Refugee Rights and Human Wrongs
My two weeks volunteering with the Chios Eastern Shore Rescue Team in Greece
I n 2016, I assisted my local refugee aid charity to deliver supplies to the Calais Jungle on two occasions. When the Jungle was evicted and demolished in October I knew I wasn’t finished helping refugees, and after a stint in a camp in Northern Greece in February 2017, I headed out to Chios in November. Born and brought up in the sheltered environment of Jersey (by the lottery of birth), I felt prepared to go out and put my boots on the ground. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the situation and conditions there.
Chios is the fifth largest of the Greek Islands, 7km off the Turkish coast in the Eastern Aegean sea. Measuring approximately 850 square km, it has a permanent resident population of around 55,000.
Since 2015, it has also been a temporary ‘home’ to tens of thousands of refugees who have crossed illegally from Turkey in an attempt to make it to Europe’s shores. At first, the island was used as a registration centre only, with refugees staying only 3–4 days before leaving again on ferries to Athens and then beyond.
Since the implementation of the EU-Turkey deal on 9th March 2016, their stays have become significantly longer. On this date, the borders of Greece and the other Balkan states closed, and EU cash was poured into Greece to enable them to process refugees’ asylum claims as well as simply registering them. Unfortunately, and despite this multi-million Euro investment, this still takes weeks and months on Chios, even for the most vulnerable of cases.
In the time I was there, I volunteered with the Chios Eastern Shore Rescue Team (CESRT) and helped the team at four landings, although during the period I was there and the week beforehand, a total of around ten landings were made on Chios. Rubber dinghies, each containing an average of 65 refugees, either come ashore on one of Chios’ Eastern shore beaches, or are intercepted by the Greek Coastguard at sea, and the people in them rescued and brought by the coastguard vessel to Chios port. At each landing, the refugees are given dry clothes and food by the volunteers, and volunteer medical teams also attend to assess medical emergencies and administer first aid treatment. I met men, women and children from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa. They were, on the whole, ecstatic to have reached Europe, one man gleefully ripping up his remaining Turkish currency, and one young lady asking me to pose for a celebratory selfie with her before excitedly ‘WhatsApp’-ing her mother to tell her that she and her young son had made it.
Then there were those too exhausted and traumatised to do anything other than stare into space, unable to speak or to change their wet babies into dry clothes.
Every single boat which arrives contains many children and babies; one boat was well over two thirds full of mothers and their children. The landings mostly occurred in the early hours of the morning, meaning that these desperate people had set out in complete darkness and could have been at sea for hours. The days are still warm in Chios but the nights are very cold.
The bittersweet moment comes when the bus arrives to take them to Vial. As I smile and wave them off, inside a part of me is feeling sick when I think of where they are going next. Vial — an ex-waste processing plant — is the “migration hotspot” established on Chios to act as a registration centre for refugees arriving on the island. Even when the refugees were required to stay only a few days before moving on through Europe it was a derelict place of fences and barbed wire without proper sanitation or adequate accommodation and food. Now men, women, children and babies, and disabled, elderly and vulnerable people must live there for months while they wait for the grinding cogs of bureaucracy to turn so slowly, sometimes feeling like they have completely stopped and they will be there forever.
The psychological suffering this causes to already traumatised people cannot be underestimated. Volunteers continuously report concerns over the prevalence of serious mental health problems — including self-harm, depression, anxiety, psychosis and suicide attempts — among asylum seekers in Greece, and most worrying of all in children as young as nine years old. In March, a 29-year old refugee attempted to set himself on fire in Vial, and earlier this year Save the Children published a report entitled “A Tide of Self Harm and Depression — The EU-Turkey Deal’s devastating impact on child refugees and migrants”. Still there is no evidence of a co-ordinated approach by the government to address these issues.
Initially intended to accommodate 800 people, Vial now holds upwards of 2,300. Therefore many people and families live outside the main perimeter fence in UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) tents not fit for the cold weather which is coming again this winter. During heavy rain, the ground on which the tents are situated turns to mud. The chemical toilets overflow into this mud. Sometimes when the wind is strong it can blow the tents down and people are left without shelter. The camp authorities have been promising to take down the tents and replace them with containers situated on gravel but the logistics and timing of this operation are not clear.
The food provided by the Greek government is inadequate and sometimes inedible. Camp residents told me that in the previous week, they had been served up food which was still partly frozen; they have no means to cook or reheat the food for themselves. UNHCR ascertain that there is enough food for everyone but volunteers aware of the numbers involved are certain that there is a shortage of at least 500 meals per day. The refugees must begin to stand in line for breakfast from 5am, otherwise those arriving late may not get anything. It is again worth re-iterating that many many children stay here, along with pregnant mothers and the elderly.
Vial is situated a two and a half hour walk from Chios town, and there are few facilities within the camp. Volunteer agencies are not allowed to assist inside, and so most of their services are situated in the town. The UNHCR provide a bus service of 6 buses per day into the town and back, which the refugees told me was extremely difficult to get tickets for. This is ending on 31st December 2017, and no-one knows what the Greek government will replace it with, if anything. There is no regular organised clothing distribution for camp residents except for a Children’s Centre run by CESRT which is only able to distribute children’s clothing — if the families can get bus tickets to travel into the town. There is no legal advice available to refugees except once again for volunteer lawyers who struggle themselves to understand the workings of the system and why everything takes so long. While I was in Chios, there were only 8 volunteer lawyers on the Island, without permanent offices. Medical reports for sick or vulnerable refugees are written in Greek, and people can only find out what is in them if they are lucky enough to know someone who can translate it for them.
As in so many other places throughout Europe, the inadequacies of the authorities tasked with looking after refugees are being largely met by grassroots volunteer groups and charities.
Funding for larger NGOs was withdrawn on 31st July 2017 when the European Commission declared that it was handing over responsibility for services such as clothing and laundry facilities, education and child protection to the Greek government, and many were forced to leave including the Norwegian Refugee Council and Save the Children. Yet again, the government were unable to implement effective handover plans and it is not clear whether all of these responsibilities are still being provided for.
CESRT has been able to continue to function on Chios because it was founded by a local resident who operates the organisation as a team, and not an NGO. It relies entirely on worldwide donors and volunteers, and the compassion, flexibility and tenacity of the team knows no bounds. The CESRT volunteers I worked with were absolutely tireless in their efforts to help. When one option is closed to them and the door shuts, the team collectively find another one to open — without fail. When I asked the founder Pothiti Kitromilidi how she is able to carry on after two exhausting years, and with no end in sight, I already knew what her answer would be. “How can I stop when there are still people in Vial and landings in Chios?”
Perhaps the more pertinent question is what has happened to the millions of Euros. Last year, refugees lost their lives sleeping in tents in sub-zero temperatures on the Aegean Islands. The suffering of the refugees continues daily while the Greek Prime Minister proclaims he is “proud of the living conditions” for refugees in Greece. Human Rights groups are urging the Greek government to take action and put human lives ahead of politics. Many refugees have said that they would prefer to return to their homelands than stay in Vial, and more than once I heard different refugees say that if they had known how terrible their lives would be in Europe, they would never have come.
That people would prefer to return to a war zone, or in some cases certain death, than endure the indignity of that which the EU deems to be acceptable living conditions for people fleeing unimaginable violence, persecution, terrorism and extreme poverty must surely be the most damning indictment of all.
If you wish to support the Chios Eastern Shore Rescue Team then please follow this link.
Sources:
Volunteer testimonies November 2017
Refugee testimonies November 2017
Independent 22.4.16: “The Chios Hilton: inside the refugee camp that makes prison look like a five-star hotel”
Guardian 9.3.17: “Where did the money go? How Greece fumbled the refugee crisis”Independent 21.5.17: “Thousands of refugees on Greek islands risk losing vital services as charities prepare to withdraw”
Independent 16.3.17: “Child refugees attempting suicide amid increasing desperation among thousands of trapped migrants in Greece”
www.aljazeera.com 30.3.17: “Chios: Syrian refugee critical after ‘self-immolation’”
Guardian 28.4.17: “Europe’s Dirty Secret: officials on Chios struggle to cope with rising tensions”
www.ekathimerini.com 22.11.17: “Migrant rights groups ring alarm over approaching winter”
www.ekathimerini.com 25.11.17: “Tsipras ‘proud’ of living conditions of refugees”
