Refugee Flows and Volunteers in the Current Humanitarian Crisis in Greece

ABSTRACT

The refugee crisis in Greece has created a great and sudden accentuation of the needs related to addressing the crises at a regional and local levels. Since early 2016, a refugee flow of over 860,000 migrants into Greece and Northern Europe has been recorded. Currently, 55,000 people have been registered as permanent residents in settlements throughout Greece. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been a determining factor in remedying the problem with involvement of hundreds of volunteers and citizens, who became active outside the traditional state frameworks, as well as the networks of major organizations, to create, on-site structures and networks for refugee support. In the framework of Seminar about Sociology of Networks at the University of the Aegean, from March to May 2016 the authors organized a field research. Four research visits and 50 open interviews with volunteers were completed in the areas of Mytilene, Victoria Square, Piraeus Port, and Eidomeni refugee camp, 2016. This article records the forms of cooperation and self-organization between the volunteers as the refugee crisis progressed, as well as their impact on safety and security in addressing the most vulnerable of the groups' issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee flows
• volunteers
• NGOs
• humanitarian crisis
• safety

Notes

1. Retrieved from http://www.unhcr.org/5683d0b56.html

2. Total arrivals in Greece (Jan 2016 - 15 May 2016): 155.837, Retrieved from http://data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/country.php?id=83

3. European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions Implementation of the Solidarity Chapter of the EU Charter aims to build a bridge between programmatic solidarity rights (social and economic rights) and justiciable civil and political rights. Justiciable rights equate to effective and enforceable rights. The challenge is to establish clearly justiciable solidarity rights (e.g., trade union freedom of association, information and consultation, collective bargaining and collective action), and, further, to develop and implement programmatic social and economic solidarity rights: for example, health, education, and so forth. The EU Charter, which was enacted with the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon on December 1, 2009, opens a new chapter in the legal enforcement of solidarity rights, both at transnational and national levels. Retrieved from http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/eurwork/industrial-relations-dictionary/solidarity-principle.

4. Total arrivals in Lesvos, 2015 (January–November 11): 379,000 (out of 660,000 who have arrived to Greece). 856,723 people in 2015 and 155,837 in 2016 have arrived all over Greece by sea. UNHCR estimates that 90% of these come from the originating countries of refugees. Most of them continued their trip to Northern Europe. In Greece, only a small percentage had filed an asylum application by the end of March 2016. Retrieved from http://www.unhcr.org/5645ddbc6.html and http://data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/country.php?id=83

5. The agreement will take effect from March 20, 2016. What this means in practice is that anyone arriving in the Greek islands from this date will be returned directly to Turkey if they have no right to international protection or do not claim asylum. Those who claim asylum will have their application processed, in an expedited fashion, with a view to their immediate return to Turkey if the claim is declared inadmissible. Retrieved from http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-16-963_en.htm

6. (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

7. Throughout his writings, Giorgio Agamben has argued that what is at stake in the political space of modernity is, at base, the definition of biological life and death or, better yet, that it is the production of a specific biopolitical body that today is the original e and ultimate e task of sovereign power. As the Italian philosopher suggests, the radical separation between bios and zoe,´ “biological” life and “political” life, has brought about a progressive politicization of the body and its definitive colonization by the language of politics and science. The contemporary “biopolitical threshold” e that “third space” described by Agamben as the zone of indistinction between a life worth living and a life that is expendable, that does not deserve to live e is, indeed, produced through the cartography of all of our individual bodies.

Agamben's Geographies of Modernity (PDF Download Available). Available from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248442125_Agamben's_Geographies_of_Modernity

8. “Drawing as well on international law and the analogy to disaster law would indicate that EU states have a duty to extend requested support to a member state facing such an inflow of refugees as to render help necessary in upholding the rights of those refugees. Article 80 TFEU's specific reiteration of the solidarity principle indicates it is a strong principle within the CEAS, and its applicability across all CEAS measures shows it is meant to apply not only to emergencies but to structural factors as well.” (McDonough, 2012, p. 9)

9. Oikopolis, a member of ecologicala movement of Thessaloniki. Intereview with Odyssea Hiltidis.

10. In4Youth Research 2012–2015, Social and Labor Market Integration Processes of Young People during Continuous Economic and Financial Crisis, “Excellence” Action, EU “Training and Lifelong Learning,” cofunding (ECB and national resources), Scientific Coordinator: Chtouris Sotiris, Sociology Professor, University of the Aegean, Director of the Sociological and Cultural Digital Documentation Lab.

11. A similar experience has been observed in the settlement of PIKPA (Patriotic Foundation of Social Welfare and Security), Mytilene, Greece which is not presented in detail in this document.

12. On May 25, 2015, the Minister coordinating the refugee situation stated on Sky TV that the total populations from the unofficial settlements will be relocated within 10 days to organized settlements, mainly in areas in The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.