Bridge to nowhere: Syrian refugees in Greece

ATHENS – Daoud Abdo and his family entrusted their safety to Turkish traffickers they hoped would help them flee war-torn Syria for a new home in Europe.

The family of four spent two weeks on a bus from Istanbul to the Evros River, Europe’s southernmost land crossing. Abdo says he and his wife fell off a platform that crossed the river and into the marshes below.

Had it not been for Bangladeshi refugees who insisted the traffickers stop, Abdo says, he and his wife might have drowned.

But when the family reached Athens, they realized that the deal they’d struck back home in Aleppo -- paying the traffickers $24,000 for passage to Northern or Central Europe -- would not be honored without more money.

Together with a fast-growing number of Syrian refugees, the family was stuck in Greece, where they spent a year sleeping in city parks and on the streets.

Sometimes they were offered shelter, but only on the condition that they prostitute their daughter, Suzin, then 14.

For 48-year-old Abdo, once a well-to-do lawyer who worked for the Syrian government and owned property in Aleppo, it was a severe blow.

"I wish I had died there,” he says of his home in Syria. "It would have been better and easier for me. The most difficult day for me in Greece was when we were homeless and all my children were crying because they were hungry and I couldn't feed them."

Six months ago the Abdos were picked up off the street by Coptic Church members and put up in an apartment owned by the church, which also feeds them on a daily basis.

Abdo says his property has been mostly destroyed by the war in Syria, and he would never risk going back.

"There is no peaceful place left in Syria. Because we are Alevi, people hate us,” he says, referring to the minority tribe that, since President Bashar Assad's father became president in 1971, has controlled the nation of 22 million.

"Before, the hate was hidden,” he says. "Now there is constant pressure from all the villages to leave.”

His wife's family has scattered to other countries. "I will not send my children to their death,” she says when asked if the family would ever return.

Yet life in Greece remains difficult. While the war rages, Greek authorities do not deport Syrian refugees, but nor do they support them. Without residence permits, it is next to impossible for refugees to work legally. Many are reduced to begging. Others live off the charity of the Greek Orthodox Church and community organizations.

It is easy to be picked up during police stop-and-search operations targeting undocumented migrants. Syrians can end up in jail for months while their nationality is verified. Police brutality inside detention centers is frequent, as Juan Akash, a 35-year-old journalist, says he discovered.

Akash says that police picked him up with a group of Syrians who were trying to cross over to Italy from Greece's west coast at the beginning of the year. He was crammed into a cell with 56 others.

"We didn't sleep for three days,” Akash says. When police bused the inmates to other precincts, he says, "the senior officers took me out and started to slap me on the face. Then police took out sticks and started to beat me. On the way down the stairs, they beat me behind the knees.”

Akash was taken to Korinth detention center, one of six facilities to house those awaiting deportation. "It is not a human place,” Akash says of the former army camp, where he spent close to 50 days before being released.

During that time, he says he witnessed frequent beatings of Syrians and other nationals. An Afghan prisoner who refused food was beaten in full view of the others as an example, says Akash.

"Police brutality is a fact,” says Vasilis Kerasiotis, a human-rights lawyer with the Greek Council for Refugees, an advocacy group in Athens. "There is no eye, no nongovernmental organization constantly inside the detention centers.”

Greece has suffered a severe backlash against migrants, legal and illegal, as a six-year recession has driven unemployment to 27 percent. Coupled with this, over the past two decades the country has become Europe's front-line immigration state.

At least 85 percent of “irregular migration” into Europe passes through Greece, according to Francois Crepeau, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. The U.N. often decries conditions in the detention centers. Crepeau calls them "shocking” and the detention of children and families "utterly unacceptable.”

The financial burden of policing external European borders and the task of separating refugees and legitimate asylum seekers from economic migrants has come as a shock to Greek authorities, who estimate the total cost at some $650 million a year -- an enormous sum in light of the fact that the Greek government can barely pay pensions or finance public hospitals.

"The European contribution is €230 million [about $170 million],” Greece's public-order minister, Nikos Dendias, told European officials in June. "We are grateful, but … I am afraid that it is not enough."

The war in Syria has exacerbated the problem enormously because it has produced close to 2 million refugees in just a year. Thousands end up living in Greece.

The Hiluh family are a case in point. They applied for political asylum, a notoriously difficult process in Greece, where applicants must pass muster through two committees. Until now, the process has taken up to three years.

"Average approval rates are 0.25 percent in the first committee and about 9 percent in the second committee,” human-rights lawyer Alexandros Konstantinou says.

In June, Greece finally overhauled its asylum process, taking it out of the hands of the police and assigning it to a dedicated Asylum Service in the Interior Ministry. In its first month of operation, the service received 878 applications, 51 of them from Syrians, and made initial rulings on 46, suggesting it may live up to its ambition of processing applications in less than five months.

The service is slated to open three border offices, making the application process more accessible for many. Maria Stavropoulou, the director of the Asylum Service, says her office will also recognize the right of applicants to work legally. "Our law says that anyone with international protection has the right to work," she says. "The real problem is the level of unemployment in our country.”

However, the Asylum Service won't be processing the backlog of at least 25,000 valid applications that are still languishing. Those will remain in the hands of the police.

To maintain asylum applicant status, Idriss and Roshan Hiluh say they had to show up for an interview once a month, despite Roshan's advanced pregnancy.

"Two weeks ago, we missed the interview because my wife was inducted into hospital for anemia,” says Idriss Hiluh, a cabinetmaker from Aleppo. "When we returned to immigration police, we were given deportation papers and lost our asylum status. We said, ‘What shall we do?' They said, ‘That's your problem.'”

During their harrowing trip to Greece, the Hiluhs saw just how reluctant Greek authorities were to admit or help them. As they crossed the Aegean Sea at 2 a.m. in an overfilled rubber dinghy, a Greek coast-guard vessel approached.

"The coast guard told us to go back,” says Hiluh, "but we had a group of Algerians among us who said, ‘This is our fifth crossing, and we are not turning around.'”

To make the point, the Algerians began to knife the dinghy one compartment at a time until the Hiluhs and their four children, including an infant, were in the water. "Only then did the coast guard pick us up,” says Hiluh.

Like the Abdo family and thousands of others, they were stuck in Greece without the money for food or for transport deeper into Europe.

But days after an Al Jazeera interview, Roshan Hiluh managed to leave Greece for Switzerland. She gave birth to her child there and now plans to file for family reunification.

Idriss Hiluh says the alternative -- staying in Greece -- is a bleak one. "What shall we do? Await a slow death?”