Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images)

The human traffickers who brought a million desperate asylum seekers
through Turkey to the Greek islands have been stopped. Where once
thousands a day were smuggled by the mafias on cheap rubber rafts, very
few are making the trip this summer.

To shut down the Eastern Mediterranean route,
countries such as Macedonia, Hungary and Bulgaria acted independently
and threw up razor-wire fences along their southern borders, defying
Europe’s central authority in Brussels. The European Union itself struck a deal that threatens to send the migrants back to Turkey from Greece en masse. It wasn’t pretty. Human rights activists called it cruel. But it worked.

The unimpeded flow of humanity, dominated by
Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans, to Europe is over, at least for now.
Arrivals in the Greek islands are down 97 percent.
The repercussions of the unprecedented maritime migration
in the Eastern Mediterranean is still playing out across Europe,
especially in Britain, whose citizens voted last week to leave the
European Union, in part, because of fears that more immigrants would
reach the British isles.

No
country has been more overwhelmed than Greece and no place in Greece
more than here on the island of Lesbos, which saw 600,000 war-weary
people pass through in the past 18 months. No more.
Now the open turnstile toward a new life in Germany or Sweden has turned into Europe’s waiting room.

Mohammed, a 22-year-old Iraqi from Mosul stuck at the Moria camp on
Lesbos, compared his life to the Eagles song “Hotel California.”He hummed a few bars. He got the lyrics mostly right. “You
check in but you never check out,” sang Mohammed, who, like most asylum
seekers, declined to give his full name because he was criticizing the
system charged with deciding his fate.

Some 42,000 asylum seekers are stuck in grim camps on the Greek mainland, according to the United Nations.
An additional 8,000 are spread throughout the Greek islands, with about 3,000 on Lesbos.
These are essentially the left-over people who arrived in Greece after the E.U. deal with Turkey went into effect March 20. Fewer
than 500 of these new arrivals in all of Greece have been sent back to
Turkey, although the threat alone may be largely responsible for the
steep downturn in trafficking. The migrants and refugees appear
to have made a financial calculation: Why spend $1,000 on a smuggled
voyage only to be sent back later after enduring a few squalid months in
a dirty camp on Lesbos?

“I would not have come to this place to
rot,” said Akash, 24, from Bangladesh, who traveled here with two
cousins. “It cost us everything we had.”
Asked whether he thought
he would get off the island and be given asylum in Greece or be
relocated to another European country, he shook his head and began to
rub his eyes.
The Moria camp, where the majority of asylum seekers are being detained, is notorious.
Human
Rights Watch visited the Reception and Identification Center in May and
found chaotic conditions: toilets flooded, poor food, the overcrowded
facility filled with angry, sometimes drunken men, fighting over their
spots in lines, harassing the women and trying to enter their tents.
On
Lesbos and the other islands, riots have broken out, with fires set as
groups of foreign nationals — Afghans vs. Pakistanis vs. Syrians — set
upon each other while the police withdrew to the safety of their
fortified freight containers.
In his report, Bill Frelick, a director at Human Rights Watch, called the conditions “unfit for animals.” Amnesty International issued its own condemnation.

Suha,
33, is a Palestinian refugee from Syria. She arrived on Lesbos in early
April, spent a few nights at the Moria hot spot and then was
transferred to another facility, called Kara Tepe, run by the local
municipality. This was previously known as “ the good camp.”
“At the beginning it was okay, but as Kara Tepe became more crowded, the problems began,” Suha said.
“The men tried to pull my daughter away from me. She is only 14 years old,” Suha said. “There were too many people, too many angry people. Stealing. Going crazy.”
Suha
and her children were transferred to the Silver Bay Hotel, now run as
shelter by Caritas, a Catholic relief agency. “I would stay here
forever; I don’t care,” she said.

Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images)

Suha and her children have their own room — there is a full-service cafeteria, language classes, even yoga.
But
no certainties. Only a few of the 200 asylum seekers at the Silver Bay
Hotel — which hosts the most vulnerable refugees — have been permitted
to relocate to other countries in Europe. The family reunification
process is also bogged down; it will take months before decisions are
made. “I suspect there will be camps here a year from now,” said Tonia Patrikiadoy, manager of the Caritas facility.

In all of Greece, only about 1,700 asylum seekers have been relocated to E.U. countries that promised to take them.
“They don’t care. I hate Europe,” said Rowaida, 20, an Afghan from Herat, who worked in a beauty salon. She sat outside the Kara Tepe camp, charging her phone.
“I can’t go forward and I can’t go back,” Rowaida said.
She
said that the refugees who rushed to get into Europe before the borders
closed and the deal was struck with Turkey to send some back, “they
were the smart ones.”
“We were too slow, too late,” she said.

Rowaida
complained that authorities only began to clean up the Moria camp in
the days before U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon came to visit two
weeks ago.

A representative in Lesbos for the U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees said the conditions in the camps did improve in June, mostly
because the Greek police began issuing permits for the asylum seekers to
leave the closed facilities. They are not allowed to leave the island,
but they can go into the main town of Mytilene.
On his visit
here, Ban said that although the smuggling of people to Greece has
stalled, the central Mediterranean route remains in use — and is
deadlier than ever.

That route brings sub-Saharan Africans
through Libya to Italy. A spokesman for the European border agency
Frontex said he could count the number of Syrians who arrive in Italy on
one hand. The top three countries of origin are Nigeria, Gambia and
Somalia — and the overall numbers there are the same as last year. What
has changed is the cost of the smuggling.
Almost 3,000 people have died or are missing at sea on this route this year.

SOURCE: Washington post