I'm on the night boat to Lesbos and should get there in
about 7 hours. Two days ago when I got to Ancona I had no clue which boat
to get on... Either the one for Igoumenitsa to get on a bus to
Thessaloniki and then head up to Idomeni where there are 15000 refugees
camped out next to the Macedonian border, or the boat to Patras to take
the train to Athens and then another boat to Lesbos. It's a tough call
because the situation is not as crystal clear as it seemed to me a month
ago when I decided to come to Greece. When I decided to come, Lesbos
was swarming with volunteers and international aid organizations that,
to me at least, represented the open arms of human decency, bearing the
fruit of compassion and welcoming war-torn families into a better world.
Nobody asked these volunteer organizations to be there but they still
came in great numbers to help refugees get off boats, feed them, warm
them up, give them clean/dry clothes and help them find their way into a
legal framework that was ready to accept them. That situation got
turned on its head last week!
'Europe' doesnt really know how to accept all these
refugees. It has a little bit to do with racism, a little bit to do with
security, a little bit to do with concerns about integration, and a
little bit to do with all the myths that drive a european dialog which
is always about who is being unfairly asked to do more. The long and the
short of it is that there is no coherent plan on what to do with an
extra million or 3 million or 6 million people. The land route beyond
Greece is closed and the feeling I got from talking to Greek people so
far is that the country is in such a sorry state that they can't
possibly help all these people even though they would love to. They feel
ill-equipped to serve as Europe's waiting room.
In order to deter more migrants from entering the EU
irregularly (not illegally because irregular entry into Greece is not a
criminal offence!), the EU made a deal with Turkey where they paid them 3
billion euros in order to take back new irregular migrants from Greece.
The next 72000 arrivals are meant to be sent back to Turkey if they
don't have a valid case for an asylum claim. The agreement presumes
Turkey to be a safe third country and therefore anyone coming from
Turkey irregularly will not have a valid asylum claim. Doctors Without
Borders, the Red Cross, the UNHCR, and most of the major NGOs that have
been operating in Lesbos and along the refugee trail are opposed to this
agreement because of Turkey's human rights record, which is pretty bad.
Turkey is not a party to the geneva convention and their human rights
record is arguably proof that they don't provide a similar level of
protection and therefore aren't a safe third country. In order to
protest this new agreement, all the big NGOs made press releases to this
effect and stopped working in Lesbos, I guess because they didn't want
to have anything to do with sending people back to Turkey.
Knowing that all those organizations pulled out makes it
very difficult to know if coming here was the best thing I could
possibly do! I have another friend who came to volunteer with the
starfish organization and she left the island after less than 24 hours
to go to Idomeni because they had just stopped training new volunteers
and were relocating most of their operations to there. That got me
thinking about whether I should be going to Idomeni instead. I was
looking at Idomeni on the map on the way from Ancona and couldn't
understand why everyone wants to go through Macedonia at that exact
point if they are so un-welcoming and the door is so clearly shut. There
are a lot of other land routes to the rest of Europe and the only
reasons I've heard so far about why nobody is taking them seemed fairly
speculative and also a bit racist and I won't bother repeating them
until I have a better idea about that place I've never been to. All I
know is that it is a pressure point drawing a lot of media attention,
and my gut feeling is that since it is a veritable media circus, it's
being stage-managed in order to tell any number of compelling stories
about Europe's failure to respond to the refugee crisis, about the
squalid conditions people are living in, about how stupid the volunteers
are for helping people cross borders illegally, about how unruly the
refugees are when their protests interrupt the lives of Greek people who
have done so much to help them, about how terrible the macedonians are
and so on. At this moment, I don't understand that place and the idea of
going there scares the crap out of me.
For now I'm not going there because while I was at the port
in Ancona trying to figure out which boat to get on, I got a message
from the guy who runs the CK team, which is the group of volunteers I
was planning on joining in Lesbos, and he said there were still boats
coming every other day, that they expect them to keep coming and that
they still need my help. Thankfully that message seemed very clear to me
so I buried all the feelings that were twisting my intentions into
convoluted knots and made my way here. Today I'll make my way up north,
meet the gang, and start getting a sense of what is going on. If it's
all quiet on the eastern front, I'll keep moving. Anyway, now you have a
friend on the ground over here. I'll do my best to send songs, thoughts
and pictures whenever I get connected.
