Greece's Immigrant Odyssey - TIME

Immigrants are seen inside a camp in the southwestern town of Patras
JOHN KOLESIDIS / REUTERS


By JEFF ISRAELY / MYTILENE
Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008

As another orange speck flickers on the radar screen, the captain gently pushes his twin-engine Lambro up to 30 knots. Two hours into an overnight patrol, the coast guard boat glides nearer its invisible target in the narrow strait separating the Greek island of Lesbos from mainland Turkey. The 36-ft. (11 m) cruiser slows as it draws close to its quarry, and its four Greek sailors gather at the front windshield. One of the men trips the Lambro's floodlights. Bobbing in the open sea 50 feet away are five young men, shielding their eyes from the sudden beam of light. Closer in, it becomes clear they are wearing only bathing suits and T shirts in the chilly night, sitting in an inflatable blue-and-yellow dinghy meant for beach play and propelled by two aluminum and plastic paddles.

Pulled aboard the coast-guard vessel one by one, each man looks around, eyes wide with fear, shivering from the cold. One of the Greek sailors, who wears plastic gloves and a headlamp, speaks to the men in broken English. "Where you from?" he asks. Eventually, one softly responds. "Afghanistan," he says, and the others repeat the word. None have identity documents. It's past 1 a.m., and the coast-guard captain estimates the raft left the Turkish coast four hours earlier. The men have rowed more than halfway across the strait, a few hundred yards into Greek territorial waters. They've made it into Europe alive. Five minutes later, the radar picks up another dinghy nearby with five more young men, and the drill is repeated. As the captain turns the Lambro toward shore, the 10 men are told to sit on the deck near four large hot-air vents to keep warm.

That scene, played out in early October off Mytilene, the harbor capital of Lesbos, is repeated nightly in Greece's Aegean waters, where a gaping new hole has opened in the border between Europe and poorer, war-torn corners of Asia and the Middle East. As growing numbers of people flee Iraq, Afghanistan and the Caucasus, human traffickers have begun using the route from the southwest coast of Turkey to several eastern Greek islands as a back door to European territory, adding it to more familiar passages from North Africa to Sicily, Lampedusa, Malta and the Canary Islands. The number of illegal immigrants arriving in Greece has surged over the past year. Interior Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos estimates that 150,000 of them will be picked up sneaking into Greece in 2008, more than three times as many as five years ago. Thousands more are likely to arrive undetected. "We're facing a state of emergency," Pavlopoulos says. "Right now, Greece has the biggest immigration problem in Europe."

Losing Control
Sitting at the crossroads of three continents, Greece has a long history of immigration (and emigration, for that matter). In the 1990s Greece was the destination for thousands escaping fighting in the former Yugoslavia. But what's happening now is bigger and more complicated.

From the port of Mytilene, you can see the lights of the Turkish coastal town of Dikili twinkling on the horizon. Further north, where the strait between the two countries narrows to just three miles, traffickers zip immigrants across by Jet Ski. But the usual form of transport is a humble dinghy or decrepit motorboat crammed past capacity, and destined to be abandoned after the crossing — if the boat and its passengers make it. In October, in separate incidents, Greek and Turkish authorities recovered 18 bodies; the E.U. estimates that 3,000 or more people die annually attempting to slip into Europe by sea. Before setting out on the patrol I accompanied, one of the Greek sailors shakes his head and sums up the situation in a single word: "Chaos."

Consider the 10 men taken off their flimsy rubber rafts: after spending the rest of the night in a police van, they were sent to an overcrowded island detention center for between 15 and 45 days. Once they're released, authorities are likely to hand them a 30-day expulsion order and a free ferry ticket to Athens. But deportations are rare, so almost all will fall into a clandestine existence. Some may stay in Greece, but most will leave to search for work in European countries to the north and west.

In September, authorities on Lesbos took in 1,886 undocumented immigrants, up from 925 in the same month last year and just 87 in September 2006. Athanasios Skarakakis, 53, a Mytilene sardine fisherman, regularly radios the coast guard when he spots immigrants out on the water. And though he feels bad for people desperate enough to risk their lives in such fragile craft, he worries about the impact their arrival has on his country. "We can barely make a living ourselves," he says. "What will they do? Where will they go?"

Those who make it past the coast guard usually seek out the police anyway, and wind up in the state-run detention center located on a dusty hilltop two miles from Mytilene harbor. Conditions at the facility, a cream-colored converted warehouse, have human-rights advocates concerned. They say detainees don't always get proper medical care and that the warehouse is unhygienic, though Greek authorities claim to have improved the center recently, adding more bathrooms and introducing rules that allow for greater use of the outdoor area. Construction is also under way on several new centers to try to ease the burden. Still, Giorgos Karamalis, the head of the government's Civil Protection operations in Mytilene, concedes that he is struggling to respond to the flood of arrivals. Karamalis says he regularly stuffs the two-story detention center to more than double its 350-person capacity, or tries — often in vain — to rent hotel rooms for detainees. "We have reports of hundreds of thousands on Turkish shores waiting to cross over," he says. "The numbers are so vast now, we fear we may lose control."

TIME's request to enter the Mytilene center was denied. From its gates, late one sunny morning, the detainees could be seen inside, a few with their arms hanging through the bars of the shut door. Several immigrants released that day said the center's bathrooms and showers were filthy, and that they were allowed into the courtyard for short spells only twice a week.

Greece grants political asylum to only a tiny proportion of illegal immigrants — another source of concern for refugee advocates and human-rights groups. Last year fewer than 1% of those who applied received asylee status, far below the rate in Germany (18%), Italy (11%) or even Spain (4%). Giorgos Karagiannis, country director for aid group Doctors Without Borders, says Greek authorities should be doing more. "Ours is not a political argument. It's practical and medical," he says. "Let's at least meet the minimum standards. We do it for natural disasters. It's not easy, but it's possible."

It doesn't help that the undocumented immigrants are arriving from Turkey, Greece's old foe. Under a 2002 bilateral accord, Turkey is required to accept the return of all would-be immigrants from Greece. But of the more than 26,000 people Greece says it can prove crossed over from Turkey, only 1,600 have been accepted back. "They are not cooperating at all," claims Alexandros Zavos, president of the Greek government-funded Hellenic Migration Policy Institute, who says Ankara sees "immigration as a bargaining chip" toward membership in the European Union. Interior Minister Pavlopoulos argues that "Turkey has to respect E.U. law if it wants to be a member. As long as it acts like this it will be impossible to move forward with accession." Turkish officials, who point out that they too are struggling to cope with huge flows of immigrants, deny a lack of cooperation and say Greece is trying to unburden itself of immigrants who may have never touched Turkish soil in the first place.

In any case, Turkey's role as a conduit for refugees adds to the anti-immigrant resentment building in Greece. "Of every 10 people walking down this street, one is Greek," says a 61-year-old owner of a sporting-goods store in an increasingly multi-ethnic neighborhood around Athens' Omonoia Square. "Immigrants are both good and bad: 5% good and 95% bad."

Gateway to Europe
Greek officials say the problem belongs to Europe, not just to Greece. Athens wants European border-control agency Frontex to play a bigger role in Greek waters, and recently proposed a new E.U. coast guard. "The E.U. has to protect its borders," says Pavlopoulos. "And every member has to take part in that protection." Panagiotis Tzilas, coast-guard commander in Mytilene, says that saving lives should be the priority, but Greece alone can't cope with the task. "It's not a question of what we should do," says Tzilas. "It's what Europe wants to do. This is Europe's border."

It's a border that plenty will always want to cross. As Europe slides into recession, it will still offer better opportunities than the places from which illegal immigrants flee. Said, a lanky 18-year-old, left his native Afghanistan two months ago and traveled by bus, foot and taxi through Iran and Turkey before puttering toward Mytilene with 10 others in a tiny motorboat. So far, he says, the trip has cost him $3,000, a discount price he got from a distant cousin, who helps operate a trafficking ring.

After a month in the detention center, Said is sitting on a ferry heading to Athens as the sun sets over the Aegean. His brother, 29, made his way to Europe via Russia a decade ago, settling in the Netherlands, where he works as a tailor. As he gets ready to sleep on the floor of the ferry, Said shows off his red-and-black Korean-made ski jacket, which he bought in Iran for $60 before hiking over the mountain border to Turkey. There's a rip along one of the sleeves. "But it is warm," Said says with a smile. "Very important to be warm."

Pulling out his 30-day expulsion order, written in Greek, he mulls over his options. He wants to leave Greece for the Netherlands as quickly as possible, but he doesn't know how: plane, train, boat. "I don't know, but it will have to be illegal," he says, his eyes dropping grimly as he folds the order and wedges it back in the front pocket of the bleached gray jeans he has worn all the way from Kandahar.

With reporting by Emmanouil Karatarakis/Athens