Rashid al-Shabai knew that time was against him. Like his family and friends, he has tried to outrun the seasons, embarking on the treacherous trek west before the winter sets in. The Syrian student was far from alone.
According to the International Migration Organisation, around 7,000 people were attempting the same voyage when he got into a dinghy on the Aegean shores of Turkey and headed for the Greek island of Lesbos last week.
“I didn’t want to come now, but it was sort of now or never,” he said, smiling wanly as he waited for the ferry that would take him to Athens on the next stage of his odyssey. “The future doesn’t exist in Syria. That is a fact. The weather, the cold, the rain, they are also facts. If we risked staying on, we might have risked everything.”
The race against-the-clock before temperatures fall has injected new vigour into the flow of refugees seeking solace in Europe from the tumult of the Middle East. Lesbos, which has borne the brunt of the traffic, is an island transformed; its windy roads now the preserve of those constantly on the move, its shops plastered with Arabic scrawl, its beaches and coves littered with orange lifejackets and black boats, all telltale signs of what it has become: the single biggest magnet for the greatest movement of people in modern times.
On Wednesday, more than 27,500 were stranded on Greek islands, most fleeing the civil war – and more recently Russian airstrikes – that has pummelled Syria since 2011. “If you are young, you are always afraid of being forced into the army,” said Al Shabai, travelling with his mother, aunt and two best friends who had also fled for fear of being conscripted. “We don’t want to fight a war that no one can win.”
Sea arrivals passed the half-million mark last week as the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, announced that more than 502,000 refugees and migrants had enteredGreece this year.
Fears over the impending change in weather saw some 41% of the migrants arrive in September alone. “The spike in arrivals in Greece is sharply increasing reception pressures on the islands,” the UNHCR said. “Many of the refugees and migrants are desperate to quickly move onwards, fearing that borders ahead of them will close.”
With Turkish officials warning that as many as 350,000 people are poised to flee the Syrian city of Aleppo – if Russian airstrikes continue – the surge could grow.
The six-mile channel that separates Lesbos from the east is the last danger zone before freedom beckons. From the vantage point of the tiny village of Skala Skamnias, Antonis Kamvissis has had a front-row view of Europe’s unfolding crisis. The hamlet, on Lesbos’s northern coast, is the nearest land mass to Turkey and the target of smugglers operating across the sea.
Every day the fisherman counts the boats coming in. No one knows when they will come, or how they will come; only that, “as sure as the sun sets”, they will come – appearing first as distant specks before assuming the outline of figures clinging desperately to dinghies. In the wooden caique he has named after his teenage twin daughters, Kamvissis has encountered pregnant women, newborn babies, the elderly and infirm. “Whenever they come, they come in groups, big groups,” he explained, stomping the ground with his boot. “And often the boats stop because they run out of petrol or the engines break down. At night they cry for help with flash lights that guide me to them.”
Stocky, curly-haired and with a ready smile, the fisherman doesn’t want to talk about the people he has saved. They are all bit players in a drama that became an emergency long before the rest of the world started to care, he says. “This summer I came across a young Syrian who had fallen out of his dinghy and so decided to swim with the flippers he was still holding in his hands. He was so exhausted, so close to death when I rescued him, that I took him home, fed him and gave him a bed.” To this day, the Greek keeps the flippers in his boat.
In the space of 48 hours, between Sunday and Monday, more than 10,000 people arrived on Lesbos. Mass arrivals were evident as much in the north as in the south, with officials estimating that 100 boatloads of human cargo are washing up daily on the island’s shores.
No landing is without emotion: despite being soaked and cold after the crossing, newcomers often kiss the ground upon reaching Lesbos. Some, like Mohammed Kher Edress, a professor of psychology from Homs, are so overwhelmed that they do not move at all. Within seconds of splashing through the waters of Kaghia beach, not far from Skala Skamnia, and embracing his sons Ahmed and Amro, he bowed his head and wept. “We are safe, my babies are safe,” he said.
At a reception centre in the village of Moria there have been riots. Human rights groups say conditions in the barbed-wire enclosure are “inhumane”. “They treated us like animals,” sighed Al Shabai. “The Greeks have been very nice, very good, but in there it’s a wild world, people sleep on the ground, in their own shit, please write that, please let the world know.” New Comers are often forced to wait days before they are registered, fingerprinted and split into groups of those considered genuine refugees and those who are economic migrants.
“I think it is clear that Greece has enormous structural difficulties because of the economic situation,” the UN high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, told the Guardian recently. “It didn’t have an adequate asylum system [before the emergency] but despite the financial restrictions there is enormous goodwill and in [leftwing] Syriza, Greece has a government that is taking a humanistic approach,” he said after a recent tour of the island.
The UN agency, which more usually operates in war zones, has been compelled to increase its presence dispatching personnel not only to the country’s Aegean isles but northern Balkan borders in a first for an advanced western economy.
On Lesbos, officials worry that the situation is bound to get worse before it gets better. Although local people have been generally welcoming – citing their own experience as refugees from Turkey after the 1922 Asia Minor disaster – the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party received unusually high support in September’s general election. Masked men have been attacking refugee boats.
For the newly arrived, relief is frequently replaced by frustration. With the vast majority determined to get to Germany before the winter sets in, few want to linger – often electing to walk a distance longer than the Athens Marathon to get to Moria and off the island. “They are tired and cold, totally exhausted and then we tell them they have to wait because there is no bus service and that’s when you see them collapse and get really frustrated,” said Mona Martinsen, a Norwegian aid worker. “It’s out of control, you see people sleeping in their own faeces, its not right, the world has to send more help.”
In his office overlooking the port capital of Mytilini, the island’s mayor, Spyros Galinos, fears that Europe is dragging its feet and that human tragedy will soon be stalking the shores of Lesbos. Already, he says, the waters have grown rougher, causing shipwrecks off the isle that have left 19 people dead in the past nine days.
“Right now, they are coming in on the northerly winds, but in the winter there will be winds that will turn boats over, our beaches will be beaches of death,” he said. Every month the municipality spends more than €200,000 (£143,000), with most allocated to cleaning up the island. “Every day the population of a small town arrives on this island,” he says.
“We’ve gathered 600 tonnes of what I call ‘environmental bombs’ in dinghies and life jackets, and now we are looking for land that could be used as a final resting place for those who don’t make it … even in death, these people struggle.”Like many in Greece, Galinos says the key to resolution lies in Turkey. If refugees and migrants were registered in “hotspots” there, they could bypass the “mafia traffickers” and come to Greece in tourist boats. “Everyone stands to benefit if we stop the criminal gangs,” he says of the smugglers that have proliferated along Turkey’s western shores. “I would like Lesbos to be a role model of what Europe can become, to show solidarity towards people whose problems are so much greater than ours. Over the last year I, too, have changed and what I have learned is that too much fear is dominating the debate.”
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