Migrants Pay Deadly Price for Europe’s ‘Border Security’

The bodies washed ashore recently on Greek islands are just part of the human collateral of EU border states’ increasingly brutal response to a never-ending flow of arrivals.

It was a Saturday afternoon, at the Naxos Port Authority, when an urgent message arrived: Another dead body had been found on Glyfada beach, a tourist spot in the summer, rarely visited in winter. Coastguards went there and found the decayed body of a child, probably 12 years old. In its backpack, nearby, was food for the trip, reports published later in the Greek press said.

Since January 4, more bodies have been discovered on beaches in the Aegean islands of Folegandros, Naxos, and Paros, all from shipwrecks that occurred between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

This time, the sea had taken its toll on those trying to reach Europe through the so-called, “Calabrian route”, crossing the sea in small boats from Turkey straight to Italy. And it’s not over yet.

2021 was a grim year for what are called “European values”. New fences in the external borders of the EU, high-tech surveillance systems, regular state violence against innocent people, and deadly pushbacks were used in the name of a “hybrid war”, for “border security”, against “illegal migration”, and in the name of “defense”, distorting the reality of people fleeing wars and extreme poverty in the borders of Europe.

Since 2011, roughly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the first fences started being built in Europe as a short-term measure to keep migrants out, it has become evident that migration cannot be contained. People who don’t have legal ways to move away from misery pick dangerous ones and go under the radar.

On November 24, 2021, 27 migrants and refugees lost their lives when the dinghy in which they were trying to cross the channel between France and Britain deflated. It was the worst tragedy in decades recorded in the sea between the two countries. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was shocked, however, a lot of talk of agreed border controls in the framework of Brexit has come to little.

In early December 2021, Slovenia accused Croatia of opening the borders and actually encouraging migrants and refugees to cross them and apply for asylum in its neighbor. An investigation on the “Western Balkan route” reported in October that Croatian police forces were beating and illegally pushing back migrants and refugees to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Romanian border guards meanwhile sent refugees back to Serbia. In early September 2021, Bulgaria sent troops to the border with Turkey and Greece to support 1,000 police officers who were deployed there to stop refugees coming from Afghanistan.

Migration is challenging perceptions of border control, as was seen in the confrontation last year between Poland and Belarus over migrants coming over the Polish border. The talk of the year has been of a “hybrid war” allegedly being waged by countries on the edge of the European Union, such as Turkey and Belarus, accused of manipulating and weaponizing migrants and refugees to push them into the EU, in order to destabilize it.

Pushbacks by some countries just divert flow elsewhere

Evacuation of migrants at the closed camp for asylum seekers in Samos island, during the exercise ‘Promachos 2021’ organised by the Greek Ministry of Migration and Asylum. Photo: EPA-EFE/MICHAEL SVARNIAS

According to Frontex, during 2021, the Central European and Western routes were the deadliest ones, followed by the “Atlantic route”. The so-called “Eastern Mediterranean passage” recorded slightly fewer deaths, but there were losses, too. The reason for that is that Greece, which has been used as a buffer zone by EU countries that don’t want to host refugees themselves, is now carrying out regular pushbacks.

In a confrontation with a Dutch journalist, Ingeborg Bruegel, a few months ago, Prime Minister Mitsotakis indirectly admitted this practice. In an interview with Greek newspaper Kathimerini, he went even further to reject complaints about pushbacks, saying that the Greek coastguard had a right to do everything “to see that that boat [containing migrants] returns to its point of embarkation”.

That policy recently translated to the deportation to Turkey of Syrian refugees after the group, which started their journey to Italy from Lebanon, claimed their boat was intercepted at the Greek island of Kastelorizo.

In another instance, 30 Cuban asylum seekers that entered Greece from North Macedonia were expelled to Turkey, stripped of their right to apply for asylum, and had their passports confiscated. In September, a European Union interpreter said that Greek border guards who mistook him for an asylum seeker assaulted him, and forced him across the border into Turkey alongside dozens of migrants.

The message the Greek government and its European partners want to pass on to the people in camps in Turkey has been successfully delivered: “Don’t go to Greece and don’t enter Europe. You will either die on the way or be jailed until you get deported back to Turkey”.

This is the real European policy on the matter. Is it a success? In November, Croatia said it had reduced illegal border crossings by 45 percent and that migrants were now taking a different route through Romania. The same applies to the Aegean Sea, where there were slightly fewer arrivals last year. In the meantime, the number of people lost at sea trying to reach Spain doubled in a year. Overall, five asylum seekers drowned in the Mediterranean, every day in 2021. People keep on taking ever more dangerous roads, as the never-ending flow of migrants keeps changing course, towards a life of hope. Most will not stop as long as the causes behind migration remain unaddressed.

As governments of the Balkan region try to seal their borders, they also forget that their peoples were once in the same position. The Balkan peninsula is and has always been a source of migration. Post-war Europe, founded on democracy and human rights, is gradually turning into an arena for inhumane and illegal policies towards innocent people.

Matthaios Tsimitakis is a Greek journalist and a digital communication expert based in Athens. He is an author of the independent Greek newsletter “Το Νήμα” (The Thread)

The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN.