Deporting again, Greece ships out 124 migrants

An officer from Frontex, the European Union border protection agency, leads a migrant aboard a ferry Friday on the Greek island of Lesbos for deportation to Turkey.
An officer from Frontex, the European Union border protection agency, leads a migrant aboard a ferry Friday on the Greek island of Lesbos for deportation to Turkey.

DIKILI, Turkey -- Greece on Friday resumed deportations of migrants to Turkey after a four-day pause, despite attempts by activists to stop the two boats from leaving Lesbos with 124 people onboard.

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AP

Activists swim in front of a chartered ferry Friday off the Greek island of Lesbos in an attempt to stop it from deporting a group of migrants to Turkey. They were detained by the Greek coast guard.

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AP

A migrant woman cooks dinner Friday in a camp near the northern Greek border checkpoint at Idomeni.

Before the first boat left the island, four activists jumped into the sea to try to obstruct the operation -- swimming to the front of the chartered ferry and grabbing the anchor chain -- and were detained by the coast guard. The second boat made the journey without incident.

One of the migrants, however, was refused by Turkey and sent back to Lesbos, Europe's Frontex border agency said. It did not elaborate on the reason.

The EU-Turkey deal, which aims to deter illegal migration, has faced several setbacks and sharp criticism in its first week of implementation and has left many would-be migrants in limbo along the coast of Turkey.

"There is no legal or adequate way for us to go to Europe, so people are either waiting for the boats or turning back to Syria," says Mohammed, a Syrian who is stranded in the Turkish coastal town of Izmir. "People are shocked and scared."

Mohammed, who only gave his first name because he might decide to go back to his hometown, which is under the control of the Islamic State extremist group, says he told his family to stay put.

"If any Syrian asked me today, 'Should I make the journey?' I'd say go back and die in your land with honor," he said. "Europe wants you dead. Turkey wants you dead."

The deportations on Friday came after the return of 202 migrants earlier this week under the EU-Turkey deal which aims to return migrants who don't apply for asylum from Greece to Turkey. In exchange, the EU will take in some Syrians directly from Turkey and provide funds for Ankara, visa-free travel for Turks and accelerated EU membership talks.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday robustly defended the deal, insisting that it is the key to reducing the flow of migrants to Europe.

Merkel, a longtime opponent of full Turkish EU membership, said it is "right to try to cement its links to the European Union, without immediately having full membership in front of us" and to discuss visa freedom.

As for the deportations, Merkel said she is "firmly convinced that making clear we are pitting ourselves against illegal migration is right." She said Europe can't stand by and watch people smugglers taking control.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the deal with Turkey started well, but conceded that a significant drop in arrivals is largely because other European countries have closed the Balkan migrant route. Germany registered 173,707 new arrivals in the first quarter, only 20,608 of them in March, after seeing nearly 1.1 million last year.

De Maiziere stressed it was too soon to predict how arrivals would develop during the rest of the year.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, an opponent of Merkel's open-door policy on refugees, has urged the EU to make defense of its external borders a priority.

Orban said on public radio Friday that Hungary opposes European Commission draft plans on dealing with the migrant crisis, which includes redistribution of refugees within the 28-member bloc.

The EU executive arm's attempt is also misguided, Orban said in the radio interview. His country will present its own plan, which seeks to complement the Schengen agreement with rules on dealing with the migrant crisis, he said, adding he'll seek support from fellow leaders in the coming weeks for the proposal.

He has also called for a referendum to block the settlement of refugees in Hungary.

Arrival in Turkey

Officers from the European Union's border protection agency escorted the migrants to the boats on Lesbos. In the Turkish port of Dikili, health and migration officials checked the passengers amid heavy security before they were whisked onto police-escorted buses heading to a deportation center in Kirklareli province, near the border with Bulgaria.

Some 4,000 migrants who reached Greek islands from nearby Turkey after March 20 are being held in detention camps to be screened for deportation. But the returns have been held up by delays in processing asylum claims by overwhelmed Greek authorities who are also preparing to deal with applications across the country by some 50,000 refugees who have been promised places in a slow-moving EU relocation scheme.

A Turkish official said his country was prepared to receive higher numbers with an array of 1,000 professionals including doctors, migration officials and police deployed in Dikili. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said that they had expected to receive 2,050 migrants Friday.

He said those returned Friday were primarily Afghan and Pakistani nationals. There were also four Iraqis and one each from Egypt, Morocco, Bangladesh and the Palestinian Territories. All are to be processed for deportation within two weeks.

Deportations will pause for the weekend, with returns from Greece to Turkey expected to resume next week, the Turkish official said.

Turkey's coast guard rescued more than 500 migrants in the Aegean Sea during the first week of April, according to a written statement by the governor's office of the western province of Izmir. In total, 23,147 migrants have been rescued since the beginning of the year.

A journey to Europe now carries a high risk of failure but staying put is no more attractive. Newcomers to Turkey report challenges registering with the authorities and know their chances of being resettled from here to Europe are slim.

Nour Oghli, who studied law in Damascus before fleeing to Lebanon and then to Turkey, says she remains determined to make the journey to Europe in the hope of reaching Germany and fulfilling her dream of becoming a judge. In the past 10 weeks, she and her family have sought to cross to the Greek islands three times only to be intercepted on the Aegean by the Turkish coast guard.

Smugglers, she said, are now offering to take them for half-price because business is bad but her mother is too apprehensive to take the offer. Oghli, who has been unable to move her legs after her university was bombed and is in a wheelchair, says she would even consider going without her family if she can find a way.

"If they catch me, I'll throw myself overboard," she said.

Boom to bust

In Turkey, some cities -- transit hubs once flush with migrants on their way to Europe -- are now seeing the effects of the EU-Turkey deal. A multimillion-dollar economy arose around the business of moving hundreds of thousands of migrants into Europe and now has gone from boom to bust.

"Every business in this square profited from the refugees, and now they've suddenly gone," said Kadir Akinci, the manager of a taxi company in the Basmane neighborhood of Izmir, Turkey. "We've taken a 70 percent cut in profits. Those passengers were our livelihood."

Smugglers, once inundated with requests from desperate migrants, meander through cafes and teahouses looking for the stray refugee.

Taxi drivers, who had transferred thousands of passengers to isolated departure points, hang around the square looking morose. Hotels that had been booked for months by smugglers now sit empty, and Arabic signs erected to appeal to Syrians have mostly been removed from shop windows.

"The biggest problem is that when the Syrians came here, the Turks moved away," said Akinci, the manager at the cab company. "And even if they now come back, it won't compare to the business of the boats. The well has dried up."

Still, even as migrants abandon Izmir in search of alternative routes, the flow into Greece has not ended entirely. Smugglers have lowered their fares from $700 to $550 and continue to push Syrian refugees into undertaking the journey.

Smugglers say it now takes them three days to load a boat with 35 to 40 passengers, whereas before they had trouble finding enough boats to accommodate the legions of migrants.

Information for this article was contributed by Dominique Soguel, Petros Giannakouris, Elena Becatoros, Derek Gatopoulos, Ayse Wieting, Suzan Fraser, Geir Moulson and Frank Jordans of The Associated Press; by Zoltan Simon of Bloomberg News; by Ceylan Yeginsu and Karam Shoumali of The New York Times.

A Section on 04/09/2016

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