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motor broke down two miles away, water pouring into the barely floating rubber dinghy. Children and adults alike cried desperately for help, until they were towed to Greece by another boat of refugees coming from Turkey.
Mouatash paid human traffickers in Turkey over 1,000 euros for this near-death experience, but as far as he’s concerned, it was a far less risky choice than continuing to hide out in deteriorating Damascus, which he’d abandoned for Turkey two weeks before. As a Palestinian who grew up in Syria’s refugee camps, he is stateless, but he has a brother in Paris and hopes to start a new life in France.
He paces up and down the shoreline, unsure of which direction to go, while local activists try to bring the new arrivals together to tell them that they need to start a 40-mile walk to a registration center on the other side of the island.
“Thanks to God I have made it here. I am free, I am alive!” Mouatash exclaims, overcome with emotion.
Refugees celebrate their arrival in Greece after crossing the dangerous Aegean Sea. (Lazar Simeonov)
Although he has escaped the horrors of Syria’s grinding civil war, Mouatash is just beginning the difficult journey through Europe. He will have to cross more borders illegally; rest in filthy, makeshift camps; pay traffickers to help him cross those borders; dodge border police; and sleep in parks and fields, before he can reunite with his brother. Still, Mouatash is one of the lucky ones. Four days after his arrival, a raft off the Greek island of Kos capsized and six Syrians—including a baby—drowned.
According to Lt. Eleni Kelmani, a spokesperson for the Lesbos Coast Guard, up to 2,000 refugees are now arriving daily on the island. She notes that this sunny tourist haven has seen the arrival of 75,000 of the estimated 120,000 refugees who have landed in Greece this year. Outside her office, hundreds of them sleep next to parked cars or in tents on the edge of the port.
“It’s obvious that if austerity hadn’t hit Greece, things would be better for dealing with this crisis,” says Kelmani. She’s trying not to mince words, while attempting to keep the Coast Guard out of the domestic Greek political fray.
Greece’s left-wing governing party, Syriza, is one of the few EU members to call for a “solidarity” approach across Europe to resettle the refugees arriving from some of the world’s worst conflict zones. It’s a position completely contrary to that of right-wing, anti-immigration, and nationalist EU politicians calling for a Fortress Europe that would make the journey for asylum seekers as difficult as possible in order to keep them from coming.
However, with the Greek economy crippled by EU-imposed austerity measures, there is little the Syriza government can do to enact its call. Instead of solidarity and a continent-wide, coordinated aid strategy, the refugees—the vast majority of them from Syria, Afghanistan, and, to a lesser extent, Iraq—are arriving on Lesbos only to find Greek state services collapsing under the strain.
http://www.thenation.com/article/this-is-what-greeces-refugee-crisis-really-looks-like/Close this incredibly insensitive selfish topic, which paints people who have faced the worse of war and terror. And now they get criticized for looking too clean. What a proud christian warrior you are little man