The Full Catastrophe

by James Angelos

  A couple of Greek men walked into the store. One of them had long curly hair and looked like he belonged in an ’80s hair band. They were standing around talking about the fact that there were no Greeks left in the neighborhood when, from outside, a small Chinese lady in snug light blue pants and pink roses on her high heels asked them if they could remove the car they had just parked there. “You better do what she says,” the shopkeeper told the men. “There’s no way she won’t get her way.” The lady was preparing for a large shipment to be delivered to her residence, a two-story lime green building across the street that was meticulously maintained in comparison to the other buildings on the block. A rainbow-colored garden windmill turned among the potted plants on the balcony. At the end of the street, a flatbed truck had pulled up carrying a very large shipping container with COSCO written prominently on the side, the name of a Chinese state-owned shipping company. A division of COSCO had a few years earlier purchased the rights to operate container terminals at the port of Piraeus, one of the biggest ports on the Mediterranean, located near Athens. The company invested considerably in the port, increasing both cargo volume and the number of jobs. For the Chinese, the port was an important landing point for goods it wanted to sell in Europe. Apparently, that included a large number of tennis racket–shaped electric bug swatters. The shipping container at the end of the street was filled with them. It, however, was too big to fit down the street, so the Chinese lady employed some of the South Asian men that had previously been loitering on the sidewalk to unload the boxes and carry them to her building. The men from the fabric store stood at the doorway and watched as one large box after another of tennis racket flyswatters was loaded into the ground floor of the Chinese lady’s building. The swatters were a product I’d seen immigrants peddling on the street. Apparently, this Chinese lady was their supplier. “Globalization in action,” I said to the shop owner. “Greeks could learn something from her,” I added, half kidding. The men seemed to take me seriously, though. “We once knew, but we forgot,” said the guy with the big hair.

  I later found Mohammed outside the mosque unlocking his bicycle. I asked him what he had prayed for. “For my happiness. Happiness for my family. Happiness for all Muslims. Happiness for all humans.” He hopped on his bicycle and peddled uphill back to his street corner.

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  Philoxenia, the Greek word for hospitality, means “love of strangers.” Greeks are often thought of as some of the world’s most hospitable people, and there is truth in this. The number of tourists who visit Greece every year far exceeds the country’s population, and indeed Greeks amiably welcome them, and their much-needed money. In my experience, I was often treated with exceptional warmth and generosity in Greece. When my wife and I arrived in Athens from Berlin, for example, we noticed that it was difficult to pass through an outdoor farmers’ market without being plied with gifts for our child. This didn’t change when people detected that my wife couldn’t speak Greek, or that I spoke with an American accent. “Some mandarins for the boy! It will make him healthy!” As we strolled past farmers’ stalls, sun-wrinkled faces gazed at our son while making a spitting gesture, a precaution against the evil eye, which can be inadvertently given through excessive admiration. This was not the kind of thing that would happen in Berlin.

  Philoxenia, however, generally does not apply to those who arrive in need, to work and to stay. This has been evident since the 1990s, when, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Albanian migrants began illegally crossing the border into Greece. Greece was not accustomed to receiving large numbers of non-Greek immigrants, and while the Albanians’ cheap labor was broadly welcomed by those who benefited from it, the Albanians’ personhood was often not. Certainly, Greece is not the only European country to have a deeply ambivalent relationship to newcomers, but Greeks’ wariness has manifested itself in some unique ways. For instance, students at the top of the class in Greece are given the distinction of carrying the Greek flag during patriotic school parades. Periodic controversies have erupted, however, in instances when the best student has been of Albanian origin. One Albanian student in a small town in northern Greece was twice the best student in his class in the early 2000s, and was twice denied the honor of holding the flag. “This flag is stained with the blood of our national heroes who fought to liberate Greece, and must not be raised by the hands of a foreigner,” a spokesman for a village parents’ group said, according to an article in Britain’s The Independent at the time. Not surprisingly, this reaction seemed to eliminate any desire the Albanian student had to accept the flag honor. “I declare that I give up the right to carry the flag,” he said at the gates of his school.

  Someone ought to have informed the parents’ group that many of the flag-bearing heroes of the Greek War of Independence spoke a dialect of Albanian. The Arvanites, as they are called, arrived in the territory that is now Greece during the Middle Ages, and lived in large numbers in the area around Athens and the northern part of the Peloponnese. After Greece won its independence—with a large contribution from its Arvanite population—the Arvanite language was censored by the Greek state. Still, people spoke it in private, including two of my Peloponnesian grandparents. One of them, my paternal grandmother, descended from an Arvanite mountain village in Corinthia she knew as Dousia, though, when I visited the place, its name had long been changed to the more Hellenic Kefalari. Greeks of Arvanite origin often deny any relation to modern-day Albanians. This is partly for reasons of religion; Arvanites, like almost all Greeks, are Christian Orthodox, while the majority of religious Albanians identify as Muslim. Moreover, to acknowledge a close connection would complicate Greek national ideas of a pure Hellenic lineage. Still, when Albanians began arriving in Greece in the 1990s, some Arvanites who still spoke their fading dialect discovered they could communicate with the Albanians who had come to work on their farms.

  It was in great part due to the large number of Albanian immigrants in Greece that in 2010, the Greek center-left parliament passed a bill that made it far easier for children born in Greece to foreign parents to be given Greek citizenship. The law was unpopular, however, with the large number of Greeks who believe that “one is born Greek and does not become Greek,” as it’s commonly put. When he was campaigning for the premiership in the spring of 2012, Antonis Samaras, the leader of New Democracy, vowed to abolish the law, which he called a “magnet for illegal immigrants.” A lot of people seemed to approve of this thinking. At a Samaras campaign rally I attended in Athens, his repeated calls for growth-oriented economic policies were not met with nearly as much enthusiasm as his vow to “remove from this place illegal immigrants, who have now become tyrants of the society.” Samaras, around this time, also called the influx of illegal immigrants an “unarmed invasion” and said his election would mean the end of a state that took care of foreigners and forsook its own citizens. After Samaras’s election, parts of the citizenship law he campaigned against were deemed unconstitutional by the country’s highest administrative court.

  At the time of the 2012 elections, Greece was in an acute phase of its debt crisis and teetering on the edge of a euro exit that would have sown sudden and profound economic chaos. It was therefore curious that, with such pressing issues at hand, the citizenship law and illegal immigration played such a prominent role in the election campaigning. This no doubt had to do with the rise of Golden Dawn, which gained a great deal of political traction almost solely due to its anti-immigration rhetoric. Other parties felt the need to compete. The tough talk was not limited to the right wing. In the run-up to the elections, the PASOK minister overseeing the police, Michalis Chrisochoidis, vowed to round up 30,000 illegal immigrants and place them in old military bases. He also announced plans to construct a barbwire fence along several miles of the Evros River Valley border, an idea European officials referred to as “pointless,” arguing that migrants would simply find another way in. During a visit to Brussels, however, Chrisochoidis said his countrymen could no lo
nger tolerate the “time bomb” that was threatening social peace.

  Greece was indeed facing an immigration problem that required the kind of responsible policy response the government had long proven incapable of mustering. Had the government been able to improve its asylum system, it would not only have created more humane conditions for asylum seekers, but it would have also allowed for faster deportation of those migrants who didn’t qualify for it and instead lingered in the country indefinitely. The Greek government could not exactly use its financial troubles as an excuse for its failure to do this. European Union funds were available to make needed improvements. A spokesman for the European Commission told me that it had earmarked 304 million euros for Greece from 2007 through 2012 to be put to use for “migration management.” Greece’s government hadn’t “absorbed” much of that money due to administrative red tape, the spokesman said. Politicians’ increasing anti-immigrant rhetoric, however, provided a useful way to deflect the focus from their long-standing failings.

  Samaras, after his election win, delivered on his promise to do something about the influx of migrants crossing the border illegally. The tactics the government used to accomplish this, however, raised a lot of questions. Within a few months, the Greek government launched Operation “Xenios Zeus,” a nickname for the Greek god that emphasizes his role as the protector of foreign travelers. Authorities began conducting sweeps in which they detained migrants in order to check their papers. Human Rights Watch, which called the name Xenios Zeus a “cruel irony,” urged Greek police to stop detaining people based on their skin color. In the first seven months of the operation, 85,000 foreigners were taken into custody in Athens. On a few occasions, nonwhite tourists were also detained by police, prompting the U.S. State Department to warn travelers of “confirmed reports of U.S. African American citizens detained by police conducting sweeps for illegal immigrants in Athens.” One Nigerian American tourist detained during a sweep complained of having been beaten by police while handcuffed, telling the BBC that he woke up in the hospital with a concussion. He later filed a complaint with the help of the U.S. embassy in Athens, though a year and a half after the incident, an embassy official told me the Greek government had not yet responded.

  In the Evros River Valley, Xenios Zeus meant the arrival of 1,800 additional border patrol officers. As a result, “the situation changed dramatically,” according to a report by Frontex. The number of migrants detected crossing the border went from 2,000 per week in August 2012 to ten per week in October of the same year, according to the agency. Questions arose, however, concerning the methods Greek border police were using to accomplish this result, particularly as the civil war in Syria was generating a record number of refugees, many of whom set their sights on Europe.

  In November 2013, the UNHCR released a statement asking for clarification from Greek authorities on the fate of a group of 150 Syrians who had reportedly crossed over the Evros River into Greece. Locals in Prangi, a village near the river, told the agency that many of the Syrians had gathered next to the village church. Police arrived in vans and took them away, the locals told the UNHCR. The agency, however, despite what it called “repeated contacts” with the police, was never able to trace the Syrians’ whereabouts. Police told UNHCR officials that they had found only thirteen Syrians, a spokesman for the refugee agency told me. The UNHCR called for an investigation and, in pained diplomatic jargon, said it had repeatedly appealed to states “to facilitate access of refugees to safety” and to “avoid returns to countries neighboring Syria.”

  Around this time, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Nils Muižnieks, sent a letter to the Greek ministers in charge of the police and the coast guard asking them to investigate the “large number of reported collective expulsions by Greece of migrants, including a large number of Syrians fleeing war violence, and allegations of ill-treatment of migrants by members of the coast guard and of the border police.” The boost in patrols along the Evros River meant that most migrants began attempting to cross into Greece over the Aegean, where they often encountered the Hellenic Coast Guard. After Muižnieks sent his letter, on January 20, 2014, eleven Afghans off the Greek islet of Farmakonisi drowned while the coast guard was towing their boat. Survivors said it capsized after the coast guard tried to drag them back to Turkey at high speed. Coast guard officials denied this, and said they were dragging the migrants toward safety when the passengers panicked, causing the boat to capsize. Eight of the dead were children. The surviving migrants were taken to a coast guard station in the morning, where they were lined up on the harborside. Greek authorities, as if to show how well the survivors were being treated, released a video of men who had just lost their entire families being provided sandwiches by a woman wearing a surgical mask and gloves. The survivors later arrived at the port of Piraeus, where a crowd of journalists waited for them. Television cameras focused on two mournful-looking men, one of whom emitted a high-pitched wail of grief. The man held up five fingers to indicate the number of his family—four children and his wife—all of them dead. He looked at the hand and wept as if it were the only trace of them he had left. Another man beside him looked like his eyes had been sewn almost shut from sleeplessness and sorrow. “Who did he lose?” asked one journalist. “His daughter, two sons, and his wife,” a translator said. The children were nine, eleven, and thirteen. “They threw them into the sea on purpose,” said the man, before covering his face with his hand.

  Muižnieks said the incident appeared to be a “case of failed collective expulsion.” Greece’s minister in charge of the coast guard, Miltiadis Varvitsiotis, denied this was the case and said the coast guard had tried to save them all. In a letter to Muižnieks, he expressed his “deepest sorrow for the lives lost in this tragic incident” and pointed out that the coast guard had heroically saved thousands of lives. In a Greek television interview around the same time, though, the maritime minister’s tone was noticeably more hostile. “Look, Mr. Muižnieks and others want to create a political issue in Greece,” the minister said. The boat’s sinking should not become “the object of dumb political exploitation,” he added. “I don’t believe anyone wants for us to open the gates for all the immigrants to enjoy asylum in this country.”

  —

  It was around this time, while walking in central Athens one day, that I met Mohamad Hussien, a twenty-year-old Syrian from the civil war–ravaged city of Homs. Hussien had a boyish face, though the dark circles under his eyes and some stubble made him look weary. He had left Syria with his mother and younger brother—leaving their father and a young sibling behind in Homs. Over a glass of tea in a dingy apartment crowded with other Syrians, he described for me the first time the three of them tried to enter Greece from the Turkish coastline. On an October night, he said, they boarded an inflatable boat with some forty other migrants. The smugglers told them that Europe was the lights flickering in the darkness, the Greek island of Samos. The Syrians steered toward the lights, but what Hussien said was a Greek coast guard vessel intercepted their boat, and men wearing balaclavas emerged pointing machine guns at them. Some of the masked men boarded their boat, Hussien said, and confiscated mobile phones and wallets; his family lost 2,000 euros, and one migrant who protested having his money taken was beaten. Last, the officers removed their engine and left the boat floating idle, he said. “Try and get to Samos now,” he recalled one of the masked men yelling as the coast guard boat pulled away. The migrants then used their hands to paddle back to the Turkish shore. Hussien told me his family tried several more times to get to Greece over the Aegean. On five occasions, they met Greek patrol boats, he said. Each of those times, crew members took their engine and left them to drift and be rescued by the Turkish coast guard. On another occasion, a Turkish vessel intercepted them and dragged them back to Turkey. Finally, the family crossed into Greece over the land border. Some days before I met him, the family had tried to fly to Amsterdam using fake identity cards. Only their mother
made it through security, though. The two sons were let go, and would try again later.

  Greek officials denied the Hellenic Coast Guard did the kinds of things Hussien described. Credible allegations of wrongdoing were investigated, they said. Hussien’s story, however, was one in a large chorus of similar migrant testimonies documented by human rights groups. Why, one might ask, would all of these people lie? The Greek coast guard and navy, one must keep in mind, did save thousands of migrants drifting in Greek territorial waters. But if some officers acted with such mercilessness, a patriotic rationale for doing so could certainly be found. An officer, after all, might see such actions as a defense of the country against the “unarmed invaders” Greek politicians spoke of. Greece, after all, seemed to be pursuing an unofficial policy of deterring migrants and asylum seekers from coming or staying. Prime Minister Samaras indicated as much. Speaking in parliament, he stressed his government’s willingness to use “additional deterrence tactics that until today were also prohibited,” though he did not specify what those tactics were. Other Greek officials also suggested that Greek policy was to make life for migrants as hard as possible. In the summer of 2013, for instance, Adonis Georgiadis, a New Democracy parliamentarian, told a Greek radio station that the purpose of the police practice of apprehending migrants in Athens and releasing them twenty-five miles outside of the city was to make migrants’ “lives as difficult as you can so that they understand the time has come to get on an airplane and leave.” A few weeks later Georgiadis received a promotion of sorts, becoming minister of health.