{"id":5596,"date":"2021-11-01T11:34:14","date_gmt":"2021-11-01T09:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=5596"},"modified":"2021-11-01T11:34:14","modified_gmt":"2021-11-01T09:34:14","slug":"refugees-detained-in-thessonalikis-diavata-camp-await-asylum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/refugees-detained-in-thessonalikis-diavata-camp-await-asylum\/","title":{"rendered":"Refugees Detained in Thessonaliki&#8217;s Diavata Camp Await Asylum"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_5598\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-5598\" style=\"width: 1600px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-5598 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-4-three-figures.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1600\" height=\"1067\" srcset=\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-4-three-figures.jpg 1600w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-4-three-figures-600x400.jpg 600w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-4-three-figures-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-4-three-figures-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-4-three-figures-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-4-three-figures-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-4-three-figures-1568x1046.jpg 1568w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-4-three-figures-1320x880.jpg 1320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-5598\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Al-Hassan family in front of their caravan. They bake bread in an old barrel placed under the watchtower (all photos courtesy of Iason Athanasiadis).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><em>In which our columnist flies up to Thessaloniki and visits the Diavata camp for refugees seeking European asylum \u2014 no one is illegal, everyone merits a better life.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h4>Iason Athanasiadis<\/h4>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>At the security screening of Athens\u2019 International Airport\u2019s Departures, police have pulled aside a group of migrants seeking to board a flight. The heterogeneous group of anxious, thwarted Arab, Iranian and African men, women and children stand out by a mile, especially when shoulder-to-shoulder with glossily confident white tourists, basking in the afterglow of a relaxing holiday. Even the non-white EU residents populating the queue have a First World sheen profoundly absent from the ragtag group.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Among the migrants is an African woman. Clearly a regular at the airport, she yanks off an unlikely-looking wig while shouting at a policeman \u201cIt\u2019s me, it\u2019s me, yes it\u2019s me!\u201d Smiling, the officer offers her his arm in a parody of gallantry, to lead her towards the head-high metal enclosure into which the others have already been corralled.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Unscriptedly, a Ralph Lauren-wearing, flush-faced American and his wife and son complacently follow the migrant crowd straight into the pen.\u00a0Catching sight of the impending social awkwardness, an Arabic-accented man yells, \u201cNo, no, no, no!\u201d, anxious to save these respectable people from veering off into some decidedly non-First World problems. The Americans return to the right queue, order is restored, and Athens returns to its traditional balancing role between East and West, rich and poor, insider and outsider: tourists, digital nomads and Golden Visa investors get to visit the Greece of their dreams, but for migrants and refugees the stay can get nightmarishly overextended.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_5601\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-5601\" style=\"width: 1101px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-5601\" src=\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-1-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1101\" height=\"734\" srcset=\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-1-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-1-600x400.jpg 600w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-1-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-1-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-1-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-1-1568x1046.jpg 1568w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-1-1320x880.jpg 1320w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-1.jpg 1600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1101px) 100vw, 1101px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-5601\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The reinforced outside of the Diavata Camp, completed in the summer of 2021.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><strong><br \/>\nOn the road to nowhere<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I am headed to the northern port city of Thessaloniki to produce a documentary about the state of migration in Europe and the Middle East, after the Taliban\u2019s summer reconquest of Kabul closed a twenty-year American parenthesis in Afghanistan. The expected migration flows have yet to pick up, but once they do, Thessaloniki \u2014 whose once-cosmopolitan port used to be the terminus for all Balkan trade in the first flush of late Ottoman industrialization \u2014 will be a transit area, covering that part of the migration route from the Turkish border to the Balkans. With winter closing in and Covid-related restrictions in force, flows of non-VIP refugees have still to manifest, although images from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border show thousands clustered there.<\/p>\n<p>In the first half of the last century, Thessaloniki lost both its commercial hinterland to the Iron Curtain and its vast Jewish community to Nazism, plunging it into an isolating ethnic homogenization from which it is only just emerging. The tens of thousands of Pontian-origin Greeks who flocked to it after the collapse of the Soviet Union, turned it into a nationalist bastion, while a cosmopolitan-minded former mayor and upgrades to infrastructure resulted in growing tourism numbers and real-estate investment, much of it Israeli. The interest from Israel isn\u2019t by chance: Thessaloniki\u2019s onetime Jewish community made it known as the Jerusalem of the Balkans.<\/p>\n<p>Covid, and low rates of vaccination, hit Thessaloniki particularly hard. A new wave is sweeping through during my visit, but celebratory liturgies in honor of the city\u2019s patron saint on the anniversary of Thessaloniki\u2019s conquest by the Greek army in 1912 and a military parade remain uncancelled.<\/p>\n<p>But a few kilometers from the center\u2019s heaving Byzantine churches, frantic nightlife and real-estate investments, lies another world. Diavata is a camp for asylum-seekers housed in a former military base lost amid characterless provincial roads, junkyards and two-storey apartment blocks. Nearby are a major prison, an industrial zone, and a Roma settlement.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_5599\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-5599\" style=\"width: 1101px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-5599\" src=\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-3-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1101\" height=\"734\" srcset=\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-3-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-3-600x400.jpg 600w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-3-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-3-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-3-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-3-1568x1046.jpg 1568w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-3-1320x880.jpg 1320w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-3.jpg 1600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1101px) 100vw, 1101px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-5599\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Camp children play in Casa Basa, an NGO that distributes food and medicine just alongside the Diavata Camp.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Its population is currently at an all-time low of 700 individuals (from a height of 1,600), following the current government\u2019s acceleration of the asylum process and severing of financial aid, and the right to free food to all those whose process concludes. A turgid futility floats over a formerly chaotic and often violent camp. Its current director, a motorcycle-riding policeman, tamed it through a mix of consultations, threats, intermediation using community elders, and expulsions.<\/p>\n<p>Named after the Greek word for \u201ccrossing,\u201d Diavata concentrates within its three-meter-high cement-and-steel walls the dissidents and runaways of a dysfunctional region. I meet an Afghan husband-and-wife couple who worked in the police force since the era of the USSR\u2019s Communist proxy government. They first escaped the Taliban in 1996 to spend four years in Iran, before fleeing them again, this time for good. Now they spend their days searching for news of their colleagues who remained behind.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s an Algerian dancer sporting a cross earring who converted to Christianity and claims Salafi extremists kidnapped and abused her before she fled to Turkey. There, she married a Moroccan (a former vagrant from Fes) whom she met in a forest after they\u2019d both been pushed back from Greece. In Diavata, the camp residents refer to them as \u201cthe Christians\u201d; she and her husband along with their months-old daughter were the victims of a mini-pogrom, they claim.<\/p>\n<p>Then there is Sima, a single Hazara mother of two boys from eastern Afghanistan\u2019s Jaghori province. Taken by a local man as his second wife, she had to fend off a coordinated campaign by the first wife and her mother-in-law. They eventually succeeded in ejecting her from the house. \u201cMy father refused to accept me back, as a bride\u2019s return to her house is shameful in our culture,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_5597\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-5597\" style=\"width: 1100px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-5597\" src=\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-5-woman-in-the-window-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1100\" height=\"734\" srcset=\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-5-woman-in-the-window-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-5-woman-in-the-window-600x400.jpg 600w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-5-woman-in-the-window-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-5-woman-in-the-window-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-5-woman-in-the-window-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-5-woman-in-the-window-1568x1046.jpg 1568w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-5-woman-in-the-window-1320x880.jpg 1320w, https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/camp-5-woman-in-the-window.jpg 1600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-5597\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sima looks out from her caravan window on another day waiting for a reply.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Sima was forced to live for some months in derelict buildings, preyed upon by men offering her protection, until she could sell her bridal gold and get a passport allowing her and her two boys to cross, first into Iran, then Turkey, then across the Aegean Sea till they ended up in Lesbos island\u2019s notorious <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Moria_refugee_camp\">M\u00f3ria Camp<\/a>. They moved to Diavata a month before Moria burned down in September 2020, missing the opportunity to be one of the 1,000 refugees accepted by Germany. Now, they spend endless days between the camp\u2019s playground, its laundry facility and their caravan, waiting for an official resolution to their claim.<\/p>\n<p>Another family I met who fled due to the toxic mix of cultural mores and conflict were the Al-Hassans from Syria\u2019s Deir Ezzor. Khaled Al-Hassan\u2019s family members were forced to leave their town after an Islamic State fighter came knocking for his nine-year-old daughter, in whom he\u2019d discerned bride material. After punching him, Khaled immediately fled with his family across the Euphrates to a succession of troubled towns. For years they lived under the threat of bombardment from the air, and car-bombs at street-level.<\/p>\n<p>The religiously conservative Al-Hassan had been a construction and restaurant entrepreneur in the nether-regions between Syria and Iraq. In Diavata, he carved out a role as an elder for a diminishing Arabic-speaking community by representing its members in disputes with the burgeoning Afghans. He baked and sold Arabic bread to the camp residents, sent his eldest son off to harvest fruit and his daughter to attend a nearby NGO, where volunteers empowered her in a female-only space by coaching her in English. Life moved on, even for those mired in an extended pause.<\/p>\n<p><strong>A glittering dead-end<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Back in Thessaloniki, the sea sparkles in the autumnal sunlight but the city has long lost its cosmopolitan glint as the exit point for Balkan trade and one of the Mediterranean\u2019s busiest ports. The wounds of coexistence are either visible in the vandalized Orthodox frescoes inside churches since Ottoman times, and tensions between nationalists and leftists, or remain eloquently out-of-sight in long-since toppled minarets and demolished synagogues, the thousands of architectural artworks replaced by modern apartment blocks, and the Jewish cemetery buried under the Aristotle University campus.<\/p>\n<p>Inside its wood-panelled library is academic Yiorgos Angelopoulos. The former Syriza government official worked hard for years to integrate refugee children into Greek schools, something made harder both by Greece\u2019s exceptionalist creation-myth (which leaves little space for non-Christian Easterners), and the asylum-seekers\u2019 disinterest in staying here (having sized up Greece, they often express their desire to \u201ccontinue onto Europe\u201d).<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe government is imposing obstacles in these children\u2019s ability to attend schools,\u201d Angelopoulos said. \u201cIt\u2019s a lose-lose situation, because both we as a society are losing something and so are these children who won\u2019t be able to acquire the tools for integration.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The day I left Thessaloniki, thousands of residents were out on the streets cheering a military parade commemorating Greece\u2019s refusal to surrender to the Italians at the start of the Second World War. Proud fathers held up their children as tanks trundled down the coastal road, while sophisticated fighter jets and helicopters performed barrel-rolls and fly-bys. \u201cWe must prepare for war in order to continue living in peace,\u201d one young man said. Another nationalist, Dimitris Ziabazis, the founder of a group called United Macedonians and organizer of a controversial 2019 BBQ featuring pork kebabs and beers prepared outside the Diavata camp (he claims it was a publicity stunt intended to focus attention on the regional marginalization that he chooses to blame on asylum-seekers), believed that a country with a militarily-assertive Turkish neighbor needs such parades to keep patriotism acute.<\/p>\n<p>On my return home, taking off from Thessaloniki, the airplane rose above the Gulf of Salonica and I caught a glimpse of Diavata sprawling in the haze. Soaring past Mount Olympus after an intense week of stories and encounters, the height and distance exerted a diminishing effect on the concerns, hopes and fears packed down there. I was back in the accelerated First World Greece which most of the people I had met would only ever encounter if the EU opened its gates to them. It was a reminder that distance can function dehumanizingly, people who don\u2019t suit our narrative can be parked out of sight, and that only interaction, by living alongside each other in cities and the countryside, can achieve integration.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In which our columnist flies up to Thessaloniki and visits the Diavata camp for refugees seeking European asylum \u2014 no one is illegal, everyone merits a better life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":5598,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,51],"tags":[118,287,754,1284,1453,1638],"coauthors":[1971],"class_list":["post-5596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-column","category-tmr-weekly","tag-afghanistan","tag-asylum","tag-greece","tag-pakistan","tag-refugees","tag-syria","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.8 (Yoast SEO v27.3) - 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