A woman receives food and water at a relocation camp in Schisto, a suburb of Athens. Photograph: Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters
In Victoria Square, Athens, home to an ever-growing number of migrants, a dubious night-time economy has emerged. On Saturday, as a large, middle-aged man walked his small dog, an Afghan boy pointed him out to his new friend, Abdul Waris. “He is one of them who comes here at night,” said the boy. Abdul’s eyes widened. “It’s OK. They don’t want underage – they take the young men who will go willingly to their homes and give them a shower and €10 or €15 for sex. Some go, the ones who have no money left.”
That developing trade is possible because, in a piazza now synonymous with the migrant crisis overwhelming Greece, and where two Pakistani men hanged themselves from a tree on Thursday, many are running out of money.
There are more than 25,000 refugees and migrants stuck in Greece, police sources have told the Observer. The borders leading out have closed down one by one, leaving the country in danger of becoming what the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, described last week as a “warehouse of souls”.
Tsipras has threatened to block future EU agreements and has withdrawn the Greek ambassador to Austria from Vienna in protest at the lack of support being offered by other nations during the refugee crisis. Austria is accepting only 80 migrants a day.
The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, plans to hold a referendum on compulsory migrant quotas. FYROM, Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia are refusing to accept Afghans and other refugees deemed not to be from conflict zones and are accepting a maximum of 580 migrants a day.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, appears to be staking everything on acrucial EU-Turkey summit, scheduled to take place on 7 March. Meanwhile, in Athens, thousands of despairing men, women and children are living rough on the streets with no idea what to do next.
Abdul arrived alone in Victoria Square around 7am, just as the 200 to 300 people sleeping here began to sit up, still wrapped in their grey blankets, facing another day of waiting. He left Afghanistan two months ago and talks about trying to reach his sister Mina, who has lived in Germany for six years. His mother is dead, his father back in Kabul.
“I am 13 and eight months,” he said. “I’m alone.” He is being shown the ropes by other young Afghan men. The green electricity fuse box that has been busted open is where mobiles can be charged. He is shown the cafe where the owner won’t let you near, and the friendlier one where you can use the lavatory as long as you buy a coffee. There is the tree and the bush that are used when you do not buy a coffee. No one shows him the tree where the two men hanged themselves.
“It was very shocking, very sudden. They didn’t say they were going to do this – suddenly they had jumped down. One, we hear, has died. The other is in hospital still,” said Shakib Sharzai, also from Afghanistan.
By noon the blankets are neatly folded in piles around the square. Many more people arrive from where they have slept, on the streets or in squats, hostels and shelters around the area. They sit warming cold bones in the sun. Some chat; children tuck themselves behind parents’ legs; one or two kick a football. There is a quiet and a stillness strange for such a large crowd of people.
“It’s just waiting, two hours, two days, three months,” said Sharzai. “Have you heard anything about the borders?” he asks hopefully.
The convergence of two crises – the refugee influx and the debt drama that has plagued the country for the past six years – has caused the rhetoric of catastrophe to be ratcheted up in Athens and abroad. After the announcement by the European commission on Friday that, in the wake of border closures, it had been forced to put together a humanitarian aid plan for Greece, there is an inescapable sense of impending doom.
“It was difficult for the government to manage Greece’s own domestic economic crisis,” said Dirk Reinermann, project manager for southern Europe at the World Bank. “The new exogenous challenge of having to deal with refugees and migrants is such that the overall task at hand borders on the impossible.”
While EU diplomats spoke of the nightmare scenario of seeing hundreds of thousands of people trapped in the country by May, analysts predicted that Europe’s southern flank could soon become embroiled in scenes of chaos and immense social hardship.
“It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better,” said Thanos Dokos, who heads Eliamep, a leading Greek thinktank. He told the Observer: “We are at risk of seeing an economy without any hope of recovery, and the country being flooded by people who have no intention of staying in camps but instead [will be] making their way to borders where there will be no shelter or facilities to host them.”
Anger at the influx has mounted on Aegean islands close to the Turkish coast, where tourism has been hard hit. In an interview, Constantine Michalos, president of the Athens chamber of commerce and industry, said pre-bookings in Kos, Rhodes and Lesbos, the islands that have borne the brunt of the refugee and migrant arrivals, were down by 60%.
“A perfect storm is brewing,” he said. “Tourism is our heavy industry, our only hope. If the refugee crisis, this global crisis, escalates, and tourism – the only sector that is booming – is hit, then frankly we are doomed.”
In Victoria Square, Greek people walk freely to and fro, many with bags of food, oranges and bread. At 8am on Saturday Thanassis, who owns a restaurant in Kaisariani, outside the city, came here with flasks of fish soup. A little later a 76-year-old man arrived with four sandwiches he had made.
“He brings sandwiches when he can afford it – not that really he can ever afford it,” said Evangelia Papagiannidou, a former film-maker and teacher from Athens. She used to bring stale bread to feed the pigeons and feral cats in Victoria Square. Now she feeds people. “Most of the bakeries will give me that which they would throw away. Some I have to say it’s for my family. One bastard round the corner pours chlorine on the bread he throws out.”
The people take only a little when offered food. Many children sit with unopened bags of sweets next to them. An elderly Kurdish man comes by to show Papagiannidou his ear, which she gives him cream for. He was bitten by some kind of rodent as he slept.
The street cleaner arrives and takes away the plastic water bottles and other rubbish. The city has removed bins and a toilet from the square, to discourage people from staying here. But they have nowhere else to go; a camp farther out of town is full.
Dimitra Koutsavli is working for Doctors of the World – Greece. The organisation is having constantly to move its operations to follow the ever-changing makeshift camps opening and closing on political orders across the country. She said she had never seen the situation as bad in Athens as over the past few days.
“The situation here is worsening. Refugees are all over the city, in squares, in the port. According to our emergency mission in Piraeus port on Friday, we saw thousands of refugees there, among them many children.”
To say that Greeks think the rest of Europe could do more is an understatement. There were peaceful protests in Athens and Piraeus last week by Greeks and refugees, and on Saturday there was a protest by 300 people outside the Austrian embassy in Athens.
Not many of those in Victoria Square went to the demonstration. “It’s for Europe to decide if it can help us. We just say, ‘Please open the borders.’ We don’t want to sit here,” said Sharzai, shrugging politely at a man from a Greek evangelical church trying to press a Bible on him.
“In my country there is Daesh [Islamic State], the Taliban, bombs every day and no jobs,” he adds. “Daesh puts it out on the radio, offering money to people to join, a lot of money, and kills men who do not join. This group is just 100km from Kabul. So I escape. What can I do?”
Aneesa from Afghanistan has been returned by bus to Athens from the Macedonian border after waiting there for three weeks with her family, hoping to get through. “It’s hard to have to turn back, when all you want to do is keep going,” she says. “Stopping is no good. It is hard.”
Her husband stares grim-faced at the ground. She takes just one orange from a bag proffered to her to divide among her three young boys. “It’s enough, because you know, bathroom,” she says with an embarrassed smile.
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