Police in Greece have moved more than 1,000 migrants and refugees from the Idomeni camp on its border with Macedonia, amid rising squalor at the site and pressure to stop criminal gangs smuggling asylum seekers through the Balkans.
Until Tuesday, about 8,200 people were living in fields around the border village of Idomeni, a key point on the “Balkan route” by which more than one million migrants travelled to northern and western Europe last year.
In co-ordination with Austria, several Balkan states closed their borders to asylum seekers in March, causing more than 12,000 people – many from conflict zones such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan – to get stuck at Idomeni when the backlog was at its peak.
Many migrants and refugees now trek overland from Turkey, through Bulgaria and Serbia to Hungary, but gangs are also smuggling people from the Idomeni camp into Macedonia and beyond, to the anger of states north of Greece.
Early on Tuesday morning, hundreds of Greek riot police moved into the camp, closing it off to journalists, volunteers and some aid workers, as a fleet of buses arrived to take people to hastily built reception centres further south.
"The operation . . . is taking place slowly and in a calm atmosphere. There has not been any need to use force," said government migration spokesman Giorgos Kyritsis.
He said that officials hoped Idomeni would be completely cleared “ideally by the end of the week”, but added: “We haven’t put a strict deadline on it.”
Greece’s government is keen to clear a site that for more than a year has been a magnet for people-smuggling gangs, and to reopen a major rail line for cargo trains that for two months has been blocked by protesting residents of the camp.
‘Organised movements’
“It’s important that organised movements are voluntary, non-discriminatory and based on well-informed choices by the individuals,” said
Adrian Edwards
, a spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR).
“As long as . . . we’re not seeing use of force, then we don’t have particular concerns about that,” he added. “It often does help to move people into more organised sites, when they’re willing to move to those places.”
Vicky Markolefa, a representative of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), said the operation at Idomeni was going "very smoothly".
She did warn, however, of “high insecurity” and “an increase in stress” for migrants who were “not fully aware of where they are going and what will come for them in the next days”.
Fighting has broken out several times in recent months at Idomeni and reception areas elsewhere in Greece, where about 50,000 migrants and refugees are stuck in limbo as the EU struggles to find a system to resettle or repatriate them.
"Authorities managing the relocation to camps and the management of these receiving facilities need to ensure basic needs will be adequately met, before they relocate thousands of vulnerable families and children there," said Amy Frost, who leads Save the Children's response team in Greece.
The charity said that about 40 per cent of people at Idomeni were minors.
