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Fourteen years later, the brutality has not abated, and has taken a turn that demonstrates even greater cowardice, callousness, and contempt for the rule of law on the part of Greece’s authorities.
I recently interviewed 26 Afghans, both victims and witnesses, who described how Greek police variously assaulted, robbed, and stripped them and others of their clothes; then took them to the banks of the Evros River in late 2021 and early 2022 where they handed them over to men wearing black or commando-like uniforms and balaclavas.
All reported that the Greek police were close by when the masked men beat them or loaded them onto small boats.
Three people we interviewed said that the men ferrying the boats told them they were also migrants who were enlisted by the Greek police with promises of documents which would enable them to travel onward in to the EU
A 28-year-old former commander in the Afghan army who was pushed back from Greece to Turkey in late December, told me about a conversation he had in Pashto with the Pakistani man ferrying the boat that took him back to Turkey. “The boat driver said, ‘We are…here doing this work for three months and then they give us…a three-page document. With this [document], we can move freely inside Greece and then we can get a ticket for…or another country.”
The Greek police continue to carry out many abuses directly. Twenty-one of the 26 people we interviewed said police forced them to strip down to their undershorts. ————
