Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

Personal tools
Sections
You are here: Home Breaking news Greece tries to end shame of migrant 'Guantanamos'

Greece tries to end shame of migrant 'Guantanamos'

08 March 2015, 03:07 CET
— filed under: , , , ,

(ATHENS) - Afghan migrant Nazir Gazemi shudders at the thought of the two and a half years he spent in the so-called Greek Guantanamos, the notorious migrant detention camps the country's new government now says it will close.

Just released from his "life with the rats" in the worst camp of all at Amygdaleza north of Athens, the 33-year-old is now trying to help his friends who sleep inside its poorly heated shipping containers which become ovens in the summer sun.

It was the suicide of a 28-year-old Pakistani in the camp two weeks ago -- the latest of many such deaths -- that was the final straw for Greece's radical new government.

Minister Yiannis Panoussis went himself to the camp to "express my shame" at the conditions, telling protesting inmates that "we are done with the detention centres. We just need a few days" to close them.

But this week a "decree" telling the police to no longer arrest illegal migrants entering the country sparked uproar, with government denying it ever issued such an order.

Human rights group fear the release of the disputed document was an attempt to undermine Syriza's vow to grant citizenship to immigrants' children born in Greece, and to free the 4,500 migrants it admits are held in inhumane conditions in the camps.

- Xenophobia -

Xenophobia has been mounting in Greece, one of the main illegal entry points into Europe, as the country's economic crisis drags on. The neo-Nazi, anti-immigration Golden Dawn party is now the third biggest.

"The release of this 'order' plays into the hands of Golden Dawn and the former government's attempts to whip up fear of migrants," said Thanasis Kourkoulas, of the Deport Racism rights group.

But for the migrants caught in the middle -- most of whom, according to Kourkoulas, want to move on to northern Europe -- the nightmare and the waiting goes on.

The camps are still open, but with officials quietly releasing inmates in twos and threes, rights groups claim.

Ali Ashraf, 23, from Bangladesh, spent two years behind barbed wire before he was released from a camp in the southern city of Corinth a fortnight ago. The next day he was back at the gates with food for his friends, but the guards would not let him see them.

For Alphonse, 31, who has been held for seven months waiting to see a judge, the worst was the two weeks he spent sleeping on the floor of a police station in the western port of Patras after being arrested in July while trying to cross to Italy.

"A Kurd and an Afghan held with me tried to kill themselves," he told AFP by mobile phone from inside the camp.

- 'Inhuman conditions' -

Under EU pressure to stem the flow of migrants, Athens built four large detention centres in Corinth, Amygdaleza and at Drama and Xanthi close to the Bulgarian and Turkish borders. The former conservative government, which took a hard line on migrants, also increased the maximum period they could be held while their cases were dealt with to 18 months.

Last December the European Court of Human Rights denounced Greece for "the inhuman and degrading treatment" of inmates, and there have been frequent hunger strikes and protests about conditions.

Syriza came to power in January on a promise to close the camps and turn them into open refugee reception centres.

Rights group are now urging the government to act quickly fearing that later it may be shackled by the need to keep its anti-immigration coalition partners, the Independent Greeks, on board.

"The minister said he needed 100 days to close the camps, but most of these people have not committed a crime and we want them shut now," rights activist Mario Avgustados told AFP.

Yet so heavy is the burden that EU migration rules place on cash-strapped Greece -- with the Dublin 2 rule dictating that migrants' asylum claims must be dealt with in the first country they enter -- that its leaders have been tempted by radical measures.

With so few wanting to remain permanently in Greece, Pannousis told Skai TV last month that his personal opinion was that the Schengen rules should be "broken to give travel permits to migrants so they can travel freely within the EU."

This may be heresy in Brussels and Berlin, but it reflects the reality on the ground, said Kourkoulas of Deport Racism. "Most migrants, with papers or not, want to leave Greece for northern Europe and that is what they end up doing," he said.


Document Actions