generalspeaking

Forlornly Desperate

"Do you think this is fun? Do you think we are used to living in trash where we come from?"
Unauthorized migrant, Greece

The Greek port city of Patras has become a major human-trafficking hub for undocumented migrants, especially Afghans, trying to reach Italy and other parts of Western Europe. Over the past several years, as many as 2000 Afghans at a time have lived in this squatter camp on the edge of the city while they try to smuggle themselves aboard ferries to Italy. The camp was destroyed bv Greek police in July 2009. - Milos Bicanski

 

They come from Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Syria and other similar war-ravaged places where oppression and poverty is the lot of the people who live in Muslim-majority countries of the world torn asunder in a horrible blight of extreme Islamist ideology dedicated to jihad and hatred of all things un-Islamic. Where their own Muslim faith does not protect them from the atrocities and depraved violence of jihad-maddened psychopaths.

They eventually end up in a no-man's-land of disappointed expectations and a yawning chasm of uncertainty, living and sleeping wherever they can find shelter in a country whose economy is so shattered that adequate housing arrangements, employment, food and medicine is scarcely available for its own citizens. So they sleep among ruins of abandoned factories, at construction sites and hiding places rife with garbage.

An unfinished building is the temporary home of Afghan migrants in the Greek port city of Patras. Many young men and boys spend months stuck in the city while they try to smuggle themselves aboard ferries to Italy.They live in squalid conditions without access to running water or sanitation and are often harassed by police.- Milos Bicanski

Such migrants cannot seek haven in Turkey, whose economy is robust and whose government is Islamist because Turkey has no wish to embrace any more desperate refugees than it already does, flooding over its border with Syria. The grace of its Islamic humanity will extend only so far and no further. And, since desperate migrants find it simpler to enter Greece than Turkey, this is where they go, dreaming that salvation awaits them there.

In Greece few humanitarian resources are available in its straitened economy to give aid to the countless immigrants who flood the country. NGO groups cite Greece for the wretched conditions prevailing within its detention centres, and for pushing immigrants back into Turkey. As a EU country Greece may not legally send on refugees to other EU countries; the place of first asylum must make a determination whether it will grant refuge.

Afghan migrants wait on the beach near the Greek port city of Patras. Thousands pass of young Afghan men and boys pass through the city every year on their way to Italy. They try to smuggle themselves aboard ferries by hiding in trucks and shipping containers. Many have died - Milos Bicanski

 

There are currently 25,000 refugee migrants in a backlog within Greece, seeking permanent asylum. Greece has granted that precious assent to fewer than five percent of applicants in the last year. Last year ten thousand immigrants signed up with the International Organization for Migration in Athens, aiding immigrants to return home.

Many of them were Georgian women whose stay in Greece as housekeepers was years-long, but who lost their employment when their wages couldn't be sustained by employers.

Immigrants, existing in their hopeless conditions of despair and disillusionment, divide themselves by age, country of origin and tribal grouping. Among the older migrants there are teen-agers who hope that the future will be kind to them. For them a local charity provides breakfast, showers and Internet access; aid denied to the older men clustered in the crumbling buildings.

The youth hope to be able to make their way surreptitiously on ferries heading for ports in Italy, and from there, anywhere else in Europe. Italy's plight, however, resembles that of Greece's. The migrants seeking solace and a place for themselves outside the misery they have left behind, face hostility to their presence by the locals, themselves barely surviving.

Some young men desperate to hide themselves on the ferries, explain their backgrounds; that the Taliban invaded their villages leaving them to wander from country to country, orphans fending for themselves. Some of the young men can show the scars of battle they sustained as fearful civilians caught in conflict. Young men try to push themselves between bent bars of the ferry terminal fence at nightfall.

They dart between 16-wheelers hoping for an unlocked container or a way to get a ride under the trucks. The Coast Guard captain, in charge of the port, speaks of the sad game he plays catching the young men desperate to make their way on from Greece in hopes of finding haven in some European port offering safety, employment, a future, normalcy.

His inspectors, he explains, find two or three men in hiding in the trucks most days. Some of them are near death from hours spent in refrigerated containers, or buried, gasping for oxygen in piles of cotton seed. Risking their lives to avoid detection.

Labels: Afghanistan, Africa, Greece, Refugees

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, August 09, 2014