The Economist (20150725) by calibre

Author:calibre [calibre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: news, The Economist
Publisher: calibre
Published: 2015-07-23T18:08:23.408000+00:00

Refugees in Greece

A choppy route to freedom

From Levantine war zones to leaky Aegean boats, people pour in

Jul 25th 2015 | LESBOS | From the print edition

JUST five nautical miles of turquoise sea separate Turkey from the tourist town of Molyvos, on the Greek island of Lesbos. But the boat got stuck halfway across, says 24-year-old Mohammed Mahmoud. He and a half-dozen university friends fled their bombed-out home town of Aleppo, Syria a month earlier, making their way across Turkey. In Izmir they each paid €1,000 ($1,100) to smugglers who put them on a night bus with blacked-out windows, then ordered them out on a desolate hillside. They scrambled down to the water, young women clutching small children, and into a rubber dinghy, 54 in a boat made for 20. In mid-voyage the outboard motor died, says Mr Mahmoud: “We tried to fix it, but it fell off and sank.”

“He’s lying,” says Rafail Tsamouras, chief petty officer on the Hellenic Coast Guard patrol boat that picked the migrants up. The smugglers know the system, he says, and many tell the migrants to dump their motors once they enter Greek waters. The coast guard is required to rescue and transport them to the island’s migrant processing camps. Migrants who reach shore on their own must often walk 60km to the camps outside Mytilene, Lesbos’s capital.

This summer, ten or more such boats have arrived on Lesbos every day. Greece has replaced Italy as the main route for migrants fleeing the Middle East. Over 75,000 came in the first half of this year, seven times more than 2014. Most are Syrian, and most come to Lesbos. In the week to July 17th some 8,500 landed on an island with a population of 86,000. At Moria, the main migrant camp, they are fingerprinted, receive papers, and continue to Athens. But police have just two of the fingerprinting machines provided by Frontex, the European Union border agency, and can register at most 500 people per day. A backlog of 1,500 migrants has built up at Moria. In March the city opened another camp, called Kara Tepe, to cope with the overflow.

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