War refugees caught in a no man’s land

An estimated 30,000 people, mostly Syrian war refugees, are expected to cross into Greece this year.

Syrian hunger-strikers demonstrate outside the Greek parliament in Athens on Tuesday [Milos Bicanski/Al Jazeera]

Igoumenitsa, Greece – Earlier this month, the Greek port of Igoumenitsa became the scene of a late-night arrest. A 23-year-old Syrian man attempted to board a ferry bound for Italy. An employee spotted his slight figure amid the lumbering trucks and walked him out of the leviathan to waiting coast guard officers.

“I will try again. What can I do?” the man, Annas Khalifa, told Al Jazeera amid the din of truck engines. “Even in Greece they do not want us. If we go to a different country this is good for them too, because it takes away a responsibility.”

An estimated 30,000 “irregular” migrants, mostly Syrian war refugees, are expected to cross into Greece on their way to central Europe this year – a twofold increase from last year’s figure. In the process they bump, moth-like, against invisible security curtains stretching across several borders. Those who can spend thousands of dollars on increasingly professional smuggling rings, capable of transporting them from Turkey to Germany in under a month.

Most like Khalifa cannot and they are accumulating in Greece, posing a policy dilemma for Greek authorities.

Khalifa faced his own dilemma when he reached conscription age two years ago. If you fight with Assad, you will kill your family. If you don’t fight with Assad what you can do? he asks. You join the Free Army, and see what’s happened in the Free Army – a lot of groups fighting each other.

A better life?

He now wants to complete his degree in electronic engineering. My mission is to invent stuff, he says. In Germany I’ve heard they can support you with free education, so that is my decision.

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Efforts at smuggling refugees throughout Europe have become increasingly sophisticated [Milos Bicanski/Al Jazeera]

 

Khalifa followed a path trodden by many of his compatriots. He spent most of the last two years in Turkey, working illegally for $350 a month and saving up for his $1,000 seat on a rubber dinghy from the Turkish coast to the Greek island of Kos. He then made his way across Greece on boats and buses. Unwisely, he had spent most of his money – $4,000 – on a fake EU residence permit that Igoumenitsa authorities confiscated.

The mountains that surround Igoumenitsa are full of migrants in Khalifa’s situation. By day, the forest floor is littered with plastic water bottles, carrier bags, snack wrappers and discarded clothing. By night, the forest comes to life with the voices of Syrians, Afghans, and Palestinians, choosing their moment to jump onto trucks as they queue up for security inspections.

The risk of stowaways is highest on busy nights, when the truck queue goes back for a kilometre into the darkness, says a coastguard officer, speaking on condition of anonymity. An unmarked police van makes sudden sorties onto the highway, sometimes catching migrants in its high beams.

When they catch us, some police take us to prison and some of them leave us, says Faraideen, a 16-year-old Afghan who fled to avoid being pressed into service for the Taliban.

Like Khalifa, Faraideen has chosen education over war, and like Khalifa, he is penniless. As in every trade, however, there are better classes of service for those who can pay.

The biggest challenge we face is finding the crypts that are built into trucks, not just to stop illegal migration, but also to prevent these people from injuring themselves,” says Antonis Mazis, the coastguard chief here.

Arduous journey

Igoumenitsa is a mere six hours from Istanbul along a new highway. Some 100,000 articulated lorries annually traverse its sparkling white concrete from east to west. Checking them all is a mammoth task, but the coastguard sports a rotating collection of confiscated vehicles – a museum of smugglers ingenuity.

A flatbed truck carried a cargo of cottonseed over a false bottom, which could conceal dozens of migrants lying down. Another had a hatch in the roof of the drivers cabin. In yet another, several Afghan children had been stuffed into plastic olive barrels. One teenager was found suffocated inside a false fuel tank.

Stone seems to be a favourite camouflage material, perhaps because X-ray scanners cannot penetrate it. On one occasion, 16 migrants were found inside two hollowed-out granite slabs. On another, migrants were ensconced amid stacks of flagstones. Perhaps the most ingenious disguise consisted of marble sheets leaning against A-frames and dug out like books.

Fourteen Afghans were found inside them, and the coastguard estimates the value of this human cargo at more than $50,000.

The cost and elaborateness of these preparations, say officials, suggest deals made in Turkey between organised crime rings and trucking companies, rather than casual contracts with individual drivers along the way.

Usually such deals work. Amjad, a 23-year-old Syrian from Damascus, crossed to the Greek island of Lesvos in mid-October. Within a month he was in Germany, walking and driving through Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Hungary and Austria. But the entire trip cost him close to $6,000 in fees to smugglers.

Stranded

Outside Greeces parliament, meanwhile, dozens of Syrians have pitched camp to protest about the uncertainty of their status here. Some have gone on hunger strike and a few have been hospitalised.

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Syrian refugees living in Greece have started a hunger strike demanding asylum [Milos Bicanski/Al Jazeera]

 

Greek authorities offer Syrians and other war refugees a deportation waiver of up to six months, but they are not allowed to work here. Their children may not enrol in schools, and they are given no documents with which to travel elsewhere legally. 

We escaped war in Syria. We escaped from killing, bombings and aircraft every day, and our houses are destroyed, says Jamal al-Abdullah, one of the protesters. We escaped to another country to get our human rights. But we didnt find it here in Greece. So we want to get out of Greece to get it. 

Without the thousands of dollars they need to have themselves smuggled deeper into Europe, these people are charity cases trapped in limbo.

Gian Othman, a 21-year-old lawyer from Aleppo, is another of those stuck in Greece. With a group of friends he tried overland routes – twice through Albania and three times through former Yugoslav Macedonia.

He says Albanian police took his and his companions mobile phones and money, then told them to walk back through the mountains. They raised their machine guns and told us, ‘Go to Greece,'” he says. 

Give us our rights, university, work, food, or let us get out of Greece, Othman adds.

A 2011 Greek law does allow authorities to issue permanent residence permits on humanitarian grounds, but it is a seldom-used option.

“Greece should go to its European partners and say, ‘let’s share the burden across the EU, each in proportion to population,'” says Andreas Takis, associate professor of law at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki.

“But to do this you’ve got to have a precise record of everyone who’s arrived and have given them some sort of status to be able to say, ‘I have so many resident refugees.'”

He says the unspoken policy of allowing people to try to smuggle themselves out of the country is morally wrong.

“Turkey is doing it without being in the European Union and having harmonised laws. For us to be doing it, it’s much worse.”  

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The mountains that surround the Greek port of Igoumenitsa are full of migrants [Milos Bicanski/Al Jazeera]


Source: Al Jazeera