Greek riot police 'clear out' Europe's largest refugee camp

(Baonghean.vn) - Greek police are working to clear Europe's largest informal refugee camp, where thousands of migrants have been stranded for months south of the Greece-Macedonia border.

Greek police enter the Idomeni migrant camp at the border with Macedonia. Photo: AP.

Reporters were not allowed into the area, but witnesses said about 400 riot police entered the camp early on May 24 to force the 8,000 or so residents out. Many volunteered to board government buses, and as of 8 a.m. local time, no violence had been reported.

Idomeni was an unofficial crossing point through which hundreds of thousands of migrants crossed into Macedonia in 2015. Migrants began setting up camp there when the Macedonian government closed its borders to citizens of several countries in November last year. When the border was completely closed in March this year, the area became a camp, and a symbol of Europe’s failure to handle the migration crisis.

Greek authorities have been trying for weeks to move people from Idomeni to official camps at former military bases. But many migrants are reluctant to leave, hoping the border will reopen; others want to cross with the help of smugglers; and many remain fearful of being locked up in hastily built government centers.

Under an EU deal last summer, migrants were essentially to be transferred to other countries in Europe – but so far EU members have failed to live up to their expectations.

Riot police stand among tents in Idomeni camp on the morning of May 24. Photo: AP.

While the government has promised not to use force to clear Idomeni, many volunteers in the area are skeptical that it will be completed by May 24.

“It looks like they are evacuating, but I don’t know how they will do it,” said Vasilis Tsartsanis, a Greek volunteer who has been serving in the area since migrants began arriving in late 2014. “They may try to intimidate migrants into leaving.”

Médecins Sans Frontières, present in Idomeni for more than a year, confirmed that as of 8am no violence had occurred.

“So far everything is calm, people are evacuating,” said Loic Jaeger, head of the charity in Greece.

Jaeger also argued that the exodus was a failure of European unity. “Everyone is excited about the exodus – whether it was violent or not – but that’s not the point,” he told the Guardian. “The point is that they should be in a flat in Europe: there were only 8,000 of them. Why put them on trucks to unfinished camps in Greece, when Europe promised to resettle them?”

View from the fence into the camp. Photo: AP.

Elsewhere in Greece, 50,000 migrants have been stranded in isolation since March, when Balkan countries closed a humanitarian corridor that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees to countries such as Germany and Sweden in 2015.

Thousands of people are trapped in squalid conditions in detention centres on the Greek islands, where many have gone hungry in protest at their treatment. Wassim Omar, a Syrian teacher detained on the island of Chios: “This is the seventh day I have gone hungry. We don’t want to live here.”

Some still want to use human trafficking to reach Germany. “We heard that tomorrow we will all be going to the camps,” Abdo Raja, a 22-year-old Syrian, told the Associated Press on the eve of the Idomeni evacuation. “I don’t care much, but my goal is not to go there, but to go to Germany.”

The dire humanitarian situation in Greece, combined with the closure of the border and the threat of deportation back to Türkiye, has seen the number of migrants arriving in Greece drop in recent weeks. But the Greek appeals commission recently ruled that Turkey is not a suitable country for migrants – meaning migrants have added incentive to cross the sea to Greece from Turkey.

Thao Linh

(According to Reuters)