One hot
afternoon this August, the peaceful waters of Vokaria Bay on the Greek island
of Chios were disturbed by a jetski as it headed in a straight line for the
shore. As well as the noise, swimmers noticed the passenger hanging on behind
the driver. Instead of the usual loudly coloured beach shorts he was dressed in
shirt sleeves and suit trousers.
While he arrived in considerably more style
than most, the judge’s reasons for seeking refuge have been echoed by tens of
thousands of his compatriots as they have landed, in the midst of other
people’s holidays and another nation’s crisis.
The judge, a refugee with money, arrived in
considerably more comfort than most. The focus has been on harrowing images
from the Turkish shore of a drowned toddler and from the Greek shore of tearful
parents clutching their children. What the tens of thousands of Syrians who
survived the crossing have in common is that they have landed in the midst of
other people’s holidays and another nation’s crisis.
They have found Greeks who have their own
reasons to feel hopeless and exhausted. They are in the sixth year of the
deepest recession ever witnessed by a developed economy. After eight months of
fractious negotiations, brinkmanship and all-night summits there has been no
easing in the terms demanded by the rest of Europe for keeping debt-laden
Greece afloat. The prescription of deepening austerity in return for the
financial aid the country needs to finance its debts and remain in the euro is
unchanged.
The foreseeable future is one of even
greater unemployment, deeper recession and political instability. Alexis
Tsipras, the man who became prime minister by insisting that Europe must
address what he called a “humanitarian crisis” in Greece, has resigned. His
hyperbole won him office, but nothing in the way of concessions from the
eurozone. He now waits to see whether he will be re-elected on 20 September.
No one should doubt the severity of the
Greek depression, arguably the worst peacetime crisis that a developed nation
has faced. Its poisonous effects can be traced in everything from suicide rates
and homelessness to child poverty and support for political extremes. But
neither should they confuse it with what is unfolding in Syria or Iraq or Libya
or Eritrea, whose people are also making for Europe. The displacement of half
of Syria’s 22 million population amounts to the worst refugee crisis since the
second world war. This is a humanitarian crisis.
One of the peculiarities of this August has
been the alignment of these crises. High season for the Greeks themselves is
usually stretched more leisurely over July and August. This year the imposition
of capital controls and the fear of Grexit has shrunk it to a few weeks,
leading to a crush even on the islands that receive fewer foreign tourists.
On islands closer to Athens, such as Tinos,
where tourism is overwhelmingly Greek, high summer earnings are essential to
survive the lean winters. It has left locals to bemoan a “relentless August”,
which had the capacity to exhaust but not to fully compensate for weeks and
months of income lost to political deadlock.
On the islands closest to Turkey, such as
Chios, Samos, Kos and Lesbos, where 33,000 migrants have arrived in the last
month alone, the two phenomena have played out simultaneously. In Chios Town,
the island’s capital, Greeks queuing at cashpoints due to continuing caps on
withdrawals, have watched far longer lines of refugees at the mobile phone
stores, anxious to get a sim card and let loved ones know that they have
survived the passage to Europe.
For Greeks weary of their own troubles there
has been no summer hiding place from the scale of the influx. Inevitably, there
are some who have taken advantage of the situation. On Chios, sharp operators
have been going to the most popular landing sites and gathering up discarded
lifejackets and the outboard engines from abandoned dinghies, which they then
resell to smugglers across the water in Turkey.
Others, like the baker on Lesbos who signed
on to feed a few hundred migrants on a government contract and has found
himself months later unpaid and feeding more than 8,000 refugees have shown great
patience. A handful of people such as Sandra Tsiligeridu and her friends, whose
day trip to a small islet off Kos on a speedboat turned into a drama when they
rescued a Syrian man who had been adrift in the water for 13 hours, have
responded with great humanity.
Meanwhile
images of refugees from a horrific civil war wandering into the background of
Europeans’ holiday snaps have proven darkly fascinating. In a sense, the
juxtaposition of sunburnt tourists on loungers with sodden, desperate refugees
arriving from Syria recalls some of the early images from the surge of piracy
in 2008 off the coast of East Africa.
Then it was ragtag Somali pirates hijacking
holiday yachts and stalking cruise ships that provided startling footage. Not
that Syrian refugees pose any physical threat to anyone, but their arrival in
such numbers is one of those jarring moments where the wreckage of failed
states, civil wars and the sum of human misery penetrates the bubble in which
much of the developed world lives.
The dividing line in people’s response to
the human traffic is most often drawn between those who acknowledge the people
on the move as refugees and those intent on grumbling about illegal immigrants.
For now the Eleftherios Venizelos, a
passenger ferry named after Greece’s greatest statesman, has been pressed into
service to transport undocumented foreigners from the islands to the mainland.
It was Venizelos who as prime minister oversaw one of the world’s most
harrowing population exchanges in 1922 in the wake of a disastrous war between
Greece and Turkey that forced millions of people to abandon their homes and
countries. Once again there are refugee ships crisscrossing the Aegean and
anyone with a sense of history should stop calling it a migrant crisis.
Πηγή:
theguardian.com
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