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Idomeni: Greek riot police move in before dawn to clear out refugee camp Idomeni: Greek riot police move in before dawn to clear refugee camp
(about 2 hours later)
Greek authorities have begun an operation to evacuate the country’s largest informal refugee camp of Idomeni. Greek police are attempting to clear Europe’s largest informal refugee camp, where thousands of refugees have been stranded for months just south of the Greek-Macedonian border.
The operation began at dawn on Tuesday and journalists were barred from the area. Government and police officials have said the people in Idomeni will be moved gradually to newly completed, organised camps. Journalists and activists were barred from entry, but witnesses said about 400 riot police entered the camp at dawn on Tuesday to order the approximately 8,000 camp residents to leave. Many left voluntarily in government buses, and by 8am no violence had been reported.
Related: The refugee children of Idomeni: alone, far from home but clinging to hopeRelated: The refugee children of Idomeni: alone, far from home but clinging to hope
About 20 riot police units, comprising a total of about 400 police, were in Idomeni for the operation. Idomeni was the informal crossing point through which hundreds of thousands of refugees entered Macedonia in 2015. Refugees started camping there when the Macedonian government began shutting the border to certain nationalities last November. Once the border shut entirely in March, the site became a full-scale camp, and an emblem of Europe’s failure to manage the refugee crisis.
Idomeni is located on the Greek-Macedonian border, where more than an estimated 8,400 people have been living for months. The Greek authorities have tried for weeks to transfer people from Idomeni to formal camps on former military bases. But many refugees have been reluctant to leave because some still hope that the border will reopen; others intend to cross with the help of smugglers; and still more are frightened of being locked inside hurriedly finished government-run centres.
The government’s spokesman for the refugee crisis, Giorgos Kyritsis, said police would not use force. Under an EU agreement made last summer, the refugees are technically meant to be relocated to other countries in Europe – but so far the EU’s members have failed to live up to their promise.
The camp sprang up on what began as an informal pedestrian border crossing for refugees and migrants heading north to Europe, is home to an estimated 8,400 people. Greek police and government authorities have said the residents will be moved gradually to newly completed, organised camps. With the government promising not to use force to clear Idomeni, volunteers in the area doubted that it would be completely emptied on Tuesday.
Journalists were barred from the camp, stopped at a police roadblock a few miles away on a highway junction leading to the nearby village of Idomeni. Twenty buses carrying various riot police units were seen heading to the area while a police helicopter observed from above. “It may look like they’re going for an evacuation, but I don’t know how they’re going to do it,” said Vasilis Tsartsanis, a Greek activist who has been working in the area since refugees starting passing through in higher numbers in late 2014. “They may be trying to use fear to make refugees leave. But I don’t know who’s going to put his head [on the line] and order an evacuation [by force].”
More than 54,000 refugees and migrants have been trapped in financially struggling Greece since Balkan and European countries shut their land borders to a massive flow of people escaping war and poverty at home. The vast majority are from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly a million people have passed through Greece, the vast majority arriving on islands from the nearby Turkish coast. Médecins Sans Frontières, which has had a presence at Idomeni for over a year, said that by 8am there had been no violence.
The government has been trying to persuade people staying in Idomeni, who include hundreds of families with young children, to leave the area and head to organised camps. This week it said its campaign of voluntary evacuations was already working, with police reporting that eight buses carrying about 400 people left Idomeni on Sunday. Others took taxis heading to the country’s main northern city of Thessaloniki or a nearby town of Polycastro. “So far it’s peaceful, and people are just moving,” said Loic Jaeger, the charity’s head of mission in Greece.
On the eve of the evacuation operation, few at the camp appeared to welcome the news. Jaeger also argued that the evacuation constituted a failure of European solidarity. “Everyone is very excited about the evacuation – about whether it’s violent or not violent – but that’s not the point,” he told the Guardian. “The point is that they should be in an apartment somewhere in Europe: there are only 8,000 of them. Why are we putting them in buses to put them in half-finished camps in Greece, when Europe has promised to relocate them?”
“It’s much better here than in the camps. That’s what everybody who’s been there said,” Hind Al Mkawi, a 38-year-old refugee from Damascus, told the Associated Press on Monday evening. Elsewhere in Greece, 50,000 refugees have been stuck in limbo since March, when the countries of the Balkans closed a humanitarian corridor that had brought hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers to countries including Germany and Sweden in 2015.
“I’ve heard [of the pending evacuation] too. It’s not good … because we’ve already been here for three months and we’ll have to spend at least another six in the camps before relocation. It’s a long time. We don’t have money or work, what will we do?” Thousands are stuck in wretched conditions in detention centres on the Greek islands, where dozens are on hunger strike to protest at their treatment. “This is my seventh day on hunger strike,” said Wassim Omar, a Syrian teacher detained on the island of Chios. “We don’t want to spend our lives here.”
Abdo Rajab, a 22-year-old refugee from Raqqa in Syria, has spent the past three months in Idomeni, and said he was considering paying smugglers to be taken to Germany clandestinely. Some are still attempting to reach Germany with the help of smugglers. “We hear that tomorrow we will all go to camps,” Abdo Raja, a 22-year-old Syrian at Idomeni, told the Associated Press on the eve of Idomeni’s clearance. “I don’t mind, but my aim is not reach the camps but to go Germany.”
“We hear that tomorrow we will all go to camps,” he said. “I don’t mind, but my aim is not reach the camps but to go Germany.” The dire humanitarian situation in Greece, coupled with the closure of the border and the threat of deportation back to Turkey, has resulted in the number of refugees arriving in Greece dwindling in recent weeks. But a Greek appeals committee recently decreed that Turkey is not a suitable country for refugees – meaning that refugees could once again have an incentive to sail to Greece from Turkey.