Greece pays price of EU’s ‘waste management’ plan

Refugees crowd an Athens street. Picture: BBC.

Athens was never Vienna, Bern or Stockholm, but it was once a safer, cleaner city. In between lulls in its pollution, one could still smell jasmine and basil. Nowadays, there’s a pungent stench wafting from its backstreets. It is the smell of human desperation and hopelessness. You notice it particularly in the morning and the closer you get to the centre.

That’s when you also see the extent of Greece’s never-ending economic and humanitarian crisis­. Refugees from Africa, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, innocent victims of international power struggles. People the affluent northern European­ states would rather stay in Greece.

However, what has become Europe’s “toilet” is now officially full. That’s how an African boy put it to me last summer­: “Athens is a toilet, and we are living in it.”

One cannot help think all this was part of a plan: to corral thousands of migrants from war-torn Africa and the Middle East in the poorest EU nations, econo­mic­ally and psychologically de­mor­al­ised and dependent on EU hand­outs.

Greece has seen it before. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1990 saw the exodus of thousands from the central Balkans towards the closest EU territory, Greece. By 1995, a million people, mostly from Albania­, Bulgaria and ­Romania, had arrived, all after their slice ofthe European dream.

Only now does it all make sense. The Dublin Regulation, for example — catastrophic for Greece — was a farsighted policy by Brussels. It ensured people claiming refugee status had to be processed in their first port of call. Greece was a convenient solution. In 2015, one million refugees poured into the country, trudging through the Balkans to reach Germany, the northernmost Europea­n states and Britain.

Meanwhile, Greece’s coastlines and its islands — its most important export — were suddenly­ covered in bodies, orange­ life jackets, shoes and nappies. The populations of Aegean islands such as Samos doubled. Its restaurants and properties by the beach became hangouts and urinals of destitute refugees in search of direction. When Greece proved unable to deal with this tidal wave of human­ity, the EU paid Turkey billions to contain it.

16-year-old Montaha from Aleppo, Syria, with her baby daughter Batour after their arrival at the port of Elefsina, near Athens. Picture: AP.

No refugee wants to remain in Greece, a poor country with an ailing economy and a weak welfare­ system. They want to go to Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Britain.

If they could, they would go to America, despite an ingrained contempt for it. And in reality that is exactly who should be hosting this collateral damage of “peace missions”. It wasn’t Greece, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Cyprus and others that instigated the Middle Eastern conflicts. They weren’t the ones who, with their “allies”, launched a war to save humankind from Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

The situation in Libya, the protests in Lebanon and Iraq, the Erdogan phenomenon, have not emerged in a vacuum. Erdogan, for example, may be an autocrat obsessed with the Ottoman era and with etching his name into Turkey’s history, but he also has a point. For the first time, Greece and Turkey have something in common. Turkey too has become a central part of the EU “waste management” experiment.

The US also has much to answer­ for. Most administrations since WWII have sought to inveigle their way into international disputes in the name of American interests that we have been convinced are humanity’s interests. This has been the case particularly in the Middle East, something recently confirmed by Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence’s diplomatic mending of US President Donald Trump’s blunder, which set America’s foreign policy­ back to the Cold War.

The general feeling in the Middle East, and southern Europe­, is that they do not matter. When asked about the prospect of Islamic State fighters escaping in the chaos of the Turkish invasion of Syria, Trump nonchalantly replied “they will head for Europe; that’s where they want to go”.

For millions directly impacted by events in the region, his flippancy only reinforces the increasingly negative view of the US. Trump has done a tremend­ous disservice to American prestige. In his “unmatched wisdom”, he has opened wide the doors to autocrats such as Erdogan and Putin. They’re now calling the shots while the US is dwind­ling in the twilight, watching the happenings from afar.

In the coming months, we may see thousands of newly displaced people heading for Europe yet again. This time the insulated northern European states will not be able to ignore reality. Those in Vienna, Bern and Stockholm may finally get a taste of what it feels like to live in Athens, because their southern European “toilet” is already full.

Dimitri Gonis is subject co-ordinator for Ethnic and Civil Conflict in Southern Europe at La Trobe University.