The morning after the night before

The events of the past 72 hours have left me lost for words and I haven’t been able to shake a deep unsettled feeling in my stomach. Since my last post at the beginning of last week the context here has turned upside down and we have no idea how it will continue to evolve. We performed 308 consultations from Monday 14^th until the 19^th, a busy week where we were seeing similar things to what I described in my last post. I was starting to get involved in some exciting talks about improving the public health situation and thinking more broadly about refugee health in the Greek setting as it seemed that refugees would be staying longer and longer in Chios. Then everything changed.

Full camp on saturday with our waiting room being used as a playground

The EU turkey deal was officially signed and went live from midnight on Saturday 19^th and when we left the camp we had no idea what we’d return to on Monday. The agreement means that all new refugees that arrived on the island after the 20^th will be apprehended and returned to Turkey. For every refugee returned from Greece to Turkey, Turkey will send one SYRIAN (no other refugees are considered for asylum in Europe) directly to a country in Europe as per a system of quotas.

Overnight the camps we work in were emptied completely, everyone was advised to go to Athens that night and those people who had bought ferry tickets for 1 week in advance were encouraged to board the ferries on Saturday evening and Sunday. From over 1500 refugees on the island on Saturday afternoon, there are now only 28 people in Souda camp. The Port and Tabakika are completely empty and closed and those that remain at Souda are mostly the relatives of 2 patients that had surgery and are awaiting discharge from hospital. We have no information about where the refugees that left were taken but informal reports state many sleeping outside in the streets in Athens. Hamed has been in touch with some refugees who have been taken to makeshift army run camps with non heated tents, gravel floor and one sleeping bag per person in north Greece by the Bulgarian border. No one knows what will happen to those 40,000+ left in Greece who arrived before the 20^th March. So many of our patients will be amongst them and I think that’s the root of the butterflies in my stomach. All the pregnant women, vomiting children, poorly healing wounds, poorly controlled diabetics, wheezy babies and one nerve gas victim I told to go to Athens and seek further care there. I can’t stop thinking about where they are and if they are ok, if things have got worse of if they went into labour.

Over the weekend and the past 2 days there have continued to be new arrivals to the island but in smaller number than “normal” despite good weather. We have no handle on what the numbers actually are and rely on the volunteers that remain in Vial to tell us from their eyeballing how many they think are there, current estimate is around 1000. The volunteers who used to watch the coast and inform the authorities when a boat was arriving have been told to leave by officials and the whole process has changed. The Greek coastguard is escorting all boats that make it to Greek waters safely to shore. There, refugees are loaded onto buses and taken directly to Vial by police or military escort, there are reports that refugees are being made to pay for this service. Vial is located around 15km inland and is far off the tourist trail, which I doubt is a coincidence. The camp is completely closed and locked with high fences, barbed wire and armed guards. All registration processes and distribution has been taken over by the military and police. We have no information about what will happen now Vial is full. At the moment there is still free movement out of the camp for the 28 refugees in Souda but we do not know for how long, we also don’t know if they will reuse Souda now Vial is full. MdM Greece are still running the clinic in Vial and we’re meeting with them tomorrow to try and understand our role and what we can do going forward.

Empty camp from on top of the castle walls

The past 2 days we have seen the same 6 patients twice. I’m doing some follow up for a patient who had appendicitis and has been discharged but otherwise we have no work. MdM Belgium just received authorization for a new team to arrive so that we could try and meet the need we were seeing across the other camps and they arrived on Saturday evening with no patients to treat. Today we were asked to help refer a patient from Vial to the hospital as we used to do but the police refused to let us take him without a police escort. It took over 3 hours to get everything organized and we have no idea what would have happened if the patient had been sicker. We have asked to be redeployed with the medibus to Athens or Idomeni but we are waiting for negotiations from MdM Greece and Belgium to be settled. I’m supposed to be leaving in 8 days and I have no idea what I’ll be doing in this time or whether I’ll get sent home early. For the new team its incredibly frustrating and I empathise completely with them from my experiences in Slovenia. 

At least there's no queue for the chargers anymore

To me the most incredible thing is the capacity of Greece and Turkish governments to implement this overnight. It was always possible. It was always within Europe’s power to stop children drowning at sea. Now we can see it with our own eyes, that because the political agenda has been set in 12 hours the entire process is changed. Everyone we’ve spoken to is distraught. Some volunteers left on Sunday morning and refused to be complicit in a system that was returning vulnerable people to what they feel is an unsafe country. Some ladies who work for European Asylum Support Office (EASO), who spent the past months convincing people to sign up for the program to be directly sent to one of 24 countries, have been receiving distraught phone calls from refugees trapped in Athens, unable to find EASO officials or being told the program has ended. They are still waiting to hear from their bosses what their job is going to be and if they will stay in Chios or not.

Last night there were demonstrations and a protest held by refugees inside Vial as word spread that they were going to be sent back to Turkey. For the vast majority they’ve invested everything and risked their lives to get to Greece and there is no way they will walk calmly onto a ferry back to Turkey. We are waiting to see how the authorities will manage this and I’m petrified about how things could escalate.

Europe absolutely has the power to find a humane, compassionate and sensible solution to this crisis and yes something had to change but what’s happening all over Greece couldn’t be further from a real solution. Smugglers will continue to find more dangerous routes to avoid coastguards, people will keep coming and Greece will not cope with returning these refugees fast enough. A humanitarian disaster is going to become a catastrophe overnight as overcrowded detention centers treating people fleeing war and persecution as criminals, continue to pop up over Greece. There are already 2 million refugees in Turkey, how many more will they “cater” for? Will they keep saying yes to get more and more EU money and continue the terrible practices we’re hearing refugees flee from? A lady said to me in Turkey she was free from the bombs but risked starvation. Some volunteers told us they have friends in Turkey and the internet is being controlled at the moment, no whatsapp, no facebook, no twitter means no ability to coordinate or organize any humanitarian response outside of the governments own and independent volunteers are being pushed out. The big NGOs are slowly going to Turkey and maybe MdM will follow but for now we know the situation there is terrible.

Its rare that you can say you’re at a turning point in history but I feel this weekend is going to be marked as a shameful time in Europe’s history. And perhaps Europe won’t exist anymore and my kids will laugh at the idea of travelling to France without a passport. Before the solace I could give people in the clinic was to say “when you’re settled you can…” and feeling that I knew they would eventually find something better. Now what can I say? No one knows. Who knows if I’ll even see any more patients.