With closed centers and extensive maritime patrols: Greece’s plan to confront the flow of migrants

Nora Bandari

During the past few years, Greece has suffered from the refugee influx crisis, especially after Turkey sent large numbers of them to the Greek borders, as Ankara uses the migrants file as a pressure card on the European Union.

The government of Ankara saw that the Greek portal is the most appropriate place to send hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers to Europe; and after the number exceeded the permissible limit, Greece demanded the Turkish regime to prevent the flow of refugees and adhere to the agreement signed between them and known as “the return of the refugee flow”, but Ankara continues its intransigence , which Greece strongly rejects.

In July 2019, Greece witnessed early parliamentary elections which were won by the moderate right, which placed immigration and refugees at the top of the files dealt with in its election campaign.

Accordingly, the new Democratic Party headed by Kyriakos Mitsotakis will lead the Greek parliament, and the majority obtained will enable it to form the new government alone. Declaring its reliance on a more organized policy than its predecessor regarding the file of immigration and refugees, it launched a special program to monitor and protect Greek borders and regulate asylum affairs, amid a severe economic crisis and doubts about the possibility of implementing this program.

A plan to protect Greek borders

The plan announced by the new party on its website regarding the refugee file, is seeking to implement eight steps to protect the Greek borders, including seeking to intensify measures to monitor the Greek borders and regulate the entry of migrants, and the use of modern devices to control smuggling operations, followed by accelerating the process of deciding asylum requests in a maximum period of six weeks.

The new party stressed two main points, the first of which is the acceleration of the study of asylum applications and the second is the immediate deportation of those whose applications are rejected.

The steps included adopting the principle of transparency before the European Union in the methodologies for exchanging money for immigrants and refugees, in addition to not obliging families and some who suffer from special circumstances to remain in closed reception centers, and ending with allocating classes for refugee children to facilitate their integration into the Greek educational system.

Greek activists on the social networking site “Twitter” questioned the feasibility of the plan’s implementation, and experts expected that the losing-losing left party in the elections would stand behind the campaign to attack the new parliament’s plan.

Many of them considered that this plan is the same as the plan of the previous party that failed to implement it, because Greece is living a stifling economic crisis and does not have the financial capabilities to help it implement what the new government wants.

Some considered that the decline in European support and the disavowal of the European Union from receiving immigrants and sharing them with Greece would be a challenge to implementing the plan announced by the New Democratic Party.

Closed detention centers

It is noted that the Democratic Party since its presidency of the government and parliament; began its efforts to counter the influx of refugees from Turkey to the Greek borders; and began implementing a hard line policy towards asylum seekers.

On February 25 2020, the Greek authorities announced their intention to establish closed detention centers for refugees on their territory by July of the same year, for the purpose of easily monitoring the movement of refugees and migrants and preventing them from infiltration without control into the Greek mainland.

Alkvyadis Stefanis, Deputy Minister of Defense, announced that the authorities want to transfer about 20 thousand to the mainland by the end of 2020 and the establishment of one body responsible for protecting the borders.

To know the mission of the new centers, Greek government spokesman Stilio Petasas announced, through a statement to Greek media reported by Reuters, that these centers will limit the movements of asylum seekers in the country without restrictions, and is a clear message to those who plan or think about.

On the other hand, the activists of the Union believed that closed refugee centers are like “detention camps” isolated from the world and the detainees in them will not enjoy any rights, whether movement or talking through the media and communication with the outside world.

The elected conservative government announced its intention to close the overcrowded refugee camps and open tougher detention centers in place of them.

Greek newspapers indicated that among the camps to be closed was “Moria” on the island of Lesbos, which included thousands of refugees and Greece discovered that it contained some ISIS extremists seeking to spread terrorism in the European country.