This Ancient, Enlightened Nation is the World’s Latest Human Rights Abuser
Violations of international conventions coming from the original champions of liberty.
Imagine that for as long as you could remember you were told you were the smart one. That you would be the high-achiever, the high-earner; that you would make your family proud.
Imagine the successes you had at school and, later, university. Imagine a promising career unfolding before you.
Then imagine all that is taken from you. Perhaps with the guns of your own government, or with those of an invader. Perhaps from civil unrest or from natural disaster.
You lose your family. You are forced to flee. You are cast down from all the high potential that once awaited you.
Instead, you experience poverty, struggling to survive in a camp or slum of a neighbouring country — poorer, less developed than your own. You know there is very little chance of rebuilding your life here.
Of course, there is very little chance of you rebuilding your life at all, but then, it’s important to stay optimistic.
Maybe in Europe, things will be better.
You decide to smuggle yourself out of the country, into Turkey, where you live a fugitive existence trying to seek out the people who can help you to make the last leg of the journey.
After months or years (probably years) of confusion, poverty and despair, of time lost that might have been spent pursuing your dreams, you are now possibly only a week or two away from finally getting back to something like where you started.
One night, you and your friends sneak down to a beach to meet a small dinghy. There are too many of you in the boat. Many are sitting on the edges precariously trying not to fall in. You join them.
The boat is towed out until one of the smugglers helping you turns on your outboard engine. He gives brief instructions to those nearest the control. Then the smugglers leave and you and the others are left alone in your little tin boat in the middle of the Aegean Sea. Probably, you can’t swim.
A terrifying night is passed on rough seas. There are children who almost fall into the water. If the waves had been any higher, the boat would’ve capsized, casting everyone into the sea. Everyone would have died.
But no, miraculously, as you near the island of Lesvos, you spot a ship approaching. A military ship, it looks like, with Greek flags. It is done, then. You are in Greek waters. Inside the European Union. Saved.
But when the ship approaches, saving you is not what the soldiers have in mind. They hook your boat up to a tow and threaten anyone who tries to board their ship. They shove people away with poles, they brandish rifles.
Your boat is dragged back, back the way you came, the sailors deaf to your cries, and the wailing of the mothers, and the screaming of the babes.
Lesvos shrinks away on the horizon. After a while, the Greek navy patrol boat stops. The soldiers disconnect their tow-chain, then, with their long poles, they work to disable your engine. Some of the others try and grab the poles. The soldiers fire shots into the air and your people release the poles. Someone almost falls in — probably the soldiers would not have saved them.
Then, having destroyed your engine, the Greeks leave. You wait four more hours on a dead boat in the middle of the sea until the Turkish Coast Guard arrives to bring you back to their shore.
Regardless of politics, no human being of normal moral comprehension could truly regard such a situation as anything other than pitiable and outrageous.
Greece stands accused of perpetrating such turn-backs, even going so far as to re-embark refugees who had already made land on Lesvos, back onto their boat, to force them back to Turkey.
The Legal Centre Lesvos, a charity registered in Greece, released a report in early July detailing allegations of such push-backs — including testimony from witnesses. Such actions are illegal, in contravention of both the Universal Declaration and the European Convention on Human Rights.
Greek authorities deny using illegal methods against boat refugees, according to a report from Deutsche Welle. Greek Minister for Citizen Protection, Michalis Chrisochoidis called the accusations “fake news.”
Last month, however, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) urged the Greek government to investigate the reports, which have increased since March, despite a decrease in refugee numbers. Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, claims there is plenty of proof of abuses collected by NGOs and media.
Some Greek newspapers have referred to the border crossings since March as an attempted asymmetrical invasion on the part of neighbouring Turkey. An attempt to sabotage its long-time rival in the region through the chaos of uncontrolled migration.
Turkey did indeed open its border in March, following a surge in refugees fleeing Syria in the wake of Turkey’s own military intervention to secure its local interests and protect the integrity of its southern border.
“Hundreds of thousands have crossed,” Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan declared, speaking of the Turco-Greek Border, where busloads of refugees had been transported by the Turkish Government. “Soon we will reach millions.”
The United Nations estimated the number to be much less, closer to 13,000. Regardless, it’s obvious Erdogan has been using human lives to pressure Europe. “The doors are now open,” he said. “Now, you [Europe] will have to take your share of the burden.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel rightly criticised Erdogan’s cynical gamesmanship. “It is wholly unacceptable to take [his frustrations at the EU] out on refugees.”
And being the world’s 7th biggest (and Europe’s number one) host of refugees, the Germans at least can bring some moral credibility to their criticism. The test for them, however, is in how impartially they can mediate between Greece and Turkey.
Because Erdogan’s essential argument — that Turkey is not being supported adequately by the European Union for the service it is rendering to them — is a legitimate grievance.
The service is to keep millions of refugees within its borders who would otherwise prefer to cross to Europe, where local social and political tensions would be inflamed as a consequence.
Turkey is the world’s largest host of refugees, administering to 3.5 million despite managing an already faltering economy and major social pressures of its own.
The European Union has long failed to offer credible means of transferring Turkey’s unequal burden, and it is no surprise that Ankara should become impatient or suspicious at its treatment.
In the Spring, Greece was unprepared for Turkey’s gambit. This time around, as increased refugee flows into Turkey look to produce increased attempts to cross the border, Greece has found itself well supported by the European Union and neighbouring Balkan countries who are just as keen not to let any more poor Africans or Middle-Easterners into their garden continent.
Footage of riot police and soldiers on drills, of heavy equipment and fortifications being deployed, is distributed by the Greek Armed Forces to the media, who duly broadcast Greece’s noble defiance of its eastern neighbour’s resurgent imperial ambitions. The imminent second ‘asymmetrical invasion’ is a topic of debate in some sections the Greek media.
Turkey, for its part, denies any kind of machinations — almost impossible to believe — and simply points to the unacceptable plight of refugees across the region, laying the blame with Europe — a claim not without merit.
That, or Erdogan’s state-media broadcast footage of alleged Greek abuses at the border: use of tear gas and batons, soldiers and unidentified, masked men dragging people back across the border. This, in turn, is labelled by the Greek media as fabrications perpetrated by the Turks for political pressure. The diplomatic bickering and media name-calling continues without end.
Of course, none of this really matters to you at this point. You, who have just seen the one dream that had been sustaining you for years — reaching Europe — destroyed before your eyes. You who finds yourself back in Turkey, having spent the last of your savings on a failed voyage. Or else you who drowned in the ocean and will never be found.
It is easy to find oneself caught up in the regional politics of refugees. The long-standing rivalry between Greece and Turkey tempts us into simplified ideas of East vs West, of Europe vs the Middle East, of Human Rights vs Abuses.
Again, the Germans seem alert to this fact, at least in their public advocacy.
“We must not allow refugees to become the plaything of geopolitical interests,” said German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas in March. “No matter who tries to do so, they must always expect our resistance.”
What European citizens and humanitarians across the world must demand is that this ‘resistance’ is directed not only against Turkish political machinations but also against Greece and Frontex — the European Union’s border protection agency — when they resort to human rights abuses.
Aligning with one country or another, becoming entangled in geopolitical disputes, ultimately only serves to entrench the legitimacy of nationalist competition at the cost of innocent human lives.
It is those human lives that we must urgently attend to, and manipulative, partisan policy and rhetoric that we must universally reject.
