IDOMENI, Greece -- You see the first camp long before you see the border. A sudden population of ragged tents and ragged people spread around and above a highway gas station. And then suddenly, another camp on the other side of the road. And then more people living in what appears to be an abandoned motel. Not really living, more like occupying. Waiting. Halted there by Europe’s decision to stop the mass migration that has become the continent’s greatest crisis since World War 2.
And then you get to Idomeni itself, the actual border crossing between Greece and Macedonia, which has become a shameful and appalling slum. It used to be little more than a train stop; now a mass of tents sprawls and spreads along the tracks and across fields, stopping just short of the razor wire that block the door to Western Europe. The so-called Balkan route. The wire is glistening and silvery in the sunlight.
“Squalid and wretched have been used by some people to describe this place, and they’re probably pretty good words.”
I’m talking to David Garley, a doctor from Britain who’s been here for a few weeks as a volunteer with Medecins du Monde.
“We can’t give advice but we do encourage people to leave this place, which is disgusting.”
But few people do leave and go to other “hotspot” camps set up by the Greek government, where conditions are said to be better. They want to be able to see the fence, to be near the gate, just in case it opens and they have only a few minutes to grab their belongings and run through. And so they squat in the dirt and misery of Idomeni, and wait.
Amina Khalil shows me her newborn baby, delivered into a dirty blanket, in a dirty tent, in a place far from her home in northern Syria. She left behind a real war zone in the Middle East, for a political war zone in Europe.
“I have no home there,” she says in fractured English, “and I have nothing here. I can’t go back and I can’t go ahead.”
After giving birth, she and her family were offered a place in a more comfortable camp, near a real hospital. She stubbornly refused, and is genuinely disappointed to hear the border is not going to open.
“Ever, ever, ever?” she asks. There is no certain answer.
Around her, men are welding and hammering as new semi-permanent structures go up. You don’t get a sense this place will empty out soon. People line up for food three times a day. There’s a long line of portable toilets. And in the middle of it all, a single ice cream truck is dispensing chocolate and strawberry cones. How odd it looks.
And here’s the definition of being caught in limbo. The migrants can only apply for asylum over Skype, and of course, there are no computers here and no real Internet connection.
“It’s a big joke,” says a young Syrian, who wants to go Canada. “A big joke on us.”
I can’t imagine what it was like living through the rain and cold of February and March, but Dr. Garley can, because he was here. He tells me about walking past a tent that was blown over and flattened, and he thought surely, nobody could be living inside. Until he heard a man cough.
“If people really thought the border was closed,” he says, “They wouldn’t be here. They would have gone somewhere else.”
I wanted to come to Idomeni to see if everything I had read about the place was true. The answer is yes. Sadly, yes, because this is Europe, the land of open borders and liberal sanctuary. Only now it’s struggling with those values under a flood of outsiders who simply want a share in Europe’s prosperity, and believe it’s their human right.
Dr. Garley has an opinion and happily shares it.
“Part of the reason why a lot of people from the Middle East, mainly from Syria, are coming to Europe is because they perceive it as a place of peace an acceptance.”
“What is keeping them here in squalor,” he says, spreading his arms outward toward the camp, “is Europe’s inability to deliver that.”
