How dictators use refugees
This is the beginning of a long essay published this month in Liberties, a quarterly journal of culture and politics.
2014
On September 4 2014, the top brass of the Hellenic Coast Guard held a rare press conference at their Piraeus headquarters. Commodore Yiannis Karageorgopoulos presented a series of slides showing the Aegean and Ionian Seas, plus a portion of the east Mediterranean south of Crete, which comprise the coastguard’s vast jurisdiction. Against this he flashed the number of intercepted entries of migrants seeking refugee status – 1,627 in 2012, followed by 12,156 the following year. Arrivals in 2014 suggested Greece was on track for 31,000 arrivals. This was an underestimation. The annual total that year would almost quadruple[1], to 43,938.
The coastguard’s concerns were very clear. Half of all arrivals were Syrians. A third were Afghans. The Arab Spring that had resulted in regime change in Tunisia and Egypt and plunged Syria into civil war three years earlier was compounding America’s regime change efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which created lengthy insurgencies, to produce unprecedented waves of refugees, and these crises were growing worse. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or Daesh, which had emerged in Iraq’s insurgency, had that summer taken control of Mosul, was slaughtering Yazidi in northern Iraq and was marching across Syria. NATO’s still-unexplained destruction of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya had led to civil war there, further inflaming regional instability.
The Greek authorities knew that this spontaneous market of asylum-seekers had created a human trafficking industry in Turkey, just a few miles from Greece’s easternmost Aegean islands. The vast majority of coastguard interceptions had taken place in the narrow straits between the Anatolian mainland and the Greek islands of Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Kos and Leros.
The smugglers were astute. They had launched refugees on inflatable dinghies with the following instructions: “When a Greek patrol boat appears, let them approach and THEN make a hole in one of the air tubes with the knife… Don’t be afraid. Greeks will rescue you. They cannot repatriate you back to the Turkish mainland.”[2]
This was true. International maritime law obliges any sailor to rescue anyone who is shipwrecked, and the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees prevents national authorities from repatriating asylum-seekers to areas where they may be in danger – a hazard known as refoulment. The fact that Turkish smugglers were taking commercial advantage of humanitarian law struck the Greeks as cynical, but what alarmed them were changes in trafficking methods.
“Because of the geographical configuration of the east Aegean islands and their proximity to Turkish coastlines, facilitators may no longer be needed and it is the migrants themselves who navigate the small boats,” Karageorgopoulos said.
Earlier in 2014 I had travelled to Kos to report on this shift in tactics. Two boatyards were full of court-confiscated speedboats that had come from Turkey, filled with refugees. Some of their outboard engines had bullet holes – even those whose owners had fitted them with additional fibreglass casings. “Last year we were facing a kind of invasion of very fast boats with a smuggler on board, and we needed to deploy our patrol boats to tackle this situation, and make some hot pursuits as well,” harbourmaster Ioannis Mispinas explained to me.
The loss of these vessels had raised smugglers’ costs and led to lengthy imprisonments of up to 25 years. 2014 was the year in which smugglers realised they could reduce their legal risk and costs by setting up production warehouses of two-tube rubber dinghies with plywood floors and small outboard engines assembled in Turkey. This worked. The proportion of arrested facilitators to refugees went down over two years, from 1.2% to 0.8%[3]. More importantly, it meant an inexhaustible supply of boats and an explosion of turnover, and it was beginning to overwhelm the Greeks.
The authorities were looking at numbers and had become genuinely concerned about their ability to police borders. Asylum law is not concerned with flows but individuals. I remember meeting a Syrian man as he huddled with his children on the harbour wharf on Kos, having just been picked up by the coastguard. “I want safety,” Hany Asef told me. “I am coming from death – I am and my family - coming from death. I want any safety.”
Hany’s children had seen Aleppo reduced to rubble. More than once, their parents said, men’s throats had been cut before their eyes. The Asefs were not rich. Hany worked in the water utility. His wife, Bara’a, was a teacher. They had spent all their savings – $3,500 dollars – on this crossing. It is precisely for people like them that the Geneva Convention had been drafted.
How was Greece to reconcile its obligations towards individuals under the Geneva Convention with its obligation to safeguard its borders, which are also the European Union’s external borders?
Read the rest of this long essay here:
https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/how-dictators-use-refugees/
[1] UN figures at https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean/location/5179 suggest 41,038, but I am using throughout HCG figures updated in 2019, after UN data were posted.
[2] Note found in the possession of asylum-seekers, photographed by the HCG, but also corroborated by my own interviews with refugees.
[3] My extrapolation from figures provided by the Hellenic Coast Guard.