Dying in Greek Waters

Post by Andriani Fili, Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Criminology and Co-director of Border Criminologies. Her research focuses on forms of violence within immigration detention facilities.  

In June 2024, the BBC presented evidence that the Greek coastguard has caused the deaths of dozens of migrants in the Mediterranean over a three-year period between 2020 and 2023, including nine who were deliberately thrown into the water. BBC journalists showed footage to a former senior Greek coastguard officer of 12 people being loaded into a Greek coastguard boat and then abandoned on a small vessel. During a break, with his microphone still on, the ex-officer reportedly said that it was “obviously illegal” and “an international crime.” The official government spokesman, Mr. Marinakis, however, refuted the allegations as unsubstantiated. When presented with the evidence, the coastguard merely praised their work saving lives and claimed to be fully abiding by the country’s international obligations.

While this recent exposé is particularly horrifying, it is unfortunately not news to those of us familiar with Greece. Deadly deterrence measures have been used by the authorities here for a number of years. In this post, I offer a brief timeline of events, moments and informal policies that led to the BBC’s report.   

In 2008, one of the highest number of apprehensions at Greece’s borders was recorded, with 146,337 people being arrested in a 12-month period, exceeding by 30% the previous year’s arrests. ‘It is the anxiety that I feel every night when they release all the slave ships at the coasts of Greece, without any control from Turkey, all these people that we have to take care of with respect to their rights and their life’, said the Minister of Interior, Prokopis Pavlopoulos addressing the Greek Parliament in June 2008. However, contrary to the official narrative, most apprehensions in 2008, (54,245 people) were, in fact, recorded in the mainland, while only 30,149 individuals were apprehended at the Greek-Turkish sea border and another 14,461 at the Greek-Turkish land border.

Yet, moral panic about rising numbers crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands, paved the way for the government to step up efforts to control the country’s borders with a system of pre-emptive, improvised measures, which had been the norm for a number of years. As a Greek border police officer told me in an interview back in 2011, ‘in the past we were more effective. The Greek government used to hire fishermen at the border to illegally transfer migrants back to Turkey’. In fact, there is evidence of the practice of using fishermen for pushbacks, even from the 1980s. ‘Now that Europe’s eyes are on us’, the border officer continued, ‘we cannot keep our country secure by doing the same good quality work’, in a clear reference to pushbacks.  While this strategy may not have been an official one, border authorities did not do much to hide it.

In a revealing interview with ProAsyl in 2007, a representative from the coastguard disclosed a policy of deliberately frightening people: ‘We drive very close to the boats and put the headlights on, to see who is there. Of course, they are not going to turn around voluntarily because they want to come here…Simply drive around them, create waves and give the people a fright – as though telling them ‘we decide what goes on here – go away!’. Amnesty International also reported in 2013 that coastguard officials used to puncture or disable the inflatable boats they intercepted before setting them adrift towards the Turkish coast, so that they would not come back. Recent investigations show matters have changed little, as abandoning asylum seekers in non-navigable rafts remains a common practice by Greek authorities in the Aegean Sea. There is extensive evidence of these so-called ‘drift-backs', which has been reported by media and NGOs, and condemned by UN agencies, EU officials, and members of the European Parliament. Forensic Architecture has created an online platform documenting over 2,000 verified incidents. The first of these cases were presented for the first time in the European Human Rights Court in June 2024 accusing Greece for illegal pushbacks.

In these examples, we can see years in which these practices have become routine and systematic. Yet, despite such longstanding evidence, officials continue to refute it, and border guards act with impunity. The Head of the Coast Guard Police at Piraeus port admitted to a CPT delegation that he while he would not tolerate severe ill-treatment but he did not see the problem with administering slaps to these people. In fact, there are overwhelming indications that violence by the police does not stop there. In 2001, for example, a Turkish asylum seeker in coastguard detention was forced to undress and was raped with a truncheon by one of the officers present (Zontul v Greece). Following the initiation of disciplinary proceedings, the victim was not examined by a doctor and the incident was recorded as a ‘slight strike on the buttocks.’ The naval appeals tribunal imposed a suspended six- and five-months’ sentence to the two officers. The case was brought before the Strasbourg court, which found the investigation seriously flawed and punishment totally inappropriate, while holding that rape by state agents is indeed torture. In 2007 on the island of Chios two coast guard officers, tortured a Moroccan migrant by mock execution and ‘wet and dry submarino’ (simulation of drowning and suffocation). In 2013, the two officers were convicted to suspended three- and six-years’ imprisonment. In 2014, they were acquitted by the appeals court.

Such measures were not the authorities’ only ‘weapons’ to tame irregular migration. In fact, as attested by a number of human rights organisations, most of the apprehensions in border regions during that period were not recorded at all; hence, official figures showing only the tip of the iceberg. As one of my interviewees explained, registers of new arrivals at border guard stations were often handwritten and during her visits there she had personally seen correction fluid used on the police custody registry books. This claim was corroborated by the CPT in 2006, 2008 and 2009, when the delegation found the existing registers superficial and on occasion incomplete or inexact. In some stations, staff were not even aware of the exact number of persons detained or simply lied about their centre’s capacity. For example, in 2005, the CPT delegation was informed that Peplos border guard station was closed but when they visited it anyway, they discovered that it contained more than 100 people and according to them it had been operating for quite some time.

As Lena Karamanidou and Bernd Kasparek argue, drawing on a collection of material that spans more than three decades, pushbacks from Greece cannot be seen as an aberration to laws, but rather ‘a normalized, enduring practice within the Greek and European border regime.’ And indeed, while researchers obtained official confirmation that the Poros centre in the Evros region is being used for temporary detention instead of screening, there are no official documents – including any administrative acts on diavgeia.gov.gr – that confirm its use as a temporary closed detention centre, nor is there any information about how the Greek authorities were funding its operation. Such matters suggest the facility is being used as a hidden infrastructure for pushbacks.

Such practices by the Greek authorities are extended to Greek citizens alike. On the night of the 5th September, 2023, Antonis Karyotis, a 36-year-old man, ran fast to board the ship, which was about to depart Piraeus for the port of Iraklion in Crete. The video that was circulated on the media shows a deck officer forcefully pushing him away, while another officer was standing by. As a result of the force, the man fell off the ramp and died into the sea, just seconds after the ship had left the pier. The video shows the two officers looking into the sea as the man was fighting for his life in the foaming water that the ship’s propellers created. While the initial reporting of the incident spoke of a tragic accident, after a few days and as public rage was growing about the criminal responsibilities of the crew, the Minister of Maritime Affairs, Mr. Varvitsiotis said that this was not indicative of the morale of Greek seamen that they have honoured for centuries, that is to rescue people at sea and not throw them into it.

The thousands of drowned bodies in the Aegean show otherwise. The numerous testimonies of those who have survived shipwrecks claiming that they have been left adrift with damaged boats to fend for their lives dating back to are evidence that this is not the first time that the Hellenic coastguard have been implicated in incidents that put people lives in danger. The decision of the European Human rights Court about the shipwreck in Farmakonisi is yet another evidence that Greek authorities are in the know when people die in their waters. The fatal shipwreck in Pylos, where around 600 people are estimated to have drowned in Greek sea, as the coastguard was observing but not intervening, shows that perhaps the lives of others do not matter in Greece. Evidence collected on the database ‘Detention Landscapes’ shows that indeed violence against migrants in Greece is not an accident that can be attributed to a few police officers but a systematic and chronic ill-treatment of those who are deemed unwanted. Can we still question whether Greek law enforcement officials adopt violent practices or that politicians are not aware of them?      

Mr. Karyotis was mentally ill living off state welfare and running errands for his fellow villagers. Some even said that he may not have had a ticket (he did), or that they mistook him as a foreigner, as if these are legitimate excuses to let someone die. The migrants too did not enter Greece ‘legally’. It was their fault that they were there. These deaths are acceptable, justified and covered up by a political system that if not supports hate crimes, it at least chooses to look the other way. State sponsored violence does not just affect the pariahs or undeserving migrants, but us all. The emergence of dangerous cynicism about the death and total deprecation of the life of ‘others’ will the question of death in contemporary border governance is here. If travelling without documents is a crime that can justify violence and the death of those on the move, being left to die in Greece will be the new normal of a society in sepsis.

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