A Greek tragedy: Migrant trafficking on the rise
Published: Tuesday, 26 May 2009, 6:02PM
By Juliet Bremner, ITV News correspondent
At first glance Lesbos is a Greek island like dozens of others - secluded beaches and friendly tavernas bring planeloads of tourists. But if you walk past the bustling bars around the main harbour in the capital Mytilini and head to the tiny port, a very different side to this holiday island emerges.
This small parcel of land has the dubious privilege of being the closest part of Greece to mainland Turkey. It's just five miles and away and this geographical accident has led to a boom in the illegal trafficking of refugees. Those heading from Asia, particularly Afghanistan, are now coming in their thousands to Lesbos.
Every night the Greek coastguard patrols the frontline trying to intercept a flotilla of small rubber dinghies. The first night we spent in Mytilini the coastguard brought back 23 men packed onto one small boat. This is now routine - 13,500 migrants arrived in Lesbos last year and the coastguard say the numbers are increasing all the time.
The men pay around $2,000 to be brought across this short stretch of water; sometimes they make it to a beach, sometimes the are picked up half way across but the aim is the same to make it to a European Union country. A local journalist who's been watching this new phenomenon is horrified by the numbers, by the risks they take and by the Greek hostility towards them.
Stratis Balaskas took me to the town's main cemetery - tucked away at the back was a unkempt patch with a few random pieces of stone in the ground. On each was written an Afghan followed by a number and a date. Each marks an unidentified man, woman or child whose body has been recovered at sea. As the coastguard explained to us, it may be only a few miles but the conditions can change quickly and the waters can become treacherous.
Those who do make it are taken to a detention centre where their names and fingerprints are recorded. This is now hugely overcrowded: it was meant to hold 250 people and now has over a 1000.
After a few weeks the refugees will be given a ferry ticket to Athens and told they must lodge a claim for asylum or leave the country within one month. But the Greeks reject virtually all asylum claims - just eight people out of 22,000 were given permission to stay last year. So instead most migrants decide to try their luck in another European country.
To do this they make their way up to Patras - the biggest port on the West coast of Greece. This is their gateway to the rest of Europe and will lead them, they fervently believe, to a better life.
In Patras we found a sprawling semi permanent camp site that is home to around 2,000 refugees at any time. It has no fresh water and no washing facilities. It's a horrible, insanitary place but the men who stay here have only one purpose in mind: they want to stow away on the ferries that leave for Italy.
They don't even try to hide any more and we watched as they walked along the port looking for any weak points in the heavily fortified perimeter fence. They don't seem to care about the barbed wire as they focus on finding a way to hide onboard or underneath the lorries waiting to board.
The naval staff at Patras patrols the port and search the vehicles but they are totally outnumbered. We saw angry confrontations between lorry drivers and Afghans who were searching an opportunity to hide. Even those who find somewhere to stow away and frequently found but according to the men we talked to, every night around a dozen migrants manage to get away.
The migrants have paid thousands of pounds to be taken across from Turkey to Greece - they are undeterred by the dangers at sea or the squalid conditions in the Patras camp. Often their families have raised the money for them to make this miserable journey and they are expected to find work to repay the debt.
It's impossible to guess how many will eventually make it all the way to the UK. But we do know that last year in 2008 the United Nations recorded an 87 per cent rise in the number of Afghans attempting to get into Europe.
Here in Britain, Home Office figures for the last quarter showed a surge in Afghan asylum claims. More people from Afghanistan are now asking to stay in this country than any other nationality. What seems certain is that they have found a new, relatively accessible route to get into Europe and the word is spreading.