Transcript for the Piece Audio version of On board with the Greek Coast Guard

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Entering Europe is no easy feat these days, but hundreds of thousands of people still manage to arrive illegally. Southern border countries are on the front lines, receiving a growing number of people each year. These days Greece is overwhelmed with people from Iraq and Afghanistan coming via Turkey. Sarah Elzas visited Samos, one of the hundreds of small Greek islands in the eastern Aegean. Until recently, its sleepy capital of 12-thousand people only saw foreigners coming off cruise ships and tourist ferries. Today about 80 people arrive illegally each day.
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AMBI: boat starting

It’s 10 PM, and the Samos coast guard is heading out on its nightly patrol.

Captain Nektarios Kitzos starts the boat. As it gets up to speed, the three other officers with him start to scan the dark, water - using a radar and a thermal camera.

Vargelis: All these lights is Turkey

One of the officers, Vargelis points to lights across the water: Turkey.
People cross from there to Samos island in rubber rafts.

At their closest point, Turkey and Samos are just 800 meters apart. Vargelis takes out a map

Vargelis: This is Samos. Over there is Kusadasi.

Kusadasi, a resort town on the Turkish coast. It’s where most people attempt the crossing.

Captain Kitzos says the coast guard’s mission is to patrol the borders—

Kitzos: We are watching the water for smugglers, for drugs, for everything.

But immigrants are told by smugglers to slash their boats if they see the coast guard, to force the patrols to take them in.

Kitzos: If they illegal immigrants cut the boat, our mission change. It’s saving the lives at sea.

From border patrol, to search and rescue. By mid-november of 2008, the Samos coast guard had brought in 48 dead bodies from the water.

About eighty people arrive in Samos each day, either brought in by the coast guard, or landing on the shores on their own. They are arrested by the police, fingerprinted and screened for tuberculosis and other contagious diseases. Then they are put into detention. The Samos detention center is built to house 350 people. These days there is regularly twice that many.

The center is at the end of a winding road in the hills overlooking Samos town.

The day I visited, the sun was setting a brilliant orange over the port below, making the center’s red-roofed boxy buildings glow. They’re surrounded chainlink fencing, toped with razorwire.

AMBI: loudspeaker

An announcement in Arabic calls people to the dining area for a Greek lesson. Two volunteers have come up from town to teach the class.

Mothers show up with children as young as two years old.

Teenaged boys come in too, eager to talk about getting out, like this kid who says he’s 15 and from Afghanistan, and has been here for 18 days.

BOYS: We want to leave. We don’t go to school. All we do is eat, sleep, eat sleep. This is not a life.

He and the two boys with him asked me to adopt them, and take them home with me.

Most people in the detention center are typical of those coming to Greece these days: young men from Afghanistan and other war and conflict-torn countries, like Iraq and Somalia.

Samos Vice Prefect, Thanos Stilianidis, says the island has spent almost half of its operating budget on screening, housing and feeding these immigrants

He says immigration to his island is not just a Greek problem. Few, if any people are aiming for Greece. They’re trying to access Sweden, Denmark or even the UK.

Stilianidis [translation]: This is a problem that does not only concern Samos. We are the first receptors, but it is a problem that concerns Greece as a country, and the whole European union… Greece or the island cannot sustain them economically, they will try to go to other central European countries. [10:02+ It’s just a matter of time when Athens and the centers will be saturated by immigrants and then there will be a serious problem.

Some would say it already is saturated.

From Samos and other outlying islands, most immigrants end up in the capital.

AMBI: church square

In the evenings, Afghans hang out in front of Agios Panteleimonas church in central Athens. Young men stand around smoking and talking.

Women watch children in the playground next door.

Some guys are squatting around a tray of hardboiled eggs. They hit the eggs against each other, and bet on whose will crack first.

AMBI: church square (egg crack)

I’ve been brought here by Nasim- a 24 year old Afghan who came to Greece six years ago. He has an apartment and a job. He had tried to apply for asylum, but ended up with a visa that only gets renewed if he pays social security. He works as a carpenter and takes high school night classes.

Nasim says most people in the square are homeless, and sleep outside. He says he sometimes takes people home with him:

Nasim: if someone is old or children, I take someone with me to my home, just for night. At the morning 5 o’clock when I get up, I say get up and back to the park….

Nasim says people don’t understand why they face the same conditions in Europe that they were fleeing from back home.

Nasim: When they are hungry in Afghanistan, now they are hungry here… They were unsafe here, they didn’t have security in Afghanistan. The same is happening in Greece, in Europe.

In the church square, everyone talks of wanting to leave Greece.

Man 1: I do not want to stay in Greece. We have no work, we have no papers.
Man 2: We want to leave away from here [S: how?] We know how, but it is difficult. We want to go to Italy.

Most want to leave Greece, but under what’s called the ‘Dublin regulation’, if they try to go to another EU country, like Italy or France- they can be sent back. Their papers should be processed in the country they entered.

One of the only ways for the people in the square to be legalized is to apply for asylum--to be recognized as a refugee

About a third of illegal immigrants to Greece end up applying, either when they first arrive, or after they are sent back from another country. But the system is overrun-

Alexia Vassiliou of the Greek Council for Refugees says that Athens doesn’t have the resources to process so many people.

Vassiliou: it’s one building, and the staff they have there are only able to cope with 350 applications a week. And on average there are about 2000 people on a line outside waiting to get in. And that causes all sorts of delays, problems, inconvenience, sometimes injury or worse…

In fact, last October, an asylum seeker died and several were injured in front of the immigration office in a crush of 3,000 people

Even after the few who are admitted into the office are processed and interviewed, very few end up with a positive response.

In 2007, about 25,000 people applied. A total of eight got asylum on the first try. Even on appeal, fewer than 1% of the applicants were granted asylum. 2008 was marginally better, just under 2%. Greece has the lowest asylum grant rate in the European Union.

Some, like Spyros Rizakos, a member of the Group of Lawyers for the Rights of Refugees and Migrants, says it’s done on purpose.

Rizakos: you can easily grant refugee status to Afghani people, to Iraqi people, To Somali people, to Sudanese people. But they don’t. Greek authorities want to spread the message: Don’t come to Greece, it’s hell [laugh]… So uh- people finally- eventually come to the conclusion that they should leave Greece, and that’s what the Greek authorities want.

Patroklos Georgiadis, General Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior, says the grant rate shouldn’t even be an issue: it’s low only in terms of percentages:

Georgiadis: It isn’t small the number, it’s small the percentage. If a country has to examine a hundred of applicants and give two or three people approval, then we talk about 2 or 3% Uh- in Greece for 2007, we had uh 25,000 applicants.

But even other border countries have higher rates. Spain accepted 8% (8.38) of asylum seekers in 2007, while Italy gave asylum to ten percent 10% (10.4) of its 14,000 (14,053) asylum seekers.

Greece has been accused by rights groups of giving only cursory examination to asylum claims- and rejecting them without any explanation.

The United Nations Refugee agency has deemed the situation so bad that it has called on other European countries not to return people to Greece, and instead, process their asylum applications themselves.

AMBI: coast guard boat

Back in Samos with the coast guard patrol, it’s way after midnight. Rain has started coming down in sheets outside. We’ve been out for five hours, and we hadn’t found anyone

Sarah: So it’s 3 o’clock and we haven’t seen anything. What do you tnhink is going on?
Vargelis: Bad weather
Sarah: nobody’s coming
Vargelis: Nobody’s come because afraid for the sunk of the boat. Maybe they will try later or tomorrow.
Sarah: For you this is a good thing
Vargelis: Of course. No illegal immigrants, better for us.

As we headed back to the port, the captain told me I had brought good luck. On a clear night, they usually bring in at least one boatload of 20 to 30 people.

Not everyone gets picked up by the coast guard, though. Some land on their own and make their way to town.

Maria: We see people walking around, ... especially in the morning, because they usually arrive late at night, early in the morning.

Maria is a member of the volunteer-run Samos Solidarity committee, that tries to help refugees on the island through clothing drives, Greek lessons -- whatever they can do.

Maria: They land on the beach and they walk until they find a village, They ask where the police is. They do not know where they are They know they are in Greece, but they do not know Samos or some other island.

They eventually find the police station, which sends them to the detention center. After a few weeks in detention, most are released- and most head to the capital.

And afterwards? If they don’t manage to ask for asylum or find another solution to stay in Greece, they are given a deportation order.

Pasagiannis: The paper says: in thirty days you have to leave Greece.

Kostas Pasagiannis is a lawyer who helps immigrants apply for asylum in Samos.

Greece, he says, doesn’t have the resources to deport people.

Pasagiannis: It is uh- auto-deportation… with this paper, you can’t go to buy a ticket, you have to leave Greece as you came, illegally…

But getting out is as difficult—if not more—than getting in. So they stay, which strains the government’s already stretched resources even more, causing more delays and problems.

The Greek government has taken small steps over the last few months—they have introduced a subsidiary humanitarian protection; there are moves to process asylum in the islands. But it’s likely to be too little. People keep coming.

Maria: You cannot stop them. You cannot build walls in the waters, and you cannot stop them because they don’t live well where they are. they believe they come here to find a new and peaceful life.

In Samos, Greece, I’m Sarah Elzas.

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