Despite its barbed wire and razor strip fencing and armed guards, Amygdaleza, Greece’s notorious detention center for child refugees, in many ways is testimony to children doing childish things.
There is the girdle of graffiti on its walls, the hand-drawn pictures of animals and flowers. There are the slogans daubed high and low: “I love you,”
“I miss you,” “life is love.” And beyond its ill-lit dormitories — little more than grimy mattresses on grimy plinths — there is a playground of sorts with two goalposts and polychrome walls.
Illustration: Mountain People
Then there are the inmates, some as young as 12, wide-eyed, fresh-faced, as quick to laugh as they are to cry.
You hear the hubbub and you do not think of a prison; you think of a school. However, that is what Amygdaleza is: a camp initially established to host undocumented migrants — in a police academy on the northwestern edge of Athens — but now home to up to 40 unaccompanied minors at any given time.
In other places, in other eras, the flat-roofed building that houses the children might have passed as a borstal. In Athens — on the frontline of Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II — it is a holding pen for innocents whose conditions, in the words of a scathing report issued by Human Rights Watch on Friday last week, is not only deplorable, but should never exist.
Greek authorities call it a “special place for the accommodation of foreigners,” part of a chain of closed facilities available to the 3,464 migrant children registered nationwide. As a measure of last resort, minors are placed in such institutions for lack of viable alternatives and for their own protection, they say.
Under the watchful eye of the guards, their eyes darting this way and that, the detainees — all boys from countries that, on our visit, include Algeria, Syria, Tunisia, Pakistan and Iraq — prefer to watch their words.
This is not where any of them intended to be. Each, in his own way, shares the common story of dodging bullets and worse to get to Europe — the imagined utopia at the end of a journey sometimes triggered by the need to flee poverty but, more often than not, persecution and war.
That they have got here, at all, in conditions that adults might find hard to survive, past smugglers and criminal gangs is, in itself, a story of courage and resolve. Some start out alone, but just as many lose their families in shipwrecks and other tragedies along the way.
“None of us want to be here,” said Ahmed Kamshle, a 14-year-old Syrian brandishing his papers. “And some of us have been here for a very long time. The food is very bad and there are rats.”
It is a plight that is not lost on Stathis Sidoropoulos, the police officer in charge of Amygdaleza’s youth wing who has demanded that the dormitories be scrubbed clean for our visit.
A mild-mannered man with two young children of his own, Sidoropoulos is the first to say that none of the minors should be behind bars.
“If our state weren’t bankrupt, if it had been properly prepared, they wouldn’t be here,” he said, his soft dark eyes looking into the distance. “If you can help improve the conditions that would be good. All day they have got nothing to do. Games would help but, so too, would mattresses, pillows, sheets and soap. In a few words, we need everything really.”
When Sidoropoulos was given the job a year ago he had dreams of transforming Amygdaleza.
“I had a vision. I said to myself when you leave you will have brought a little bit of Europe to this place, but look around you. There are two goalposts in the courtyard and no ball. There’s an activity room, but the truth is we have no computers. There’s a TV with no satellite connection so unless they speak Greek the kids never watch it. And, you know, we say all this and nobody wants to listen,” Sidoropoulos said.
In the folds of history there are stories that go untold. In Greece, in Amygdaleza, in detention centers and police holding cells up and down the country, it is these children — by far the most vulnerable of the more than million Europe-bound migrants to have crossed Greek borders — who have somehow been forgotten.
For the Greek state — in barely disguised meltdown after six years of economic freefall — the minors are an embarrassment, but also a glitch. Faced with a chronic shortage of space, its island camps brimming, its shelters practically non-existent, its asylum-seeking system stretched to breaking point, its reaction has been to deal with them as if they do not exist.
“The problem is no one sees them,” said Sofia Kouvelaki at the Bodossaki Foundation, a philanthropic organization now prioritizing the minors’ plight. “And by failing to recognize them for what they are, as the most vulnerable among the migrant flows [into the EU] they have been marginalized to the point of invisibility.”
It is a fool’s game. One that starts with violence, but also, long-term, will beget violence, too, she said.
“It is a circle of violence. They start off fleeing it, then they experience it once they get here and at some point they will express it,” she said. “Because who, after all, is going to deal with their anger and despair?”
Such existential questions might have remained in the realms of theory if the evidence was not so compelling. However, what nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), charitable organizations, psychologists and social workers are fast discovering is that the flipside of grit, the mirror image of courage and resolve, is a vulnerability both destructive and brittle.
“Psychologically they have huge problems, they self-harm, they cut themselves up, they use their hands and arms as weapons,” said Tzanetos Antypas, who heads Greece’s biggest humanitarian organization Praksis.
A social worker-cum-academic with vast experience handling those worst affected by the nation’s near-economic collapse, Antypas finds it hard to hide his own emotion when he recounts what he has witnessed.
Unaccompanied minors involved earlier this year in a revolt at the closed reception center on Lesbos — the Aegean island that has borne the brunt of the migrant influx — emerged with shocking disabilities.
“Many had been kept in custody for as long as 100 days, four times longer than the time allowed legally,” he said. “There were some, I’m not kidding, whose hair had turned white. When we moved them to an open camp they chose to remain listless in their tents. After so many months incarcerated in such overcrowded conditions, I was told they had forgotten how to walk.”
Antypas, like Kouvelaki, are heroes in this drama. Both Bodossaki, a privately run foundation and Praksis, with more than 2,000 volunteers nationwide, have no desire to substitute the state. However, what is certain is that they are supplementing it in ways both vital and clear.
“If it weren’t for the charitable foundations and NGOs things would be very difficult,” Athens Vice Mayor on Migrant and Refugee Affairs Lefteris Papagiannakis said. “They’ve been crucial in these very hard times.”
All agree that the story is as much about numbers as anything else. With only two state-run shelters — in Athens and on Crete — and 33 charitable centers, about 1,530 unaccompanied minors have formally been placed in accommodation. The rest are either housed with adults in camps or left to fend for themselves, with many resorting to sex for survival.
“We need around 400 more shelters because each one can only house 30 children,” Antypas said. “And we need to do it fast.”
Among the lucky few are those who have found shelter with the Society for the Care of Minors in a neo-classical house in Athens’ Exarcheia District. The 18 wards, mostly from Pakistan, but also Afghanistan and Syria, banter and play as teenagers would anywhere. There are games on the shelves and warm food on the table and a couple who play “mama and papa” to the child migrants.
“I love Greece,” Rafiullah from Afghanistan said. “They have been very good to me. Soon I will be reunited with my uncle in the Netherlands.”
Throughout the long, hot summer organizations such as Bodossaki have also worked around the clock to create new shelters, with 18 children moving into a colorfully painted house in a central Athens neighborhood last month.
In an ideal world, human rights defenders say the minors would be transferred rapidly to other EU countries through relocation and family reunification schemes.
“But what is most important is that these children are allowed to be what they are — children — again,” Kouvelaki said.
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