Identifier
Created
Classification
Origin
08ATHENS1387
2008-10-02 05:39:00
CONFIDENTIAL
Embassy Athens
Cable title:  

GREEK SLANDS: A GATEWAY TO EUROPE FOR ILLEGAL

Tags:  PRL PGOV PBTS PTER PHUM GR 
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VZCZCXYZ0000
OO RUEHWEB

DE RUEHTH #1387/01 2760539
ZNY CCCCC ZZH
O 020539Z OCT 08
FM AMEMBASSY ATHENS
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC IMMEDIATE 2582
INFO RUEHZG/NATO EU COLLECTIVE
RUEHGB/AMEMBASSY BAGHDAD 0096
RUEHBUL/AMEMBASSY KABUL 0419
RHEFDIA/DIA WASHINGTON DC
RHMFISS/COMDT COGARD WASHINGTON DC
RUEKJCS/CJCS WASHINGTON DC
C O N F I D E N T I A L ATHENS 001387 

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 09/25/2018
TAGS: PRL PGOV PBTS PTER PHUM GR
SUBJECT: GREEK SLANDS: A GATEWAY TO EUROPE FOR ILLEGAL
MIGRANTS

REF: A. ATHENS 1270

B. ATHENS 920

C. ATHENS 260

D. 07 ATHENS 2305

Classified By: A/DCM Timothy Haley for reasons 1.4(b and d).

Summary
-------
C O N F I D E N T I A L ATHENS 001387

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 09/25/2018
TAGS: PRL PGOV PBTS PTER PHUM GR
SUBJECT: GREEK SLANDS: A GATEWAY TO EUROPE FOR ILLEGAL
MIGRANTS

REF: A. ATHENS 1270

B. ATHENS 920

C. ATHENS 260

D. 07 ATHENS 2305

Classified By: A/DCM Timothy Haley for reasons 1.4(b and d).

Summary
--------------

1. (SBU) ver-increasing numbers of illegal immigrants
Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, and ohers) are
using boats and rafts to travel fro Turkey to Greek islands
in the Aegean Sea, making the islands the preferred route for
these immigrants into the EU. The wave of newcomers has all
but overwhelmed the local Greek autorities charged with
detaining and fingerprinting the immigrants, and then housing
them in holding facilities until they are released. We
visited one new holding center on the island o Samos; it is
one of only two in Greece that UNHCR sees as meeting
international standard, and even it is at double its
capacity becaue of the influx. Despite a bilateral
agreement on the return of aliens who entered from Turkey,
Greek officials universally assert that Turkey has been able
to avoid taking back more than a small handful of the
migrants. Greek officials on the islands release the aliens
as soon as procedures permit (anywhere from a few days to
three months after they are detained) and give them a ferry
ticket to the Greek mainland and a letter instructing them to
leave Greece within 30 days. Once on the mainland, they
attempt to stow away on ferries to Italy and other European
countries where they have a better chance of receiving asylum
than in Greece. Everyone agrees it is not a satisfactory
system -- either in terms of the aliens' well-being or in
terms of effective border control that would screen for
terrorists or criminals -- but the combination of EU
regulations, various states' laws, and the unwillingness of
Turkey to accept the return of the immigrants has left Greek
officials unable to find an alternative. End Summary.

Local Officials' Summer of Discontent
--------------

2. (SBU) The UNHCR Head of Office in Athens, Giorgos
Tsarbopoulos, told us September 2 that while the number of
illegal migrants tring to enter Europe at two other
traditional lcations -- the Canary Islands (Spain) and

Lampedusa (Italy) -- was declining, the number etering
through Greek islands had been growingdramatically for at
least two years, indicatig that for alien smugglers Greece
is now the "ain route" into Europe. The result,
Tsarbopolos said, was a "very alarming situation" in which
all detention centers are overcrowded and resource-strapped
local authorities come under tremendous pressure. He said
there were now two centers that meet international standards,
on the islands of Samos and Evros, with a third on the
mainland in Sparta set to open soon. Even these, however,
are already overcrowded, and many older, substandard centers
continue to operate. (Note: Greece has repeatedly come under
sharp criticism from EU officials, UNHCR, human rights NGOs,
and others for poor conditions in the detention centers,
including the former facility in Samos, which was closed in

2007. See ref C. End Note.)


3. (SBU) Local officials throughout the Aegean have been
outspoken about the worsening situation, and have made
pointed pleas to the central government for help. To take
some examples from news reports in September alone: Samos
officials issued an urgent plea for help in dealing with the
deluge of immigrants "suffocating" the island, asking for
support for lawyers, translators, and other professionals.
Hotel owners in Patmos have protested against the hundreds of
migrants on their island, and local citizens are reportedly
acting as "civil guards" to prevent migrants from entering
certain resorts there. Officials in the Dodecanese islands
have issued a written plea to Athens for help dealing with
the "desperate" situation there. In early September
residents on the island of Agathonisi (permanent population
150) protested the arrival of 570 migrants in a single
five-day period, and the arrival of almost 3,500 since the
start of the year. UNHCR's Tsarbopoulos told us that local
prefects representing both ruling and opposition parties (for
example, those in Samos and Lesvos) see the problem in
exactly the same way.


4. (C) Greek Coast Guard Security Directorate Commander
Yannis Chortis shared with us September 30 statistics that
quantified the surge. From 2002 to 2006, the Coast Guard

detained a fairly steady number of migrants at sea, between
2,000 and 4,000 per year. In 2007, the number shot up to
9,240, and the 2008 totals had already reached 10,514 as of
September 28. (The numbers do not include immigrants
detained by the police or other agencies on land.) There
were similar increases in the number of alien smugglers
arrested and boats confiscated. Chortis said the vast
majority of these migrants traveled to Greece from Turkey,
although there were also smuggling routes from Egypt.

An Island at the Edge of Europe
--------------

5. (SBU) We visited the island of Samos September 24, and met
with leading local officials and law enforcement. Samos is
only about one mile from the Turkish coast, and while the
towns and beaches were still full of late-season European
tourists, it was easy to spot some of the islands' other
(less welcome) visitors walking along the waterfront in the
town of Samos. We witnessed a table full of locals at a
seaside cafe calling out to a nearby Coast Guard vehicle --
"Did you see them? They went that way" -- after two
suspected migrants limped past; in this case the Coast Guard,
whose jurisdiction is limited to the waters and the port, did
not pursue. Everyone we met stressed to us that islanders
are sympathetic to the migrants, in part because Greeks have
their own experience of being refugees, but the burden of
such a large number of aliens on the small island communities
was creating social tensions.


6. (C) Samos Prefect Emmanouel Karlas, the highest official
on Samos and several nearby islands, described the situation
to us as "unprecedented" and "nregulated," and expressed
fears that it was only going to get worse. A doctor himself,
Karlas said the immigrants were "potential time bombs" for
pandemic diseases with long incubation periods that medical
checks on the island could not screen for. Deputy Prefect
Stylianos Thanos said the island's new "reception center" for
the migrants was a great improvement, but it had a downside:
more immigrants chose to go to Samos because of the better
accommodations, and officials on some other islands have
complained that their own immigrants should be sent there.
Thanos said the local government appeals to Athens on a daily
basis for more resources.


7. (C) Coast Guard Deputy Harbormaster Lieutenant George
Psarakis told us the Coast Guard patrols the sea around the
island only at night, and has only one or at most two boats
available at any given time. He said the aliens come in
inflatable rafts through treacherous waters north or south of
the island; they do not come from the east -- the closest
point to Turkey -- because that area is a Turkish "national
park" with Turkish military patrols that deter smugglers.
Psarakis said it takes Coast Guard boats an hour to get from
one side of the island to the other, and each incident with
aliens consumes two to three hours out of the patrol. Given
these resource constraints, many of the immigrants make it to
the island. Others, sometimes over 100 a night, are
intercepted at sea, but even they end up on Samos, because
they intentionally destroy their rafts so that the Greek
Coast Guard will be compelled to rescue them. Psarakis
expressed confidence that all immigrants to Samos are
detained, if not by the Coast Guard at sea then by the police
on land. Others we talked to, including Mayor Filippos
Petrouskas, were not so sure. Petrouskas told us that during
the previous week ten migrants had camped out in a park
outside city hall; when he asked them to leave, he said they
begged to be arrested.

What Awaits an Illegal Migrant
--------------

8. (C) As explained to us by Samos Deputy Police Director
Panayotis Kordousis, when police detain a migrant they first
take him or her to the hospital for a medical exam, then to
the new detention center on the hill above Samos town. There
the migrants are fingerprinted and housed for a period of
time -- from a few days to three months -- depending on their
stated country of origin. Since most of the migrants
understand the rules and have destroyed their travel
documents before being detained, Kordousis said, they
naturally tend to claim citizenship in those countries with a
shorter period of detention. Kordousis said the fingerprints
are entered in a database and checked against INTERPOL
records, but he did not rule out the possibility that many of
the immigrants might be released before local authorities
were notified of any INTERPOL "hits" on the fingerprints. He
said there was a risk of terrorists entering Europe in this

wave of immigrants; noting that a two-time illegal immigrant
had killed a famous actor in Athens, Kordousis asked us to
"imagine if that had been a terrorist."


9. (SBU) Police escorted us to the outer fence of the
detention facility, where we witnessed local police and
prefecture employees providing food and other services to a
large number of detainees of both genders, most of them young
and many with children. The facility consisted of a number
of trailers, with one in front serving as a cafeteria, and
near the front was a well-equipped playground and basketball
court. We saw new arrivals being issued large sacks
containing a mattress and other items, which they carried up
to the living quarters. Because the center is at
approximately double its capacity of 250, many of these
mattresses will be placed on the floor.


10. (SBU) Upon completing the required term in the detention
center, the aliens are then released with a ferry ticket to a
port on the Greek mainland, and a letter instructing them to
leave the country within a month. The Coast Guard told us
they monitor the outgoing ferries, to ensure that only those
aliens who have gone through the legal process board them.
The police agreed that it would be difficult to leave on a
ferry without documents, although Mayor Petrouskas told us he
thought it was possible. At the mainland port of Patras,
many aliens live in shanties while they await their chance to
stow away on ferries to Italy and elsewhere. (Comment: The
Greeks of course have some incentive to look the other way as
the immigrants leave and move the problem on to another
jurisdiction. End Comment.) Few aliens seek asylum in
Greece, where asylum approval rates are extremely low. As
Greek officials explained, however, under the provisions of
the Dublin Agreement other EU countries can return to Greece
any illegal aliens found in other countries who can be traced
to Greece. In some cases, courts in Europe have begun
refusing to do so because of Greece's low rate of granting
asylum.

The Role of Turkey
--------------

11. (C) Everyone we met in Samos -- including the Prefect and
Deputy Prefect, who were otherwise at pains to stress their
good relations with Turkish officials -- said a major part of
the problem was Turkey's failure to prevent the aliens from
embarking and Turkey's unwillingness to accept practically
any of them back, despite Turkey having signed a bilateral
agreement on return. Greek Foreign Minister Bakoyannis has
raised Turkey's commitments under the agreement with Turkish
Foreign Minister Babacan (ref D). Psarakis said that when
the Greek Coast Guard sees a raft of immigrants in Turkish
waters, its first action is to try to notify the Turkish
Coast Guard; he said the Turks respond "two times out of
ten." Psarakis said the Greeks then stop the raft at the
borderline while continuing to try to contact the Turks, but
this almost always fails because the aliens destroy the raft
to force the Greeks to rescue them. He said the Greeks had
evidence of Turkish complicity in transporting the migrants,
referring to a recent controversy in which the Turkish Coast
Guard allegedly dumped aliens in Greek waters, and in other
cases allegedly towed rafts full of migrants to the Greek
side (ref A). The Coast Guard's Chortis expressed some
sympathy for the immigration challenge facing Turkish
officials -- calling it even more difficult than the Greeks'
-- but he said the vast numbers of smuggling networks coming
from Turkey (some using motorboats and quite sophisticated
techniques) suggested police corruption in Turkey was a major
part of the problem.

Comment
--------------

12. (C) Illegal immigration has been a problem in Greece for
a number of years -- along Greece's northern border as well
as in the islands -- but the dimensions of the problem in the
islands have exploded over the last couple of years. This
has produced considerable finger-pointing, with some EU
bodies and international NGOs criticizing the Greeks for
failing to meet basic requirements in caring for the
immigrants, and local officials in turn blaming Athens and
the EU for not giving them the resources to deal with the
problem. Although no one seems to have a solution, Greek
officials at both the national and local levels acknowledge
the dangers of the status quo. Deputy Minister of Merchant
Marine Panagiotis Kammenos, who is responsible for the Coast
Guard, told DCM September 17 that he thought both domestic
and transnational terrorist groups could make use of the wave

of immigrants entering the EU through Greece. The dangers of
contraband smuggling, human trafficking, and other kinds of
transnational crime are also obvious, and the consequences of
the problem could be felt well beyond Greece. In order to
help address the problem, Embassy DAO and ODC are currently
working with the Greek Coast Guard to help them procure
better ships, aircraft, and surveillance systems, so that
they are on par with the systems now in use by Spain and
Italy, where the number of immigrants has declined.
Nevertheless, it is clear that Europe faces a major challenge
in securing its borders, and the Greek islands appear to be
its most vulnerable spot.

SPECKHARD