While media pressure is building up against Greek authorities systematic and widespread human rights violations in the Aegean, they continue to leave vulnerable men, women and children helpless drifting in life rafts in the middle of the sea.
In the last days, 10 life rafts, carrying 180 people, mostly Afghan nationals, and 60 of them small children, have been found drifting by the Turkish coast guard.
We are in daily contact with people in distress after being illegally and brutally pushed back by the Greek coast guard in the Aegean Sea.
Some of them have documented their ordeal on video, most cannot, because their phones are usually robbed from them by their captors before they are forced into these motor-less rafts, or they don’t dare to out of fear of what would happen to them if caught.
In the early hours of Wednesday June 19, a boat carrying 33 people, 14 of them small children, was closing in on the north east shore of the Greek island of Leros. Those people had travelled more than 20 miles from the Turkish coast, under cover of darkness, in an overloaded flimsy rubber boat, and had only a few more miles left to reach land on Leros.
A few miles from Leros, they were detected by a vessel from the Greek coast guard, and brutally stopped.
Everyone was taken onboard the coast guard vessel. Some believed that they would be taken to safety. Others, especially those who had had experience with the Greek Coastguard before, were more sceptical about their fate.
Masked men onboard the Greek coast guard vessel, carrying guns and batons, started shouting, ordering them to hand over their phones, and brutally searching everyone.
At first light, the group was forced into two life rafts and left helplessly drifting in the middle of the sea, inside Turkish waters, by the Greek coast guard.
At 05.30am CEST, a woman from one of the life rafts contacted Aegean Boat Report and asked for assistance.
We did the only thing we could do: document their case and inform Turkish authorities, so the group could be rescued and taken to safety on land.
“Hi please help us, we have kids and called Turkey coast guard, they said we can’t come because you are in greek water, please save us!”
The life rafts were drifting in Turkish waters, but the group insisted that they didn’t want to be rescued by the Turkish coast guard and taken back to Turkey: they said they had not been and would not be safe in Turkey.
But because they had already been illegally pushed back by the Greek coast guard, their only immediate option was to be taken back to Turkey.
The group told us: “We are not safe in Turkey,” and we must agree. They are absolutely not safe in Turkey. Thousands of Afghans in Turkey have in the last months been rounded up and transported to camps close to the Iranian and Syrian border, from where they are almost always deported against their wishes back to Afghanistan, and an at best uncertain future under the Taliban regime.
At 07.30am, we were informed by the Turkish coast guard that two life rafts carrying 33 people, 14 of them small children, had been found drifting 20 miles north west of Bodrum.
Comparing pictures and videos taken and shared with Aegean Boat Report by the people onboard the life raft with pictures taken by the Turkish coast guard, we could confirm that it was the same group.
This week two strong documentaries have been published, by BBC in the UK and STRG_F in Germany. They both clearly, and without any doubt, show the systematic human rights violations in Greece, and the total failure of Frontex and the European Commission, to make sure that member states uphold fundamental rights of people seeking protection in Europe.
But even as pressure is mounting against the Greek authorities, Frontex and the European Commission, for supporting the widespread and systematic fundamental rights violations in Greece, this incident and many others beside prove that the Greek authorities continue to put lives at risk, killing vulnerable men, women and children at the European border in the name of border protection, blessed and funded by EU.
When small defenceless children are thrown into life rafts and abandoned in the middle of the sea by authorities, and we don’t raise our voice, there is something terribly wrong with us.
