Border
closures in the Balkans may create an enormous and potentially
critical refugee bottleneck in Greece, UN High Commissioner for
Refugees Filippo Grandi has warned.
Grandi spent
most of Wednesday (February 24) in Athens. meeting the Greek prime
minister Alexis Tsipras and several of his ministers.
The
potential bottleneck, Grandi said, was a major topic of discussion.
The UN High Commissioner for Reguees once again criticized the border
closures and the inability of European countries to face the refugee
crisis with generosity and unity.
But he also
said UNHCR and the Greek authorities must start planning for a
situation where more than a few thousand people are stuck in Greece.
"I hope
that there will not be a huge refugee population," Grandi said.
"But that part can be managed, working together with the
government in a timely way, in a rapid way. And we are ready for
that. That was my message to the Prime Minister and to his ministers.
"But
really we need to work on alternatives to that, we need to work on
the restrictions, we need to work on relocation, we need to work
especially on massive resettlement from Middle Eastern countries."
He said he
would go to Brussels to address the EU's Justice and Home Affairs
Council on Thursday (February 25) to bring the message that Greece,
which is facing deep economic difficulties, will need considerable
added aid, along with urgent implementation of the relocation scheme,
to deal with the refugee bottleneck.
As he spoke,
the evidence of the bottleneck was in the streets.
On Victoria
Square in downtown Athens hundreds of people, many of them Afghan
refugees, wandered about or sat on UNHCR blankets. Several of these
people had traveled to the northern border with the Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia and been sent back by police.
Sayed was
one of them. He, his wife and three young children had got to Greece
last week and gone to the northern border. They and other Afghans
were herded into a makeshift camp and held. Only Syrians and Iraqis
with passports were allowed through.
Sayed, who
is 30, helped draw up a petition of protest. It was refused and the
Afghans were bussed back to Athens and left on the square at
midnight. He and other men stood guard through the night to protect
their families.
"We
took our lives in our hands," he said. "We demand not to go
back (to Afghanistan) because we are in danger there. Please open the
borders for us, so we can move forward. We came here to save our
lives."
The scope of
the potential crisis was also evident in Elliniko, an abandoned
stadium built for the 2004 Olympics. Hundreds of Afghans who had just
arrived by ferry from the Greek islands were lining up to be
admitted. Many knew the northern border was closed to them but none
knew what they could do.
Upstairs, in
a corner, Massoume cried. She is a widow from Afghanistan who managed
to get to Greece with her two sons who are 13 and 20. The older son
needs medical attention. She had planned to join her married daughter
in Germany. Now she cannot.
"I am
so alone here, I feel I am in a desperate situation," she said.
"I tremble day and night. If the border doesn't open I don't
know what will happen to me and my children."
Those are
individual consequences of closed borders. Grandi warned of broader
consequences, of Europe backtracking, losing its vision, values and
lessening its influence in the world.
"The
response," he said, "must be cooperation, not closures."
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