Greeks bearing gifts

How Europe’s poorest country is doing more than anyone else to help Syrian refugees.

By Annia Ciezadlo, politico.eu

One Friday in late summer, just as the Syrian refugee crisis was beginning to peak, a blue station wagon pulled up to the Kara Tepe refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. The car’s side mirror was held on with masking tape and force of will. Big letters on the side said “Free Food For All” in English and Greek. A half-dozen sunburned, chain-smoking Greek leftists of all ages piled out, followed by two barrel-sized aluminum vats, several gas burners with propane tanks, two folding tables, forty bags of pasta, a box of spices, a dozen car-battery-sized cans of tomato paste and a couple of three-foot-long wooden paddles for stirring soup.

Within minutes, they had an outdoor kitchen set up. “With all respect, this should come from us,” said a tall young Syrian named Basil, who was a refugee himself. He spent the entire afternoon stirring and serving soup. “We should be doing this ourselves. But I’m glad they’re doing it.”
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“They” are O Allos Anthropos, “The Other Human” in Greek. The founder is Konstantinos Polychronopoulos, a burly, bearded man in his early fifties. In 2009, when the fiscal crisis hit Greece, Polychronopoulos lost his job in marketing and communications. Two years later, at 47, he was broke and living with his mother. One day, walking around Athens, he saw two children fighting over rotten fruit from a garbage can.

“The worst thing was that people were passing, and they didn’t care,” he says. He stuck his nose and chest in the air, in a pantomime of lordly indifference. “They just looked at them and passed by”— here, he strutted off ten feet away, swinging his arms like a commedia dell’arte character, and then back — “I thought that this was not acceptable, and horrible, and that people should care. So I decided to do something about it.”

The next day, Polychronopoulos went out into the streets of Athens, and began cooking enormous communal meals with anyone who was hungry — Greeks, refugees, whoever. He’s been doing it ever since. This August, Polychronopoulos and other volunteers traveled to Lesbos, where they spent the traditional European vacation month standing for hours in 97-degree sun, with no shade, stirring giant steaming vats of food with thousands of people who were by turns desperate, angry, bewildered, helpless, exuberant at having survived the journey, or all of the above.

Of all the countries in Europe, Greece is the one that can least afford to be anyone’s savior. It is the continent’s most beleaguered country: constantly threatened with expulsion from the European Union, it is hugely in debt to European banks. In 2010, the “troika”— the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund — forced the government to adopt extreme austerity measures., and Greek society has been in a state of crisis ever since. Unemployment is 25.2 percent. Suicides are up 36 percent since austerity was introduced. Nearly half of all schoolchildren aren’t getting enough to eat. Greeks have every right to be exhausted and selfish. And some of them are: on Kos and Lesbos, the two islands where most refugees are landing, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn partyalmost doubled its share of the vote in the September 20 general election. (It didn’t help that supporters of the leftist ruling party Syriza stayed home in droves.)

But if Europe has failed both Greeks and refugees, one of the strangely beautiful things about the current crisis is the way both Greeks and refugees have been helping each other get through it. As their government flounders, and the big international aid agencies focus on the 95 percent of Syrian refugees who aren’t in Europe, Greek volunteers have provided everything from housing to food, medical and legal help. Volunteers from Greece and other European countries even produced a clear, comprehensive guidebook for incoming refugees, with useful Greek phrases like “I want a doctor” and “I am from Iraq,” and translated it into Arabic, Farsi and English.

* * *

The Syrian refugee crisis first caught the world’s attention this September, when photographs of a three-year-old Syrian child named Aylan Kurdi, who drowned while trying to flee to Greece, went viral. The world moved on, but the situation on Lesbos has only gotten worse: In October, Russia’s relentless bombing campaign in Syria drove out a new wave of desperate people that peaked in mid-October.

Then came the November 13 attacks in Paris by members of the Islamic State. French police found a Syrian passport at the scene of one of the attacks. The passport appears to be fake; so far the only attackers identified have been EU passport holders. But the damage was done. Macedonia and other Balkan countries began closing or tightening their borders. Thousands of refugees were stranded in Greece, the EU’s poorest and least-equipped country — just as it headed into a series of bombings and general strikes over the EU’s latest austerity measures.

Today, approximately 5,000 people arrive in Greece every day. The majority of them are landing in Lesbos. This year, so far, 719,087 refugees came to Greece. Lesbos took in 406,206, which is almost five time times the island’s population of 85,000. In mid-August, the International Rescue Committee described Lesbos as being at “the breaking point,” which is true; except that this tiny island off the coast of Turkey — like Syria, Iraq and the entire Greek economy — already broke a long time ago.

Most of the refugees land in the north of the island, near the ancient city of Molyvos, where the distance from Turkey is only about six miles. But no matter where they come to shore, all the travelers have to make their way to Mytilini, the capital, to register. Only then can they get the magic slip of paper that allows them to board a ferry to Athens, Thessaloniki, and the rest of their modern-day odyssey: Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary — but watch out for Hungary! — Austria, then the promised land: Germany.

Mytilini is where Europe’s twin crises of austerity and refugees converge. The Greek government is already paralyzed by years of economic collapse, EU-imposed austerity programs, and its own internal political struggles: It can’t handle half the people headed for Europe in the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. In Mytilini, the authorities can’t register people fast enough, which means they can’t leave the island. Today, Syrian families wait in Kara Tepe; Iraqis, Afghans, single Syrian men, and the handful of other nationalities — Pakistanis, Eritreans, Somalians, fleeing the Taliban, forced conscription, and other assorted horrors — wait in Moria, a walled prison camp that makes Kara Tepe look like a bed and breakfast.

When I was there, all over the island, columns of people were straggling along the roads toward Mytilini: women lugged small children under the fierce Aegean sun. Men wrapped shirts around their heads against the heat. Young men collapsed exhausted under trees; as my friends and I drove around the island, ferrying people to Mytilini, we saw Afghan men so drawn and dehydrated, lying by the side of the road, that they looked like corpses. Blue buses picked some of them up, but not nearly enough.

In early September, thousands of people protested in the streets, demanding to leave the island. After that, some cavalry finally arrived: Save The Children set up child-friendly spaces in Kara Tepe. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees set up a massive tent to protect people from the island’s sun and rain. The International Rescue Committee, which had been quietly working in Kara Tepe for months, installed lamps, toilets, and portable latrines. And, most importantly, the Greek authorities sent extra personnel from Athens to speed up the registration process.

“For the moment, the registration goes fast, but this is not going to last,” Latsoudi warned in mid-September. “Because there is no real political decision. This is the Greek way: when things go out of control, we give a solution, and we don’t really plan.”

She was correct. By October, the situation on Lesbos was worse than ever: at one point in mid-October, 43,000 people landed on Lesbos in just five days. The government has estimated that 11,000 people were stuck on the island; by early November, according to Marios Andriotis, the spokesperson for Lesbos Mayor Spiros Galinos, between 10,000 and 15,000 people were waiting in Mytilini, a city of 27,000.

The bottleneck was partly due to a four-day strike by ferry workers. But it was also because the EU had designated Lesbos as a “hotspot,” meaning that EU officials would be on hand to identify, register and fingerprint everyone who came to the island. Not surprisingly, the hotspot approach has dramatically slowed down the registration process. Frontex, the EU’s border agency, announced that it had deployed 28 “experts” — including four “screening experts,” eight “debriefing experts,” and four “team leaders”— to handle the tens of thousands of refugees showing up every week. Local volunteers were posting frantic appeals for help and photos of rain-soaked refugees who had been standing in line in the mud, waiting to be registered, for days.

On October 5, dozens of boats arrived, carrying about 5,000 people. At Moria, Greek police sprayed tear gas on the huge crowds of people, including children, who were waiting in line to be registered. The next day, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann toured the island, which had been cleaned up for their arrival. Tsipras said they had seen “the good face of Europe,” which he described as “the face of solidarity.”

The Syrians arriving here are often aware of the irony. “In the news, on television, we see their situation — that their economy is destroyed here in Greece,” says Khaled Osman, a 51-year-old father and former chauffeur from Kobani, the town in northern Syria where Kurdish fighters have been battling the Islamic State. “Despite that, they really, really helped us.”

But the Greeks are not just helping refugees despite the economic crisis; in some ways, they are helping because of it. The Other Human is part of a larger, austerity-driven movement, throughout Greece and southern Europe, of citizen-run social solidarity structures. It is not a charity — “NOT Philanthropy!” shouts Polychronopoulos, wagging his finger — but a “social kitchen,” meaning that people run it themselves, on private donations, without help or hindrance from government. Unlike traditional charities, The Other Human makes a point of cooking with people, as opposed to simply feeding them. “They are HUMAN!” bellows Polychronopoulos. “NOT Dogs! We cannot treat them like dogs!”

Since austerity, Greeks have set up social healthcare centers and pharmacies, social housing, and even social refugee camps. Most of them are run by volunteers like Polychronopoulos — people who, despite being broke and unemployed, somehow manage to help others who are worse off. Greece’s anti-fascist left — which goes back to the Nazi occupation of World War II — has a long history of helping refugees. But what makes these organizations especially effective is that the people who run them, like Polychronopoulos, know what it’s like to need help; and the people who eat the food, like Basil, also know how to help.

Politically, these groups represent the ascendance of an unspoken coalition between grassroots local organizers and Syriza, Greece’s ruling leftist party, said Nikolas Kosmatopoulos, a cultural anthropologist and professor of International Affairs at the Graduate Program of the American University of Beirut.

“Politically, it was defeated, because Syriza capitulated to the IMF and to the Europeans,” said Kosmatopoulos. “But culturally, this coalition has shifted the way that we talk about pride, about solidarity, and, at the end of the day, about migrants.”

Migrants and refugees arrive after crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey. | BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty

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* * *

They are HUMAN! NOT Dogs! We cannot treat them like dogs! — Konstantinos Polychronopoulos

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In mid-September, the European Parliament awarded its prestigious European Citizen’s Prize to Polychronopoulos and Giorgos Vichas, the director of the Metropolitan Social Clinic in Athens, where volunteer doctors give uninsured people free primary health care. Both refused it. Both pointed out that they could not in good conscience accept a prize from the same politicians whose austerity policies made their work necessary in the first place. “It would be hypocritical for us to receive a prize when Europe closes its eyes to malnourished infants and dead cancer patients,” said Vichas at the Athens awards ceremony.

The Greek collapse was not just economic, pointed out Efi Latsoudi, a local volunteer who has been coordinating citizen-run social refugee relief on Lesbos for years. The crisis of authority forced people to rely on themselves — and each other — to find solutions. Now they’re using those solutions to help refugees, often more effectively than the international community.

“The economic crisis was also positive for the society,” said Latsoudi. “Because we managed to create more solidarity groups. We started to look for alternative ways to be connected in the society. So there was something positive, together with all the negative things that were happening.”

On October 28, at least 35 people drowned when a boat capsized within sight of shore; volunteer lifeguards and local fishermen were the only thing that kept the death toll from being higher. On November 1, a fed-up Polychronopoulos announced he was going back to Mytilini, to cook and to help bring people to shore. He’s still there.

* * *

I went back to Kara Tepe to see how people ate when there was no O Allos Anthropos. As soon as I got there, Feras, a 23-year-old engineer from Damascus, introduced himself. When I asked him who was feeding the 2,000 or so people in the camp, he answered in classic Syrian fashion: by offering to buy me a coffee and something to eat.

That wasn’t why I asked, but we headed to the kantina anyway. This was the social heart of the camp: two small kiosks offered soft drinks, water, potato chips, pup tents, batteries, and iced instant coffee frappés to any of the lucky travelers who still have cash. Farm boys from Idlib flirted with the laughing, long-haired Greek girl behind the counter, who was learning Arabic. An Iraqi trucker pointed to the creamy-brown frappés, bewildered, and asked a neighbor: Ammu, shunu hadda? Uncle, what is this?

Just then, two medium-sized white catering vans pulled into the gravel road that runs through the middle of the camp. People, mostly men, ducked through a hole in the fence and pounded toward them. Within a minute, several hundred people were surging around the rear doors, where the food would appear. Men were shouting hoarsely. A few started shoving and hitting each other. Panic rippled through the crowd. There was never enough food for everyone.

Two burly Greek men with sunglasses and red t-shirts climbed out of the cabs. “Back!” they roared, in English, raising their fists in the air, palms forward, like they were trying to bench-press the crowd. “Back! Back!” Nobody listened. I saw Abdullah trying to maintain some kind of order, begging people to form two lines. But after a few minutes he gave up.
A gray-haired man was standing next to me and Feras, watching all this with the half-raised eyebrows and half-smile of someone who has probably seen much worse. “See that?” he said to us, in Syrian Arabic, tipping his chin toward the melee. “That’s freedom.”

“No,” said another man, with a half-laugh. He was also just standing around, because there wasn’t much else to do at Kara Tepe. “This is what they call ‘democracy’.”

We all laughed, a little sadly.

Six miles south of Kara Tepe, there’s a piney-smelling hillside overlooking the sea. Rustic wooden cabins and huge conifers ring an open area carpeted with pine needles. Women sat in a circle, peeling vegetables. Children laughed and ran across the open space. Fat, friendly dogs gnawed on bones in the shade. A hammock swayed gently between two trees. Outside one of the cabins, on a cot, someone was doing physical therapy exercises with a handicapped child. On another cot, a Somalian man sat in the sun, smiling in all directions as if he couldn’t believe his luck.

This is Xorio Oloi Mazi, the Village of All Together, where Tsipras and Faymann swung through in October. Before the economic collapse, it was a summer camp for disabled children — exactly the kind of wasteful social program Greece’s European creditors wanted it to cut.

In December 2012, when the refugee crisis was first heating up, Latsoudi and other volunteers persuaded the local authorities to let them take over the abandoned summer camp. Within a day or two, they had turned it into a welcome center for refugees. A local NGO, Angalia, picked people up as they came ashore and drove them to the village. A nearby monastery contributed food. Residents often stayed on as volunteer translators.

Inside one of the cabins, Samira Osman was slapping balls of dough onto a tiny electric hot plate, where they puffed slowly into flatbreads. Her children — Mezgin, Daraya, and Juan, 10, 12, and 17 — were playing outside with the others. Khaled, their father, stood outside, under the pine trees, watching the children play in the sun.

The Osmans are from Kobani, the Kurdish city in the north of Syria that was under siege by the Islamic State for months. They survived the Islamic State’s invasion, as well as the US and Arab coalition air strikes that flattened their neighborhood. They fled to Turkey in September 2014, when Turkish authorities opened the border as thousands of people fled from the Islamic State. They waited a year, hoping it would be safe enough to go back. But when they heard that “the merchants of people” could bring them to Europe, they sold everything they owned and boarded a boat to Greece this July.

If they had ended up at Kara Tepe, they would be more or less on their own. Here at the Village of All Together, they get weekly visits from doctors and human rights lawyers, as well as shelter and food. “I’m 51 years old, and it’s the first time in my life I’ve known such a thing, where there is someone who comes and asks how we’re doing,” says Khaled, shaking his head. “In Syria, if a government official comes up to you, you’re going to get a couple of slaps or worse. In Greece, we didn’t experience this, thanks be to God. We thank them, all of them.”

If Kara Tepe is what people imagine disasters have to be — the dystopian results of authorities floundering their way through a crisis — then something different is happening here. The years of austerity made some people tougher, more resilient, more experienced and organized.

Latsoudi and other volunteers believe that the refugee crisis, too, can be something positive in the end. If the EU was willing to spend its millions on infrastructure instead of security — and the Greek government was willing to push for it — they could help both refugees and Greeks. Better hospitals and transportation networks would be good for everyone. “We can create real movement in the economy that will be good for Greek people too,” says Latsoudi. “But it’s a choice to make it like this.”

Annia Ciezadlo is a Beirut-based journalist and author of “Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War.“