Taken and left at sea (2023)

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From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbara. This is the Journal.

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A few weeks ago, my colleague, the head of the Brussels office, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, received a tip which, if true, would prove that a major European government is carrying out an illegal plan to deliberately endanger the lives of citizens as young as six months old. withstand the game. . old. Today's story of how Matina proved this tip to be true.

It's Wednesday, June 7.

Matina, this story begins for you with a hint. Tell us about this tip.

It's true, Michael. I'm in the office in Brussels, at my desk. I'm getting this e-mail from a man I've never heard of. And he says he shot a very revealing video on the Greek island of Lesbos, capturing Greek authorities rounding up migrants and successfully throwing them into a lifeboat in the middle of the Aegean Sea.

In practice, this means that these people have no access to the national asylum system. They never actually existed as far as formalities are concerned. And if what this whistleblower claims to have captured on video is true, it would be a flagrant violation of local and European Union law, as well as international law.

So this tipster made a rather unusual claim that seems explosive.

It sounds explosive, but I instinctively hesitate to believe him right away. The reason is that we have already heard about this alleged practice from the Greek authorities in the past. Several press organizations have tried to prove this to be the case. But there was no evidence until then.

So I'm also partially preparing -

Which may not be true.

Exactly.

Tell us what you see after watching this video.

The film is over three hours long in total, but I'll get to the relevant parts quickly. And I immediately realize that it was apparently taken around noon, just like the guy who filmed it said. I also recognize the landscape. I've been to Lesbos myself. I worked there. And it looks familiar.

And you see this unmarked white van, no windows, no license plates, no nothing, driving down a narrow dirt road towards the coast. Is for. And three men who are not in uniform, wearing only dark clothes and balaclavas, their faces are not visible, they open the back of the van.

And then I see 12 people get out of the van one by one. And some of them, surprisingly, are clearly young children. There is even a month old baby and many women. There are only two men in this group. So all these things really make me stand out.

Now, three masked men escort the group down the road to this picturesque cove with a wooden jetty, where a larger inflatable speedboat awaits them. I noticed that one by one the people who are there now are distinctly African and you can see that some of the women have headscarves covered. They are placed on the speedboat one by one.

And the boat turns around and enters the sea at high speed. He's approaching a Greek Coast Guard vessel in two minutes. And at this point, I'm starting to get pretty scared because it's starting to clearly indicate that these masked men are working with the Greek Coast Guard.

Normal. Here is the Greek government suddenly stepping into this movie.

Exactly. Status markers are visible for the first time in the video.

And so the speedboat passes a Coast Guard ship parked in the sea. And the camera zooms in. It's a little blurry, but you can clearly see people being escorted to the Coast Guard ship, one by one. And you see a Coast Guard ship sailing further off the coast of Lesbos.

So what you saw at that moment was masked men taking these 12 people out of a van without any signs or markings, placing them one by one on a speedboat, and then that boat met a Greek government ship that took these 12 people. And all this is happening in the middle of the city.

And in broad daylight. At one point, a coastguard boat stops with 12 migrants. And soon you see something like a black inflatable life raft being dropped. The video is blurry. The distance is quite large. But you can still see the lifeboat drifting behind the Coast Guard boat. A little later, the boat leaves the lifeboat adrift, turns around and begins to cross the bay back to Lesbos.

What just happened here?

So while I don't see 12 migrants on this inflatable lifeboat, I believe they are on this lifeboat and stranded in the middle of the Aegean Sea. And indeed, that belief was quickly reinforced because after about an hour and a half of the film, I see two Turkish Coast Guard vessels approaching a lifeboat in what appears to be a rescue operation.

The lifeboat drifted halfway between the Greek island of Lesbos and the Turkish coast. Thus, it becomes clear that the lifeboat was left by the Greek Coast Guard in the drifting territorial waters of Turkey.

Normal. Not by accident, but in this deliberate effort, as you said, as this informant suggested to you, to prevent these migrants from entering the Greek immigration system.

Exactly. And of course Türkiye is not a member of the European Union. So now these migrants are not only outside Greece. They are also located outside the territory of the EU.

What do you think after watching this rather disturbing video?

Well, Michael, I think the informant was right. What he said he got on the tape is on the tape. But we will have to do a lot of work to verify this. And time is of the essence because this movie is only two days old. And we want to act fast

We believe that these people, 12 migrants, must still be somewhere in Turkey. And so we get a reporter we are working with in Turkey to confirm that they are being held in a deportation center, a type of prison where migrants are held before being deported in the coastal city of Izmir.

I'm flying to Izmir to meet them and interview them. [BACKGROUND CHAT ON VIDEO]

And what do you find when you arrive at this prison?

When I see them, I have no doubt that they are the same people I saw in the film.

Because?

The composition of the group, their physical characteristics, the presence of small children and an infant correspond to the film. But honestly, some of them were still wearing the same clothes more than a week later. I remember being particularly impressed by a young woman wearing a turquoise hijab and a black-and-white checkered shirt.

And she really stood out in the movie. And here she was, right in front of me in this detention center in Turkey.

What story are these people telling?

So in order to interview them, we had to revise and translate.

One of the first things we were able to determine was that not all of them were family members.

But they all come from the same part of the world. They come from the Horn of Africa. There is an Ethiopian, an Eritrean and two mothers with children. And they come from Somalia.

And in fact, their stories are the stories of this region and how much security has collapsed in recent years.

For example, the youngest mother, Nayeema, comes from the southern part of Somalia, which is completely controlled by the terrorist group Al-Shabaab. She flees Somalia with her six-month-old baby Awala.

Every story we hear relates in some way to the difficulties these people face in their homeland and to the brutal and complicated ways of migrating to Europe.

And what did those migrants tell you about how they all ended up in that unmarked white van?

They say they reached the Greek island of Lesbos after paying smugglers to arrive there in two separate groups. They didn't meet until they were locked in the back of the van.

And when we arrived in Lesbos, it was midnight, it was dark.

They took refuge in the bushes near the coast. And they were confronted by masked men. And the women and children were told by these men that they were first responders working for the famous medical charity Doctors Without Borders.

It quickly turned out to be a total lie.

The masked men took their money, mobile phones and all the documents they had with them. I have completed them. A little later, two young men who were arrested by masked men in a separate operation were also thrown into this white van with women and children. And this is where the testimonies of the migrants lead us to what we begin to see in the film.

So at this point, Matina, what's your level of confidence, and that's exactly what this whistleblower is sending e-mails about you out of the blue.

At this point, Michael, I'm 100% sure. And I am also 100% sure that this is not how the EU asylum system is supposed to work. I am convinced that we have the most solid evidence ever presented that the Greek authorities are involved in a crime.

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Matina, why would Greece do this to migrants coming to your country? Why would he so blatantly break the law, but above all treat people like this, risk their lives to prevent them from entering the Greek immigration system as asylum seekers?

Well, Michael, it's a long story of almost a decade how we got to the point where Greek authorities treat migrants this way. You may remember that around 2015, 2016, due to the massive displacement caused by the civil war in Syria, more than a million mainly Syrians but also Iraqis tried to take refuge in Europe, fleeing these conflicts.

I was there myself in 2015 on the Greek island of Lesbos, when thousands of refugees arrived every day. Greece was just the first stop for those people who were trying to get to Europe and be safe.

And, most likely, the Greeks at that time were extremely generous. The Greek coastguard, the same one we saw on a ship abandoning people in the Aegean Sea, rescued hundreds of people every day and helped them on their way.

It was a completely different picture then. That is, the inhabitants of the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea welcomed these refugees and were even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for their generosity. The media documented his extraordinary generosity and responsiveness in helping those in need.

What changed?

Well, Michael said at the time, the then-famous German Chancellor Angela Merkel, that we could do it. And she opened her country's borders to receive over a million refugees from Syria and Iraq within a few months.

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But that generosity dried up quickly and suddenly.

Germany has closed its borders, as have most other European Union countries.

But the refugees kept coming. And many of them ended up in Greece for months, stuck on these islands.

Thus they languished in Greece, often in terrible conditions, on the island of Lesbos and other neighboring islands. Conditions you won't see in some of the world's poorest countries.

It was very difficult for small communities in Greek islands, such as the island of Lesbos, where tens of thousands of people lived.

So what is the reaction of these Greeks, especially on these islands, to the fact that for these migrants, Greece is no longer a stopover on the way to the rest of Europe, but something like a permanent destination, an endpoint instead of a beginning?

The appalling conditions only made local communities feel that asylum seekers should not be in Greece. And that was the basis of government policy.

Explain this.

Well, the Greek government realized that although the large number of Syrian refugees we saw around 2015 and 2016, although the number of asylum seekers arriving in Greece later was much, much lower, actually only a fraction, it was still too much because the local community, Greek voters, didn't want those people there.

Therefore, they developed a much tougher approach to asylum seekers. Part of that tougher line was a tougher approach to those on the borders.

That they never end up in the Greek asylum system.

In fact, what we saw in our video and during our research was the most extreme version of this policy that these people were sent back to make it look like they were never there.

Matina, what duty does the European Union have here in the eyes of the Greek Government and the Greek people? Because what you have just presented is the history of a system that started in 2015 and absorbed all these migrants in a somewhat disproportionate way, and now Greece is asking to take in a disproportionate share of them. So what should the EU do?

Well, the responsibility that the European Union has to Greece and the responsibility that Greece has to the European Union has been hotly debated in Europe for many, many years. Certainly the Greek authorities believe that the European Union should find a much faster and firmer way of determining whether migrants are entitled to asylum, expelling them from Greek territory and distributing them almost immediately to the rest of the country. Union.

The European Union believes that Greece should receive, process and receive asylum seekers much better. And it actually put billions behind that question. He paid Greece to build better facilities where people could stay while their asylum applications were being processed.

She assisted the Greek government financially and staff in protecting its borders. In fact, the coastguard vessel that we saw in our video, in our investigation, was actually paid for 75 percent by EU funds as part of efforts to support Greece, in violation of Greek and European law.

So we have an impasse here. And in light of this constant influx of migrants, does it seem that Greece's response is to take the rather extreme step of forcibly throwing these migrants into the sea?

It's true, Michael. There is an impasse, but there is also a tacit agreement between the European Union and Greece. In a sense, Greece is doing dirty business to Europe. And until they are caught, the European Union will be happy to let it continue until now.

Indeed, the European Union and the European Commission in Brussels know that Greece has treated migrants brutally and possibly illegally. Many cases have been brought before the European Court of Human Rights. There were newspaper articles. There were testimonies of migrants.

But so far it has decided not to punish Greece. The reason for this is that Greece is needed. This is important for managing migration in Europe. But this incident, which we managed to investigate and expose, may have been a step too far.

You know, Matina, we're talking about Greece here. And we are talking about the EU and the way they treat these migrants. What we are really talking about is the refuge and the nature of the refuge. And it seems to me that the US has been deliberately restricting asylum for several years, starting with Title 42, during the COVID emergency.

And now with a replacement program that will make asylum seeking increasingly difficult. This seems to be what Greece and the EU want to make asylum applications more difficult. So what do you think about the fact that it's happening on these different continents at the same time?

Michael, I think you've come to the right place. I think that in the so-called developed Western world, we see countries with increasingly restrictive migration and refugee policies.

And that includes the United States. It covers the European Union, but also Australia, Great Britain. All of these places become increasingly difficult to migrate around the same time. Indeed, the United States continues to accept thousands of refugees. The European Union has welcomed millions of Ukrainians fleeing the war.

But in a different way, we see the erosion of the right to asylum. This varies from country to country, depending on the specifics and circumstances of each country. I think if we take a few steps back, these policies seem coordinated and reflect some of the trends we've seen over the last 10 years in developed countries.

We have seen the rise of nativist politics. But we've also seen many people in the developed world get worse, in some cases due to inflation and the cost of living. This means that people living in the rich world feel that their standard of living is declining, destroying the generosity of previous decades.

At the same time, however, in the poorest parts of the world, in many regions, we are seeing more conflict and difficulties. And often the West even had a hand in it. This creates a recipe for disaster, a recipe for abuse.

And I think this story makes me wonder, is what we've documented, what we've discovered about Greece a step too far? Will Greece be punished for this behavior? Or will it eventually be met with a shrug and become more widely accepted politics?

Some new norm of asylum evasion could be literally sending people to sea, never to be able to claim asylum.

Exactly.

Matina, before I finish, I want to understand what could happen to those 12 people you met in Turkish custody? They came to Greece because they wanted asylum in the European Union, but they were never allowed to apply for it. So what do we think will happen to them now? Do they have a chance to get asylum somewhere?

Well, Michael, at least two of them have already been released from Izmir custody. Somali women and children may still be held, we are not sure. But of course, none of them managed to apply for asylum in the European Union.

The young man who was on that boat, the Mahdi, who is from Ethiopia, I have been in contact with him since our research was published. He was released from custody. And now he is seriously considering seeking asylum in Türkiye.

And despite the different outcomes for each of these people, the only thing they seemed to agree on was that they were devastated by the experience of trying to get to Greece. The Mahdi told me that he regretted his attempt to seek asylum in Greece.

Which, if we're being honest, could be exactly how Greece wants him to feel.

Absolute.

Well, Matina, thank you very much.

Thank you Michael.

we're coming back.

Here's what else you need to know today. A critical dam along the front lines of Ukraine's war with Russia was destroyed on Tuesday, triggering massive flooding that put tens of thousands of people at risk.

Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of blowing up a dam on the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine that held back a body of water the size of Utah's Great Salt Lake.

Speaking at a news conference in New York, the UN Secretary-General said that whatever the cause of the disaster, the Kremlin is ultimately responsible.

Today's episode was produced by Rachelle Bonja, Shannon Lin and Diana Nguyen with help from Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by MJ Davis Lin, features original music by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell and Rowan Niemisto, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme song was performed by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Fayad Mulla.

So much for the Journal. I am Michael Barbara. See you tomorrow.

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