THE UNSTOPPABLE FLOW - A DOUBLE TRAGEDY IN GREECE

The little red-tiled complex outside the Greek village of Filakio is not much to look at. But stand next to the fence and arms start to wave through the bars. “I am hungry!” shouts one voice. “No toilet!” adds another. They cry out their nationalities—Algerians, Moroccans, Iranians. The bellowing turns political. “Ce n’est pas la Grèce, c’est Guantánamo!” claims one man. Another screams: “German, Hitler, Nazi! German dog!” The policemen hardly resemble vicious camp-guards. They do not try to stop a stranger speaking to detainees being held for illegally crossing the border from Turkey.

But last month the European Court of Human Rights ruled that conditions at Greek immigrant detention centres are so squalid as to breach the ban on “torture or inhuman or degrading treatment”. Even before the ruling, several countries had stopped sending asylum-seekers back to Greece under “Dublin II”, a convention ruling that applications must be heard in the first country of entry.

This humiliation is of Greece’s own making, but it also reflects the pressure of numbers. In recent years Greece has become the main illegal migration-route into the EU. Its border controls have been lax and its asylum-processing system slow and questionable (the approval rate for asylum applications is tiny compared with other EU countries). Hundreds of thousands of foreigners are adrift in a semi-legal limbo, sleeping rough in Athens or in ports from which they hope to get to Italy. Greek xenophobes are beating up immigrants. Traditionally a country of emigrants, Greece is unready for a mass influx.

Like a river seeking the easiest path to the sea, immigration that once flowed to Spain and Italy now courses to Greece. People first crossed to Greek islands; now they prefer the border marked by the Evros river. Nearby is the Turkish city of Edirne, the former Adrianople. Here in 1922 Ernest Hemingway recorded the flight of Greeks across the Evros during the population swap with Turkey: “twenty miles of carts drawn by cows, bullocks and muddy-flanked water buffalo, with exhausted, staggering men, women and children, blankets over their heads, walking blindly along in the rain beside their worldly goods.” Greek cavalry, he wrote, moved them on “like cow-punchers driving steers”.

These days the staggerers include Afghans, Iranians, Pakistanis, Somalis, Congolese and Eritreans. And the cow-punchers are human traffickers, pushing them into the river on flimsy dinghies or across fields of sunflower and garlic. About 50 have drowned in the Evros; ten more have died in the cold. This is one of the most militarised frontiers in Europe. Yet at its most vulnerable stretch, a land section cutting across a bend in the river, slipping into Greece takes no more than a stroll through farmers’ fields. Greece wants to build a fence there.

About 47,000 crossed the border last year. “They do not have any documents,” says Colonel Georgios Salamagkas, police chief in the town of Orestiada. “All the white people say they are from Palestine. All the Africans say they are from Somalia. They know we cannot send them back to those countries.” Most immigrants are trying to pass through Greece to reach richer countries. They avoid Turkey’s border with Bulgaria, but that would change if it were let into the EU’s Schengen passport-free zone.

Greece’s crisis is Europe’s problem. Frontex, the EU border agency, has deployed a rapid-response team—including border guards, dog-handlers and interpreters—to help. The flow has reduced, partly because the Turks are co-operating. But no sooner has one gap tightened than another is reopening on the Mediterranean. Some 5,000 immigrants, mostly young men, have arrived on the Italian island of Lampedusa. Italy stroppily accuses the EU of doing too little. Political oppression may push people to flee, but the end of dictatorship in Tunisia has also lifted an obstacle. Events on Lampedusa must alarm all EU countries about the popular revolts across the Middle East.

Two big European projects, the euro and Schengen, are under severe strain in Greece. To work, they require mutual trust. But this has been eroded, first by broken public finances and now by broken border controls. Greece says harsh spending cuts make its immigration and asylum system harder to fix.

As with the sovereign-debt crisis, countries facing an immigration emergency need help from the EU, in exchange for deep reforms. EU countries need to align their asylum policies more closely so as to bridge the big disparities between them. Some means of sharing the resettlement of refugees makes sense. Southern countries want the option, in times of stress, to halt the return of asylum-seekers to their first country of entry. Northerners fear this might encourage southerners to export their problem. A painful compromise might be tried: if Greece wants to suspend Dublin II, it should accept a temporary suspension of Schengen and the return of border controls.

Part of the answer lies in co-operating with Europe’s neighbours, helping a free Tunisia to re-establish border controls, say. Greece is under pressure because Turkey allows visa-free entry for some of its neighbours. Turkey also maintains the “geographical limitation” in the 1951 convention on refugees, restricting asylum to Europeans only. If Turkey wants more influence in both the EU and the Middle East, it should end this legal anomaly.

An effective asylum regime must be part of a more sensible immigration policy, not least because an ageing Europe will in future need more foreign workers. But refugees should not be confused with economic migrants. As long as there is war and oppression, there must be sanctuary. Greece’s prime minister, George Papandreou, should know this more than most: under the Greek colonels, his family was given asylum in Sweden.

Copyright: ''The Economist'' 

http://www.elkeda.gr