by Myrto Aretaki
Today’s eyewitness accounts from the survivors of the shipwreck in Farmakonisi reveal the tragic truth of what happened, which has unfortunately been long suspected:
“We were trying to get on the coast guard’s boat, they were hitting us and they threw us back in the sea. A small one-year old child was shouting ‘help, mom, dad’. I lost four children and my wife.”
“I lost my daughter, my two sons and my wife. They were 9, 11 and 13 years old. They threw us deliberately into the sea. They were cursing at us.”
At the same time, the government, via Shipping Minister Miltiadis Varvitsiotis, proves itself unworthy of even mediocre expectations.
“I can’t believe that all of this would be the subject of silly exploitation, I can’t believe that anyone wants us to open the gates and for all immigrants to enjoy asylum in the country,” was the minister’s response. “The Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner is trying to create a political issue.”
Last November, residents of the northern town of Orestiada alleged the disappearance of a total of 204 immigrants in two different push-back operations in the Evros region. Relatives of one of the women who was violently removed on the 14th of November then claimed,
“At night they took them to the edge of the river. There they were handed over to two people with covered faces. Only their eyes could be seen. They tried to humiliate them any way they could. They beat them so much that there was blood. One woman was with her husband who had a heart problem. He got so scared he had a heart attack and his wife started screaming and crying for help. They pulled her by the hair, they beat her and threw her in the river. They picked up her husband and despite his heart attack they threw him in the river as well, cursing. They had tools in their hands and would hit whoever got too close to them. Then they put them in groups in an inflatable boat and sent them back to Turkey.”
“There is no chance of police behaving violently to immigrants,” the Orestiada police chief stated to protesting citizens. “Often immigrants make calls from Turkish territory to organisations or to the Greek authorities using the signal from Greek mobile phone companies in order to create the impression that they have been pursued within Greek borders.”
The violent push-backs of refugees by the Greek authorities are a fact. The repeated deaths of refugees and immigrants at sea and by the land borders are also a fact.
The country’s strategy over the critical issue of immigration provokes terror in its victims and outrage among those who refuse to accept that the only solution is extermination.
The objective difficulties the country faces in handling the large influxes of refugees and immigrants have provided the most vulgar excuse for the unhindered murderous action of the security forces on the country’s borders.
We have an obligation to protest the atrocious conditions and the torture immigrants are subjected to in police stations and detention centers. We have an obligation to protest en masse statements along the lines of, “we must make their lives unbearable,” especially when they amount to instructions from the head of the Greek police.
In response to the ridiculous argument, “if you want them take them home,” we say that we demand our country respect human life, we demand the torture stop, we demand that addressing the issue of immigration be a central priority of the Greek EU presidency and be the basis for a substantive and proper dialogue with all of the parties involved.