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Rescuers help refugee families on Lesbos.
Rescuers help refugee families on Lesbos. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP
Rescuers help refugee families on Lesbos. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP

Poor weather means a discount: the refugees risking their lives at sea

This article is more than 8 years old

Guardian refugee appeal: ‘We can’t bear to tell them what lies ahead,’ say volunteers helping those desperate enough to cross to Greece in a dinghy

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Mohammed’s crossing from Turkey to Lesbos took two hours because the motor on the dinghy stopped. “But there were only 40 of us on the boat, other people had much more. Thank God the smuggler wasn’t trying to kill anybody.”

He is standing with his sons, Ahmed, 16, and Mahmood, 20, opposite Skala beach where the dinghy came in. The other 14 members of his family sit nearby. He is composed, not jubilant, and minded to see the best in everything – in the smugglers who charged him $900 per adult and half that per child, to the patch of shore he’s arrived at, with a few lean-tos for people to change behind while they wait for a bus. It smells so strongly of vomit and oranges that it becomes impossible to distinguish between them. It has bottled water, biscuits, volunteers and sacks of alarming, second-hand clothes. People who dress with care and panache arrive, soaking, and have to change into Hannah Montana socks and neon trainers.

“We heard people would welcome us very warmly,” he says, concentrating fixedly on the silver lining.

Families of refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP

The family came from Hama, to the south of Aleppo. “When the Russians started bombing, the situation got a lot worse,” he says. “On the ground, there were suddenly a lot of fighters. Iraqi Shias.”

From the top of the cliffs, local people, volunteers and medics watch the boats making their precarious way over the strait. Every so often, you see something come off, and hope to God that it’s a bag. People sometimes jump out to save the rest of the dinghy. At a certain point, the Greek coastguards go out to guide them over, helped by Spanish and Danish volunteers on jetskis. There are so many rocks, and the dinghies are so flimsy, that nobody is safe until they’re right up against the coast.

The weekends are quieter, but on one recent Tuesday the flow had started up again in earnest, boats arriving through the night, just under 3,000 people arriving on Wednesday alone.

That lunchtime, two Spanish jetskiers were sitting on the beach with binoculars, waiting for the next boat to arrive, their eyes almost disappeared with exhaustion. “Talk to Jago,” one said, “my English isn’t good enough. But, oh my God … two o’clock in the morning, they said there was a boat. While we were going out, three, four more boats arrived. Then four more, they were coming in until 5am. This is so fucked up.” He laughs. “I’m so tired, I can’t speak any language.”

Salam Al Deen, 33, is a Danish lifeguard. He arrived on Lesbos on 5 September, “but the problem is, I’m stuck. When I first arrived, there were maybe five or 10 volunteers covering the whole coast. I have brought in over 150 boats. I have seen Turkish coastguards passing very fast in front of the boats to waterlog the engines. Today, I saw a boat with people hanging off the back, they were trying to balance the boat but it was letting in the water. You know what would have happened? They would have drowned. They were panicking.”

It is much more dangerous to cross at night, especially in a wooden boat (for which the passage is more than twice as expensive, on the ropey premise that it’s safer). It is dangerous to cross when you don’t know how to swim or indeed, man a dinghy (the smugglers don’t travel with them; they sometimes hold back a family member as a hostage, to get a refugee to bring the boat back. More often, they consider the boats disposable).

Waiting for humanitarian aid on Lesbos. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP

It is dangerous to cross when there is a south wind blowing, but more dangerous still when the wind comes from the north, because then you don’t realise until you are a kilometre in.

“On days that the weather has been poor, refugees have been telling us that the smugglers gave them a discount,” said Boris Cheshirkov, the UNHCR spokesperson for Lesbos island. “This is obviously a time when the shipwrecks occur, and that means the families that might not have the means … it’s incredible. It goes to show the unscrupulous nature of the people who are organising this business.”

Realistically, the dangers of the crossing are so numerous as to be ever-present, and yet for many, it isn’t even the most terrifying thing that’s happened this week. Tala, a clothing manufacturer from Aleppo, was travelling with his wife, Ayesha, and their five-year-old son Ahmed (they have another son already in Germany, evacuated when his arm was blown off). They had got on a boat the day before, the motor had failed, and they had to turn back, whereupon a gang of Iranians had mugged them for €200 each. “They held a gun to his head,” Ayesha said, gesturing to her small son, trying to mime it without his noticing.

The war in Syria has been going on an incredibly long time. Four million people have been displaced, a 12-year-old Syrian will probably never have been to school, people in beleaguered cities have been living on nothing but bread for six months, Ayesha’s sister has lost both her legs and her husband – yet it takes even more and longer than this to wipe out trust. Her face is staggered, outraged, that anyone could do that to a five-year-old. “The smuggler was a good man,” Tala insisted. “When the sea was not calm, he told us not to go.”

For those arriving in the day, the beaches teem with people, medics and volunteers with silver blankets, from organisations called things like Team Save a Life and Team Humanity, the Green Helmets, Live for Love. They’re grassroots operations from across Europe, called to arms by the desperate pleas of people such as the Starfish operation, which Melinda McRostie has been running for years (refugees have always come through Lesbos, though never in these numbers), and Philippa and Eric Kempson, an English couple living in Eftalou, nine miles along the shore from Skala.

They’re often very highly skilled – Sheila Donnelly, 53, and Kay Wilson are a doctor and nurse team from Broughton-in-Furness – but they’re not emotionally defended in the way that field-hardened professionals are. “We get them off the boats,” says Donnelly, “we say hello, we warm them up, we smile and we can’t bear to tell them what lies ahead.”

Newly-arrived children wait for humanitarian aid. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP

“Don’t tell them,” Philippa says. “Just let them have that moment of relief, it means a huge amount.” She gave a young man a bottle of shampoo five months ago. He just Facebooked her from Norway and said: “My hair’s still really shiny.”

Rumours are everywhere, often corroborated. Three more people, in a different boat, say the Turkish coastguards tried to scupper their journey by riding too close and destabilising their boats. Everybody knows Syrians who have been mugged in Turkey, who’ve finally got to a Greek registration centre, only to be unable to carry on because they cannot afford the ferry to Athens.

The Afghan refugees arriving often say they are Syrian because they have heard Syrians are better treated, and they’re right, they are. Some of that is accident – Syrians register in a different place, which is less squalid, because people move through it faster, mainly because they tend to have passports – and some design. There are refugee “hotspots” such as Moria on Lesbos where four agencies – EASO, Frontex, Europol and Eurojust – assess cases and send them to the designated country to be assessed for asylum. To qualify, you need to come from Syria, Iraq, Eritrea or the Central African Republic (the countries are decided on a quarterly basis; Afghanistan might yet qualify in the future).

Mohammed, an Afghan who did not get this memo, shows me his bullet scars from the Taliban. Then there are more lurid whispers: Iman Mirai, 35, says: “Maybe you have heard of the people who simply disappear, because of the trade in human organs?” His friend Abdullah Al Afandi, 21, shuts him down laconically: “Look, we’ve heard a thousand stories, but we don’t know if they’re true.”

If just about anything seems believable, it is because the money involved is so dramatic: a thousand dollars for a place in a dinghy, $2,500 in a wooden boat, over 350,000 refugees passing through this one island, this year alone. It runs to maybe half a billion dollars.

“How,” asks Philippa Kempson, “can the European Union claim to be worried about terrorism when what we have is a self-funding Isis war, the more people they drive out, the more money they make?”

Whether this money does go to Isis or just the Turkish mafia, the important thing is, the situation is so nefarious that anything seems possible. The tourist ferry costs €10. The European Union upholding this border, which stays porous but for an astronomical price, achieves nothing but the redistribution of money from the desperate to the criminal. Cheshirkov says: “Looking at Lebanon, it has a population of 4.5 million, every third person is a refugee. Europe is perhaps the richest continent in the world, with a population of 508 million. They should be able to manage this situation. It shouldn’t be a crisis. It shouldn’t be an emergency. This shouldn’t be at the expense of refugees who have fled their homes because of the most heinous crimes that we could probably not even imagine.

“The European Union has been built along the values of dignity, tolerance, brotherhood; our European values need to take precedence over everything else.”

Once they are off the beach, refugees are taken by bus, either to Kara Tepe, the registration camp for Syrian families, or to Moria, the one for everyone else (there is a third camp for vulnerable people). Kara Tepe is the nicer one, though it’s just semi-permanent structures, nothing to sleep on, short of everything.

This is where Mirai, Al Afandi, and a third friend, Fadi Faraj, 34, wait, before they move on to the ferry. They all speak witty, elegant English, Al Afandi especially. Mirai has a master’s in economics and was in the middle of a PhD when the war started; Faraj was a chef. Al Afandi was in the middle of a maths degree – he fled Aleppo a year ago. “You can’t even assure your life for one minute there,” he said. He went to live in Turkey. “I tried to get into university, I learned the Turkish language, I tried to communicate with the Turkish people. Mostly, they don’t like us. There are some kindly and generous people, but mostly, they pay us no money and they wish we would leave.”

Faraj was living in Deir ez-Zor when Isis overran it. His wife, his mother and his four children are still there. “I had to come, I have to get a job before I can bring them. But it is not easy leaving your family in an Isis area.”

Mirai wants to go to Austria, where he has a brother. Al Afandi wanted to go to the Netherlands, even learned some Dutch, but heard the reception for refugees had turned sour.

I ask whether he would rather go to France or Germany, and he raises his sardonic, ancient 21-year-old eyebrows. “I wouldn’t rather go anywhere, actually. I’d rather turn back home and finish my education.”

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