Greece starts to send migrants back to Turkey
Under agreement, EU will pay Turkey $3B to host Syrians
Deportations part of an agreement with the European Union.
DIKILI , TURKEY Greece began deporting migrants Monday from the island of Lesbos back to Turkey, as part of an agreement with the European Union to manage the continent’s worst refugee crisis since World War II.
Turkey announced that three boats carrying a total of 202 migrants landed in this western port city.
They were put on buses and whisked to an unknown location, possibly to a refugee camp near the Bulgarian border or the town of Duzici near the Syrian border.
Merve Demirkan, a spokeswoman for the Turkish Foreign Ministry, said she was not authorized to reveal information about their destination.
Most of the migrants were non- Syrians, such as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, according to the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet. Sixteen Syrian refugees from Turkey arrived by plane in Hanover, Germany, according to the German press agency, DPA.
That is in keeping with the EU-Turkey agreement, which stipulates that the EU will take in one legitimate asylum seeker from war-torn Syria in Turkey for each Syrian returned to Turkey. The political bloc does not consider asylum applications from people who want to settle in Europe for purely economic reasons to be legitimate.
The agreement will see the EU pay an additional $3 billion to Turkey for hosting refugees. About 2.7 million Syrians fleeing their country’s civil war are in neighboring Turkey, which has said it lacks resources to manage that many without EU aid.
Monday’s operation started hours earlier than initially announced to avoid protesters.
Before dawn, six buses entered the Moria detention center on Lesbos and loaded people to be deported — one policeman from Frontex, the European border agency, for every deportee.
A small group of people arrived to protest the EU-Turkey deal.
“Turkey is not a safe country,” said Natasha Tsangarides, one of the activists who came to the port. “They’ve already done deportations back to Afghanistan, and there were also reports of them even not letting Syrians back in.”
About 2,900 migrants are detained on Lesbos, a short ferry ride from Turkey, and more than 2,700 have said they would apply for asylum. That means they cannot be deported until they have a hearing, a process that could take weeks.
Human rights groups have been critical of the EU-Turkey plan, saying Turkey cannot adequately care for the refugees.
“This is the first day of a very difficult time,” Giorgos Kosmopoulos, the head of Amnesty International in Greece, told the Associated Press. “The EU is forging ahead with a dangerous deal.”
More than 1 million people migrated to Europe last year, prompting a public backlash over concerns about security and strains on domestic resources. Those complaints led to the new agreement for handling the flow of migrants.