A few days ago we reported about the police coming to the squats and arresting several people. These arrests have been going on for several weeks now and some of the people arrested are still in jail. Certain nationalities are targeted…at the moment especially people from Pakistan, Algeria, Marocoo and Bangladesh which are the people that are very unlikely to be granted asylum.
These arrests are part of a bigger strategy. Since many months the plan of the EU and the Greek government is to empty the islands, speed up deportations, lock up more people. Therefore the people arrested in the past weeks are either forced to apply for asylum if they didn’t do so yet. If they already had their asyulm rejected they are incarcerated and will most likely be deported. All has been going on for months now but we feel that now its getting more serious, and more fast. The following text wants to  be a summary of what´s going on politically now on Lesvos and tries an analyzis of changes in the coming weeks and months.

On 8th of December 2016 the European Commission published a report about the « Progress made in the implementation of the EU-Turkey Statement ». The asked to « speed up processing of asylum applications on the Greek islands » and state that « further efforts are needed, […] so that the processing of asylum applications at first instance is expedited and that the number of returns is increased and sustained ». [i]

According to this report « In total, 1,187 irregular migrants were returned from Greece to Turkey in the course of 2016 under the EU-Turkey Statement or the Greece-Turkey bilateral readmission protocol. […]Non-Syrian migrants are being returned to Turkey by boat and transferred to a removal centre […] Reportedly, so far 47 persons submitted their applications to the Turkish authorities […] So far, 417 persons, who did not apply for a refugee status in Turkey, have been returned to their countries of origin. »[ii] Among the people deported were also 93 Syrians. According to this report 163 people from the islands persons returned « voluntarily » to their country of origin since 28 September 2016.

The greek press [iii]  also wrote about the will of Greek government, enforced by European authorities as Frontex, to  speed up the deportation back to Turkey. According to these report the number of people on the islands will be cut by half until mid April 2017.

The greek authorities plan to put people in jail after their interview has been rejected. Even if they appeal a negative decision, they can be incarcerated during the time of their appeal. This concerns especially certain nationailites (see above) that have low chances for asylum recognition. Although detaining people by nationality is illegal in principal, greek authorities can do it until a court pronounces these incarcerations as illegal. For this increase of incarcerations, Authorities are already planning new « pre-removal centers » on the islands[iv]. We are at this moment not sure how these plans will be implemented on Lesvos. While reports speak about a new pre-removal center being planned, there is also the option of Moria turning more and more into a closed camp. In the past weeks,  families and nationalities with chances of asylum in Greece (as Syrians) have been moved out of Moria camp, leaving mostly single men behind.

But not only in Greece we will see a worsening of conditions for people and a raise of the incarceration of people based on the sole fact of being « irregular » migrants with low chances of being granted asylum. There are also strong concerns about the conditions of returnees back in Turkey. Reports show [v] that people that are placed in closed camp respectively detention centers have very limited or no acces to legal or medical support. Furthermore the living conditions are very bad and personal belongings including mobile phones (which are essentiel to get in touch with a lawyer) are confiscated by the police. As that would not be enough we also repetedly hear stories of violence and abuse towards asylum-seekers and migrants in these centers. Plus, the Turkish government has been already breaking the Non-refoulment principle, and is sending back people to unsafe countries.

Furthermore the European Commission also recommended the re-implementation of deportations from EU-member states back to Greece under the Dublin agreement [vi] in December and thus putting even more pressure on the Greek asylum system. Several countries, including Germany, have announced to start again the deportations. That will concern people that enter Greece after March 15th.

As we wrote before, Lesvos is not anymore a door to Europe that is possible to pass. Lesvos and Europe are more and more turned into a revolving door. Many countries in the north of Europe, for example Germany, are increasing deportations to peoples countries of origin (in the last weeks Germany deported many people to Afghanistan) and will start to send people back to Greece. Greece will raise the number of people being deported to Turkey and Turkey deports people to their country of origin. All completely ignoring human rights, bad living conditions of people and also ignoring the risks of persecution in the peoples country of origins. All this happens on the false assumptions that the countries where people are returned to (be it Greece, Turkey or Afghanistan) are « safe »…an assupmtion thats always very far from the reality that´s people face in these countries after their return.

Recently more and more people got controlled by the police in the streets of mitilini and on their way back to the camps. After severlal arrestations in the last days and some repression against activists, the police also came to the squats.

Yesterday morning the police was checking the former social center two times and on their second „visit“ they took 14 people from different communities with them. Two people were released in the afternoon yesterday. The situation for the rest of the people is still unclear.  According to the informations we have right now, we cannot confirm if 6 people are going to be released in the next two days. 6 other people didn´t want to apply for asylum, so they are stuck in the prison of Moria for now.

They were frightening people and didn´t even let us talk to them to get their full names for looking for help by the lawyer.

Depending on their papers, some of them where sent to sector B, where people are kept until they can be deported.  Also in the streets people were arrested.

The athmosphere is tense at the moment, people are already afraid of deportations back to Turkey and the police is trying to scare them even more. It is pretty unclear what is happening at the moment.

“It is getting really unconfortable on the island, but we will remain! We fight together!”

Yesterday evening the Social Center got a very unpleasant visit. Around 11 pm three cars of police showed up at the squat. They went to all the rooms and took the people outside to the front of the building. Then the people were made to kneel down with their faces to the wall and their hands behind their heads. Some had no shoes or sweaters and were forced to kneel like this in the cold for around one hour. The cops checked the papers of everyone. When asked why they check the papers and why they treat the people like this they refused an answer. After some time two people were taken to the police station and the others could go to inside the building again. The two people that were taken were luckily released after their papers were checked inside of the station.

After the incident we learned that people escaped the prison in Moria the same night and the police were searching for them. While this is a reason for the control it is no excuse for entering peoples living spaces and treating them in this humiliating and disrespectful way. We are angry about the racism and violence of the cops here on Lesvos (and everywhere else).

What happened yesterday is not a single event. Instead it is one of many, many incidents of humiliation and violence of the Greek police towards refugees. Every week refugees in Lesbos are controlled, arrested and beaten. Most of them without any reason other than them being refugees here on Lesvos. Hopefully the people that escaped prison are hiding well…and find a way to leave the island soon.

A comrade in Turkey asked us to cross post this text. Its originally from nabermedya…and here it is:

GENDARMERIE INTERVENTION TO REFUGEE CAMPS IN TORBALI

As of February, 8th refugees living in the tents in Torbalı and Bayındır districts are getting evacuated in accordance with the district governorate decisions with the intervention of the gendarmerie and the tent areas are being removed. Thousands of refugees who left their countries because of the civil war in Syria have been struggling to survive as seasonal agricultural workers and living in the tent camps constructed with their own efforts in the rurals of İzmir.

Since wednesday many tent areas have been removed by gendarmerie without any reason. Some tent areas were given time till monday to evacuate the area. Refugees whose residence is not İzmir were told to be expelled and the others wouldn’t be let to stay in tents and they were supposed to rent homes. However for the majority of the refugees who work for very low wages it doesn’t seem possible to earn enough money to move into a house.

In return of showing tent areas and giving jobs “dayıbaşı” (the master of the area) deduct the refugees’ journals, don’t pay regularly or even never pay at all. Since these agricultural workers need to live close to their working areas and don’t know the language they are obliged to the dayıbaşı system. Thus these people getting evacuated from the tents means removing their resources of income.

Refugees who left everything they have in Syria can’t earn income for a long while since the demand for the seasonal workers decreases in winter. They can survive in cold weathers thanks to tents, food, firing, diapers and hygiene products provided by the limited number of volunteers and CSO’s. The tent areas lacking toilets, showers and clean water and getting covered with mud after every rain are being ignored by the authorities.

These conditions affect the children at the utmost. The children get exposed to illnesses and developmental disabilities as a result of poor nutrition and health conditions. Hospitals deny to treat the refugees without the documents. Even the death of the baby Noaf of pneumonia after getting refused from the hospital couldn’t make enough impact on the government’s policy on the refugees that made it hard for refugees to get registered. There are lots of children suffering from pneumonia in the camps. The threat of forced displacement by the gendarmerie just deepen the children’s trauma caused by the civil war and poor living conditions.

In the last May before the harvest, tent areas providing a space to live nearly two thousand people were removed by the district governorate. Now it is thought-provoking that the same incident happens before seed-time when the demand for seasonal workers increase. Yet it had been speculated for three years now that the district governorate and municipality had plans to move the tent areas to one center to improve the living conditions of agricultural worker refugees.

A few days ago we finally found a place for our kitchen! We moved around a lot in the last two weeks and are super happy to have a stable place again for cooking. After the conflicts in the days before that we had a lot of meetings and discussions. Finally it was decided to separate the kitchen from the Social Center building. Also we were asked to support the people more in cooking for themselves instead of serving ready food. So now its food boxes for cooking instead of cups of ready food.

We are cooking everyday now in the new kitchen and distributing the bigger part on Tsamakia beach and a smaller part we bring to the people in the squats around the old Social Center.

Apart from all the moving and cleaning of the new place we had nice, quiet and sunny days.

Check out our new kitchen:

Also a NGO called swisscross started cleaning up in the squats, getting rid of all the junk that the owners of the old warehouse left inside when leaving the place and therefore making the place more liveable.

But as always there is also shit going on here…in the last days the police was rounding up people from Pakistan and Bangladesh. A lot of people were picked up by the cops in the street, taken to Moria and the people that didn’t do it before were forced to give their fingerprints and apply for asylum. Most of their cases will be rejected quickly and then they will be deported back to Turkey. Already today morning around 60-70 people were deported to Turkey, as far as we know mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh. We are angry and sad about this and fear for the safety of our friends and comrades from this two countries here on the island.

We said it many times before but it seems that it cannot be said often enough: Turkey is not safe. It’s not safe for any asylum seeker. In Turkey there is on the one hand no proper support of asylum seekers or even access to a asylum system. All non-syrian asylum seekeres are detained in so called “repatriation-centers” without access to medical care, education or legal assistance. Most non-syrian will be deported back to their countries, where many face persecution. Syrians might be given some kind of protective status but then are still without access to basic support like medical care and often forced to work in exploitative conditions. On the other hand we also continue to hear stories from brutal violence against refugees and migrants in Turkey by the hand of the police.

As always we will still stay here, we will support our friends in the squats and camps and we will now and forever say

Stop deportations!

No one is illegal!