‘Our island has become a warehouse for souls’
Lesbos is being used as vast prison to contain migration crisis, claim residents as tensions in camp boil over
Standing in the mud, Khairullah Sabri points towards the tiny cabin he built from pieces of wood and plastic sheeting in the sprawling Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos. He fled fighting and Taliban repression in his native Kunduz province in Afghanistan with his wife and two small children, aged four and two, travelling through Pakistan, Iran and Turkey before paying smugglers to make the short sea crossing to this island in the Aegean.
That was six months ago. The family is still here, a tiny part of the thousands of refugees and migrants who battle cold, filth and uncertainty as they reluctantly call Moria home.
“It’s very hard for the children. They are sick all the time. If you go to the doctor, there is a queue of 300 people. We have no idea how many more months we’ll have to wait for our asylum applications to be processed,” said the 25-year-old former shopkeeper, who is a member of Afghanistan’s Hazara community.
The camp at Moria – long a stain on Europe’s conscience – is bigger than ever before. Designed to hold 2,800 people, it is now a vast township of leaky tents, makeshift shelters, uncollected refuse and muddy, winding paths, where 20,000 people have been left to fend for themselves.
The vast majority live outside the wire fences of the original facility, trying as best they can to survive in the battered olive groves that surround the camp.
On Monday, riot police fired tear gas at a protest march involving 2,000 asylum seekers frustrated by a failing refugee system.
There have been reports of local vigilantes arming themselves with clubs and tracking down NGO workers in Mytilene.
After five traumatic years on the front line of Europe’s refugee crisis, Greece now says it has come up with a plan to ease the pressure on its embattled Aegean Islands.
The country’s conservative government, elected last summer, wants to dramatically speed up the processing of asylum requests, deport failed asylum seekers back to Turkey and transfer tens of thousands of migrants and refugees to camps on the Greek mainland.
There are plans to deploy floating barriers at sea to deter more arrivals, to build five new migrant centres and to close down the shameful Moria camp, a morass of mud and misery.
“Decongesting the islands is a priority,” said Alkiviadis Stefanis, the deputy defence minister, promising that the new camps would be built by the summer.
“The numbers are huge, which is why we introduced a law (to) speed up the process.”
Within the next three months, the number of deportations will be increased to 200 a week, he said.
It all sounds promising in theory, but on the ground refugees, human rights groups and local officials say the situation is just not improving on the islands – it’s getting far worse.
Inside the Moria camp there are children everywhere – babies on their mothers’ backs, toddlers in mud-spattered Crocs, young children in damp track suits with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
Some people have been here for so long that they have set up microbusinesses – snack shops, barbers and even a bakery in tiny cabins made of plywood and tarpaulins.
Ancient olive trees have been hacked down to their stumps for firewood, which is burned in old cooking oil containers by families desperate for warmth.
The mountains of Turkey, just a few miles across the water, are covered in snow as a cold front sweeps in. Despite the bone-chilling cold, some people have only flip-flops to wear.
Reshede Sifalha, 20, wearing a bright yellow beanie, pokes his head out of a home-made cabin not much bigger than a dog kennel. “It’s very cold at night,” he said. “And the food is really bad.”
The government’s master plan to decongest the islands has so far resulted in little concrete action. Just 85 failed asylum seekers have been deported back to Turkey so far this year – a drop in the ocean given that new boatloads are arriving all the time.
Local authorities are sceptical over whether Athens will be able to make a difference any time soon.
The government promised in November to transfer 20,000 people from the islands to the Greek mainland. “Hardly anyone has been moved in the past six months,” said Tasos Balis, special adviser to the mayor of Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos.
“The plan is there but there is no implementation. We are facing the worst moment of the refugee and migrant crisis. It’s a really bad situation. We supported this government but it looks like they can’t keep their promises.”
Nor are Lesbos authorities impressed with a government plan, announced last week, to install a floating barrier off the island’s coast to deter crossings from Turkey.
“It doesn’t make any sense. If people have been through wars and bombardments, this is not going to hold them back. They will just cut through it. It’s a joke,” said Mr Balis.
The government says it wants to shut down Moria and open a new closed detention centre on Lesbos for people earmarked for deportation, but most islanders are opposed to that, too.
Amid fierce local opposition, no site for the new centre has been identified, let alone a construction timetable agreed on.
Having lived with the refugee crisis for five years, the people of Lesbos are exhausted. They feel their island is being used as a vast open-air prison to contain Europe’s migration problem. “We’ve become a warehouse for souls. We’ve done our bit. Now we want our lives back,” said Mr Balis.
Greece now has a backlog of nearly 90,000 pending asylum cases, a result of bureaucratic inertia, a lack of personnel and the complexity of verifying the claims of people who may have no documents and whose home countries are in turmoil.
It is hard to check a person’s story when his or her home town has been bombed to bits or overrun by rebels.
The multiplicity of languages and nationalities calls for governmentcertified translators, but they are often in short supply.
Speeding up the process will be a big challenge.
“I think it’s too early to say whether the new fast-track procedure will bear the fruits that the government hopes for,” said Nickolas Panagiotopoulos of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organisation led by David Miliband, the former foreign secretary.
“This should not be happening in Europe,” said Mr Panagiotopoulos, the IRC’s senior area manager for Lesbos, Samos and Chios.
In the village of Moria, just a few hundred yards from the camp that bears its name, people’s patience and sympathy has all but run out.
“When the first refugees arrived, we welcomed them with love, especially the Syrian families. But now things have changed,” said Afroditi Deligianni, who runs a grocery shop.
“My shop has been broken into six times. Some of the refugees kill our sheep and chickens for food. They take the fruit and chop down trees for firewood. They create a lot of problems for us.”
Maria Hatziargiriou, who also works in the shop, said: “The kids can’t play outside any more. We want the camp moved. The government should listen to our voices.”
The success or otherwise of the government’s plans will be known in the next few months.
But with fighting in Syria forcing half a million people to flee their homes since December, and continued instability in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, the Aegean Islands could be at the forefront of the refugee crisis for years to come.
“We’re going to face this for the next 20, 30 years because of wars, poverty, climate change. This is not something that is going to be solved tomorrow,” said Mr Balis.
‘It’s very hard for the children. They are sick all the time. If you go to the doctor, there is a queue of 300 people’
‘This [floating barrier] is not going to hold them back. They will just cut through it. It’s a joke’