May 2008
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SAMOS - Every time I enter in the sea I feel anguish. And I think it is not normal. I walk with caution, in a small bay of the Greek island of Samos, full of turist. I don’t wear shoes. And I'm afraid to touch a dead body underwater. I have in mind the pictures I saw one week ago in Lesvos, of the corpses of two children found along the coast. I remember the stories of fishermen and the news of the last month. In May at least 112 people were reported to be died on the ways to Europe, 102 of them just in the Strait of Sicily. Buried in that mass grave which has become the Mediterranean - at least 12,180 dead in the last 20 years. Normally the authorities found some corpses but nobody know more about their ghost-shipwreck. The last one happened here in Greece, on the island of Samos. One body was recovered from the sea on May 20. Four days before, a migrant rescued by a fisherman wrote this letter before to leave the detention camp of the island: "We were 22 people on a rubber boat… We were intercepted by Greek coast guard. They tied our boat to their motorboat and brought us towards the coast of Turkey. Then they seized our fuel and left us in the middle of the sea. The weather became stormy and the waves were higher. The boat started to sway. It was on May 16 at 2 a.m.. The passengers fell in the water one after the other… then the dinghy capsized. I lost my friend. I started to swim and to fight against the waves of the sea. At the end a fisherman saved me and brought me to the hospital from where I was transferred to the camp "
Yassin, the author of the letter, went to Athens and we lost his contacts. Maybe the passengers were able to reach Turkey. Maybe they all drowned. It would not be the first time. Tawfiq know it for sure. It is Algerian and he lives in Samos. Despite his young age, 23 years old, he is a veteran among the harragas, since it has burned seven times the border between Turkey and Greece. The last one he was alone. On a small dinghy, with two oars, along a route of a couple of miles. His brother, Sufien, also was returned in the open see by the Greek authorities. We meet him the day after on a beach. In front of an cold beer he tells me about the night of May 2 of 2007. No smugglers. They did everything alone. They already knew the route. He, his third brother, two cousins and one friend. All Algerians. They bought the oars and a rubber boat. They left from a beach near Kuşadasi, but halfway were intercepted by the Greek Navy. The agents approached the boat and cut with a knife the rubber making the zodiac sank. The the motorboast stayed there for a while before all the five fell in the water and start swimming back. Fortunately they could swim and they were able to reach the coast. But what would have happened if one of them was not able to swim? And what would have happened with the winter temperatures? Sinking the migrants boat is a normal practice for the Greek authorities, as widely documented by the 2007 report of Pro Asyl. As well as the rescue’s omission. Bilal and the other 23 passengers on one boat departed from Turkey on March 12, 2008 waited in vain for nine hours the arrival of Greeks relief after their phone call. The Greeek motorboat arrived actually but – Bilal said – they went away after having taken pictures. They therefore decided to call the Turkish coastguard, and were finally saved at around 13.30. 
The number of migrants and refugees arrivals along the Greek Aegean coasts is increasing in the recent years. At Lesvos for example in the first five months of 2008 have already arrived 4,320 people against the 6,370 persons during the entire 2007. They are mainly Afghans (3,285 in the first 10 months of 2007). And then Iraqis, Kurds, Palestinians, Somalis, Sudaneses, Mauritanians, Senegaleses, Ivorians, Nigerians, Algerians and Moroccans. The flows are mixed. Migrants and economic refugees. To avoid expulsion, part of Africans declare to be Somalis. As part of the Arabs say they are Palestinians or Iraqis. But there really are refugees. It is sufficient to visit the former detention camp of Samos to understand it. It is an old building on two floors, in the centre of the city of Vathy. It has been closed in November 2007. The writings on the walls tell the stories of thre refugees kept here. There are portraits of Yasser Arafat and the flag of Palestine, there are phrases in Amharic and declarations of love to Somalia and Sudan, as well as appeals for the freedom of Kurdistan. 
On June the first, 35 people were released from the new detention camp of Samos. I take this opportunity, accompanied by Anna, a militant of the island, to get on the Nissos Mikonos, the ferry going to Athens, and meet them. The Prefecture paid them the ticket. They were released after two or three weeks of detention. Nobody on the Greek islands is doing the three months of detention, as it was until last year. Nobody except those who applies for asylum. And in fact nobody do it. In 2007, the 96% of application for asylum were made in Athens. Before to release them, the police give them a document which allow them to stay in Greece for two months and oblige them to leave the Country. But at the same time forbid them to go to the Achaia region, the region of Patra, the port used to cross the border towards Italy. The document is written only in Greek. Nobody can understand it. None knows what to do or where to go once in Athens. They are left to themselves. There is also a minor, 16 years old, from Guinea. The only chance, once in Piraeus, the port of Athens, is to take the underground to Omonia, the immigrants ghetto under the Acropolis. 
In Xouthou street, behind the window of an anonymous bar of Athens, there is the headquarters of the Association of Sudanese refugees. The President, Adams, received me with a tea. He escaped from Darfur, and arrived in 2004 in Crete, on a container ship sailed from Port Sudan, in the Red Sea. According to him, at least 450 Sudanese and 400 Somali refugees live in Athens. Potentially they are all political refugees. But de facto all of them received the order to leave the country. One of them, Abdallah, born in 1972, landed in Samos on April 20 2008. From ten days he is officially a clandestine. I met him shortly after in the Maqi hotel, an old hotel occupied by the Sudanese in Satovriandou street, where newcomers sleep for three euros a night in rooms of ten people. Nobody prevents Abdallah and the others to seek asylum in Greece. But waiting times here are in average three or four years. In the meantime they can work, but at the end of the procedure, the answer will be negative in the 99% of the cases. In 2007 about 25,000 people applied for asylum in Greece, but only 150 received a protection status. That’s why everyone want to leave. To leave Greece they use false passports or hide themselves in one of the hundreds of trucks which every day left Patras on the ferries heading to Italy. But their fate is tied to their fingerprints. It's called the Dublin Regulation II and it oblige the asylum seeker to apply in the first European country he entered. Doesn’t care if in Greece the rate of recognition of asylum is fifty times lower than in Italy or Sweden. If the fingerprints were taken in Greece, in Greece they are condemned to stay. Ali, from Sudan, managed to arrive in Norway one year ago, but they returned him to Athens. Siad the same, from Ireland. Everything is simply irrational. Greece does not want them to stay and that’s why it deport people to Turkey and denied the protection to most of the asylum seekers. But at the same time Greece forbid them to leave. And if they leave they are sent back. And all this while in the rest of European countries the requests for asylum halved in the last years. The only result here is the increasing number of undocumented people working - and exploited - in the construction in Athens as well in the collection of strawberries in Olimpya or of oranges in Atra. Greece is not what they expected from Europe. So the travel resumes. From Patras. In the obstinate and contrary direction. Towards Italy.
Mohamed shows me one of his drawings. There is a policeman with a knife in his hand and a bloody boy, in a grey car parking in front of a port. I was told of this story the day before from Jaber, 16 years old, who saw the scene with his eyes, running away from the police. It happens every night in Patras. Small groups of ten fifteen teenagers jump the two metres high fence, at the Gate 7, and run towards the second barbed wire fence which surrounds the parking of trucks. To understand if the truck goes to Italy - says Jemmah – we feel the temperature of the tires. If it is hot it means that it is just arrived from Athens and that it will board the next day. If it is the case they hyde themselves inside the trucks before the police arrive. Otherwise they will have a lot of trouble. Jemmah knows it very well. Two months ago he was caught by four agents of the port police. He was kicked on his ear. Then they push him to the floor and one agent start walking on his back. And finally they decided to have fun with him. A policeman pointed the gun on his forehead shouting "I will kill you!" And he pressed the trigger. The coup did not exploded because they had removed the bullets before. At the end, after the kicks and the fake execution, they asked how old he was. Fourteen he said. And they left him go away. A story like many others. A story of abuses and impunity. A story of racism. How is it possible that a police agent plays a fake execution to a 14 years old boy? And how is it possible that a 14 years old boy dies crushed under a truck, as in January 2008, just because he has no other way to reach Italy? 
"Our generation was born in the war, we grew up in the war and we escaped from the war. I have not seen anything else since I was born, if not destruction, death, abductions. We lost our beloved. We lost our rights. And we are not recognized as refugees. So how many wars, how many deaths it need to be a refugee?" One young Afghan asked in a public meeting organized by the movement of Patras, on May 25. For the occasion some activists from Thessaloniki came and bring running water to the slums of the Afghans thank’s to an illegal connection to the aqueduct. About 500 Afghans live there, one third of them is minor. The camp existed since 1996. It was built by the Kurds. Now there are only Afghans. Every night they try to cross the border. It’s a kind of ghetto where hundreds of refugees are concentrated and controlled by the police. Even if there are no cages, people are not allowed to go out from the camp. There are police cars at every corner. They risks to be arrested and maybe kept for three months in the detention centres in Evros or Athens. From the camp you can only escape. In the night. To Italy. Trying to avoid to be caught by the police, by the private guards of the shipping companies and by the truck drivers. And hoping neither to be readmitted in Greece nor to die asphyxiated in the lorry. "We are dying every time and we continue to die - concludes the Afghan boy in the meeting - But we are human beings like you. We are not animals. We have the same feelings, as you" 
We recommend Italian and European politicians to visit Patras. The Italian parliament is discussing a law according to which being an undocumented immigrant in Italy will become a crime, punishable by up to 18 months in a detention center. The Government is also ready to spend 600 million euros to open 10 new “Centres for identification and expulsion”. In a certain way they are simply anticipating the shameful European directive on returns which is going to be approved in June. It is serious what is happening in Europe. Every year tens of millions of tourists reach the Canary Islands, Spain, Greece, Malta and Sicily, welcomed by the smiles of hostesses and waiters. On those same routes, few tens of thousands of unwelcome guest are intercepted by our warships, aircraft and satellites and then detained and deported. And on those same routes hundreds of men, women and children lose their lives. I think to it every time I enter in the sea. And I think that it is not at all normal posted by gabriele del grande at 6:07 PM 
