bosbach told the
Frankfurter
Rundschau. The
EU must “address the asylum issue at its roots”. What is meant is
the complete closing of the borders to refugees before they can even
reach the EU. According to Bosbach, what is necessary is close
cooperation between the EU, Greece and third countries; he accused
Turkey of showing too little zeal in ensuring the flow of migrants
did not come to Greece. The Turkish government is deliberately being
placed under pressure to act more aggressively against refugees, thus
prolonging the EU accession negotiations with Turkey even further.
The
EU states that insist on the enforcement of the Dublin II agreement
and close their eyes to the conditions in the camps and on the border
are just as guilty as the Greek government of human rights abuses
against refugees.
In
August 2010, the Greek interior minister, Giannis Ragousis, presented
the EU Commission with plans for a completely new asylum system and a
“national action plan” to manage migration. But these pledges
were mere lip service. The bankrupt Greek state lacks not only the
will but also the money to implement the plan. In 2010, the EU made
available €46 million to the Greek government for improvements to
border management, and this year, a further €9.8 million are
promised. But this is primarily being used to further fortify the
border, while the situation in the camps and the asylum facilities is
set to worsen. Although Greek banks received over a hundred billion
euros, refugees continue to languish in the wretched conditions of
the camps.
The
PASOK government came to power in 2009 with the express aim of
solving “the problem of immigration”. Anyone who at the time
believed this meant improvements in the conditions faced by refugees
has now been disabused.
Until
the 1980s, Greece was a country of emigration; laws regulating entry
and migration did not exist. Ever since 1990, Greece has increasingly
become a destination for immigrants, at first coming from Albania and
Macedonia, living in the country without documentation. They had no
rights and worked for starvation wages in construction, agriculture,
the tourism industry and as cleaners and nannies. But the Greek media
and the people took little notice of them; as cheap labour they were
even welcome.
This
situation has changed suddenly since the dramatic financial and
economic crisis gripped the country. The media and political
officials have seized on asylum and migration as subjects of
concern—not the inhumane living conditions and abuse of migrants
and refugees, but rather the economic damage that the undocumented
immigrants allegedly cause. Refugees are branded as scapegoats,
ultimately blamed for the drastic cuts and austerity measures the
PASOK government is imposing on the population.
The
seed is now bearing fruit; more right-wing groups are forming, such
as the Chrysi Avgi (“Dawn”), responsible for attacks on
immigrants in some districts of Athens. In December 2010, a tent
encampment erected by 100 refugees near the office of the UNHCR in
Athens was violently dispersed by special police forces after a few
days. The refugees were protesting against their inhumane treatment;
some had even sewn their mouths shut and gone on hunger strike.
While
the government is presenting the proposed border fence as a populist
measure, it represents a direct attack on basic democratic and human
rights. Refugees and migrants will be forced to seek other, more
dangerous routes to come to Europe and many will die in the process.
The
death toll at the Greek border is already enormous. According to
official figures, between 2000 and 2006, nearly 100 refugees have
died on the minefields along the Evros. In 2010, 41 refugees drowned
on the Evros and washed up on the Greek side; how many ended up on
the Turkish side is unknown. In August last year, a mass grave with
16 Afghans was discovered, and according to activists for the human
rights organization Welcome to Europe, a local funeral home in the
village of Sidiro had buried between 150 and 200 drowned refugees in
the area without identification.
8
January 2011
