Greece announces steps to shut down notorious refugee camps

The Greek government said Wednesday that it would replace intensely overcrowded migrant camps on the Aegean Islands with new centres that would be more restrictive of the migrants’ movements.

The step comes amid a continuing influx of new arrivals from Turkey. It is an effort by the new conservative government to tighten its control over migrant flows while also addressing conditions at the camps, including Moria on Lesbos and Vathi on Samos.

These conditions have become symbols of Greece’s, and Europe’s, inability to manage migration in an effective and humane manner.

But it was not clear that the new centres would do little more than redistribute a humanitarian crisis that has defied solution since the peak of the migration crisis in 2015 and 2016. At that time, more than 1 million asylum-seekers fleeing economic hardship or wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan arrived in Europe.

This year, after several years of having slowed, the numbers of asylum-seekers making the short but often treacherous journey from Turkey to Greek islands in the Aegean Sea has ticked up once again.

The government presented the new centres as a more humane alternative to the grossly crowded camps that have been widely condemned by international organisations.

But they were also intended to send a “clear message,” said a government spokesmen, Stelios Petsas, that migrants who paid human traffickers to reach Europe would remain bottled up in Greece.

“They need to understand, as the prime minister has repeatedly emphasised, that if they give their money to a trafficker to bring them to Greece, they will lose it,” he said.

The camps, on five Aegean Islands, together hold some 34,000 people, many of them living in squalor. Over recent weeks, and with the cold winter months looming, migrants have protested by setting fires and rioting.

“There is a desperate lack of medical care and sanitation in the vastly overcrowded camps I have visited,” said Dunja Mijatovic, the European Union’s top human rights official, last month, warning of impending “catastrophe.”

She said the facilities on Lesbos and Samos had turned life into a “struggle for survival.” Some families had chipped away at rocks to create makeshift shelters on steep hillsides.

Greece’s leaders argue that the blame for the conditions rests also with Europe.

At the summit of European Union leaders in Brussels last month, the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, called on the bloc to come up with a “Plan B” to deal with the possibility of a new refugee crisis, saying Greece could not handle the problem alone.

He urged more solidarity from member states that have refused to share the burden of taking in refugees, which has fallen hardest on countries on Europe’s Mediterranean border, like Greece and Italy.

Even Europe’s more liberal leaders, wary of a rising nationalism in their own countries fuelled by anti-migrant talking points, have continued to crack down and have done little to lighten the load.

The Greek government’s new plan foresees replacing three big camps on Lesbos, Samos and Chios with smaller ones, while refurbishing camps on Leros and Kos.

The aim is to ease pressure on the islands where camps are horribly overcrowded; to increase control over the camps; and to improve vetting of migrants to determine who gets returned to their home countries, and who goes to the mainland.

The plan foresees the transfer of 20,000 asylum-seekers from the island camps to less crowded facilities on the mainland by early 2020. Unaccompanied children, pregnant women and older people would be the first group moved.

In recent weeks, officials have moved hundreds of people off the islands to the mainland, but those transfers have not kept up with the clip of arrivals from neighbouring Turkey.

In an interview with Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper this week, Mitsotakis, the prime minister, accused Turkey of reneging on an agreement with the European Union to crack down on human smuggling across the Aegean, signed in March 2016, when thousands of migrants were landing on the islands daily.

The Turkish Coast Guard’s failure to work with its Greek counterpart was “unacceptable,” he said.

Mitsotakis’ government is planning to hire 800 new border guards for the islands and another 400 for Greece’s land border with Turkey to tighten inspections.

The government will also begin recruiting 500 new workers to speed up the slow-moving asylum process to determine which migrants deserve refugee status and to more efficiently move them off the islands.

Local authorities on the islands were sceptical that the old centres would indeed close.

“It’s not clear to me,” said Kostas Mountzouris, regional governor for the northern Aegean Islands, including Lesbos said on Greek television. “If the plan is for the old and new centres to operate simultaneously, then we oppose that,” he said.

Many locals, both on the islands and the mainland areas where the migrants have relocated, were fed up.

Last month, angry locals protested and blocked a busload of migrants arriving at Vrasna, in northern Greece. The migrants were relocated again.

Earlier this month a nationalist group protested the growing presence of Muslim migrants by cooking pork at a barbecue and drinking alcohol next to a refugee camp in Diavata, also in northern Greece.

© 2019 New York Times News Service