A Month in Focus – April 2016Greece - "Is this Europe?"Yemen – Situation remains volatile in AdenMalawi – Protecting Lake Chilwa’s fishermenJordan – Returning to SyriaViolence Against Aid Workers – The Meaning of MeasuringMigrant Crisis - "As translators, we’re there to reassure"
NEWS Focus
Greece
The agreement signed by the European Union and Turkey came into effect on
March 20th.
Since then, all refugees who arrive in Greece are held in detention centres. Several
hundred have already been sent back to Turkey.
Refugee1 (man in Arabic)
Open the gate! We want to move freely.
Refugee 2(man in Arabic)
We just want to go and buy food and stuff.
Refugee1 (man in Arabic)
What is this place, Guantanamo?!Omer, Walid, and seven hundred others wait behind the razor wire encircling the detention centre on the island of Samos… They have no information at all on what’s to happen to them and they feel they’re being treated like criminals.
Lubna (girl in Arabic)
Why are we locked up in here?
Is this Europe?! What about human rights?!
Why are they detaining us here when they let others through?Between last October and 19th March, MSF teams offered assistance to refugees landing on beaches… As soon as the migrants obtained their documents, they would board the ferry to Athens and continue their journey to Europe. But now that the registration centres on islands in the Aegean Sea have been turned intodetention centres from where people are deported back to Turkey, MSF and numerous volunteers and aid organisations have decided to withdraw their assistance.
Julien Delozanne, project coordinator, MSF (in French)
The decision to suspend our work on Samos was really tough, a really big decision. We’re
aware that what MSF is doing on the island isn’t enough but we refuse to do more because
we don’t want to have anything to with sending migrants back to Turkey. These Syrians consider themselves lucky as they arrived just before March 20th. They’ve been given the documents allowing them to continue their journey – but to where?
When they disembark in Athens, they may well end up with the 5,000 people already camping in squalor at the port.
Alisa, 14 years old (in Arabic)
The food is really bad, the water too: it's toilet water not drinking water. And people keep
getting sick because of it. We’re treated like animals here with this food they give us. The Greek authorities are trying to transfer the migrants to camps… But most of them, uncertain of the reception they’ll get or fearful of being deported, are refusing to board the buses. Mid-March, the authorities managed to get around 1,500 people to move to a camp not far from the Albanian border. Two weeks on, these families, some with very young babies, are living in tents pitched on stony ground while temperatures drop close to zeroat night.
Refugee, Katsikas camp (in Kurdish)
The situation here’s not good, but we have no other choice, we’ll have to stay till we get
some help and to reach our relatives. There’s nowhere for us to go. We’ve been homeless
for too long, we’ve had enough frustration and humiliation. We fled Daesh!"The situation is even worse in Idomeni, where several thousand people wait in front of the razor wire fence. But the Macedonian border remains firmly closed.
Marietta Provopoulo, directrice générale de MSF Grèce (in English)
60% of the people that are stuck today in Greece are women and children. And more than
90% of these people have a clear refugee status, they really come from war torn places.
This is a failure of Greece, but a failure of Europe to collectively respond to a problem.
What we call the refugee crisis, we want to object to that, I want to object to that (…) The
problem is that we have failed to receive them, the problem is that we wanted to make
their lives as difficult as possible. Over 50,000 refugees are trapped in Greece. Their only alternative, at least for the time being, is to apply for asylum.