CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP - BBCnews.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/10_01_17_fo4_agreektragedy.pdf · - 5 - KEMP: 15 year old Bilal is one of the star pupils in the English class. BILAL:

BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 4

TRANSCRIPT OF “FILE ON 4” – “A GREEK TRAGEDY”

CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP

TRANSMISSION: Tuesday 10th

January 2017 2000 – 2040

REPEAT: Sunday 15th

January 2017 1700 - 1740

REPORTER: Phil Kemp

PRODUCER: Sally Chesworth

EDITOR: Gail Champion

PROGRAMME NUMBER: PEL44001242/AAA

- 1 -

THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT

COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING

AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL

SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

“FILE ON 4”

Transmission: Tuesday 10th

January 2017

Repeat: Sunday 15th

January 2017

Producer: Sally Chesworth

Reporter: Phil Kemp

Editor: Gail Champion

ACTUALITY – WILD ANIMAL NOISES

KEMP: I’m on the Greek island of Samos on the European

Union’s eastern frontier and I’ve just walked into a migrant camp, where we’re told as many

as eighty children could be staying without their families. On one side of me is a tall metal

fence capped with barbed wire and what looks like a small village of metal containers behind

it. On the other, row after row of tents snake up the hillside here. You might have thought

the migrant crisis was over - and it’s true the number arriving on these islands is much

reduced. But a new crisis has taken its place and thousands are now trapped in Greece,

waiting to see if they’ll be granted asylum in the EU - many of them children.

MUSIC

BILAL: My father dead, the Taliban killed him. Two brothers

dead in suicide bomb and then my mother. I’m sorry, I can’t say.

RAMYAR: No baba, no mother, father. Me no family. Family

finish.

- 2 -

KEMP: Tonight on File on 4, we meet the children braving

winter here in makeshift detention camps and ask if enough is being done to protect some of

the world’s most vulnerable washing up on Europe’s shores.

MUSIC FADE

ACTUALITY WITH TABLE FOOTBALL

BISWAS: Yeah, this is the foosball table. So it’s being used at

least ten hours a day. You can see almost some of the small men are starting to lose their legs

because it’s being spun so much around.

KEMP: The sound of young migrants playing table football can

be heard pretty much all day here in Athens at the shelter Dan Biswas founded with his wife

last July. It’s called Faros – or Lighthouse in English – and Dan opened it to house at least

some of the unaccompanied children he was finding living on the streets or in the city’s

parks. These boys are the lucky ones. There are twice as many unaccompanied migrant

children in Greece as there are official places available in shelters.

So what goes on in this building then? [BOY GRABS MICROPHONE]

RAMYAR: How are you? Welcome.

KEMP: [LAUGHING] Hello.

Dan’s showing me around when a boy grabs the microphone.

RAMYAR: We are from Iraq, Faros very, very good.

KEMP: And how old are you?

RAMYAR: How old are me? Twelve!

KEMP: You are twelve?

RAMYAR: Yes, twelve.

- 3 -

KEMP: Wow, your English is excellent.

RAMYAR: English, yes, yes, I have to …

KEMP: This is Ramyar. Because of his age, we’ve changed

his name to protect his identity. Ramyar is amiably mischievous. He’s bouncy and curious

and loves a cuddle, especially from the women on the staff at Faros. He arrived just three

months ago and Dan and his team are still unravelling what happened to him.

RAMYAR: No baba, no mother, father. Me go, I think, yes.

KEMP: Do you have family in Athens at all?

RAMYAR: Me no family, family finish.

BISWAS: So when he came here he was giving different versions

of his story as a defence mechanism, not allowing anyone to get that close to him and then he

actually ran away from our shelter, but then after I think a week or two, he was brought back

and we were able to get closer to him and work more with him and get to know him and try

our best also to make him feel safe, and although he is still very vulnerable and in a very

difficult situation, we have seen a lot of change in him also.

KEMP: Taking over as our tour guide, Ramyar leads us to his

dorm and points to a bunk bed decorated with brightly coloured pictures.

So this is your bed?

RAMYAR: Yes. Only photo.

KEMP: So you drew all these?

RAMYAR: Yes, because me very, very like photo.

KEMP: What have you drawn on these pictures?

- 4 -

RAMYAR: I love Marianna.

KEMP: Is Marianna your dog?

RAMYAR: Yes, me very, very love Marianna, because dog love

me. After Marianna, photo Faros after Iraq. Now England.

KEMP: Well that’s very good. You draw very well.

Ramyar shares his dorm with boys from some of the world’s most crisis-hit communities. He

points to where each of them sleep.

RAMYAR: Yes, yes, yes. Because room Afghani, Pakistani,

Kurdish, Kurdish, Afghani. Because me very, very like, always friendly.

KEMP: You’re on the bottom of a bunk bed here.

RAMYAR: Yes, me very, very like bed here.

KEMP: This is your blanket.

Ramyar and the other nineteen boys who stay here at Faros are among more than two

thousand unaccompanied migrant children now estimated to be in Greece.

ACTUALITY IN LANGUAGE CLASS

TEACHER: Let’s start with just a little bit of conversation.

Anybody want to tell me, what did you do last night?

BOY: I went to sleep …

KEMP: As well as being given food, shelter and legal advice to

help them pursue asylum claims, the boys are also offered education at Faros.

BILAL: Last night my sister called to me from Afghanistan,

yes.

- 5 -

KEMP: 15 year old Bilal is one of the star pupils in the English

class.

BILAL: I was speaking with her a lot of time. I think two hours

I spoke with her.

TEACHER: Beautiful. Okay.

KEMP: Bilal’s around five feet tall with slick, long black hair

combed into a side parting. He looks very young in jeans and a black hoodie. Once more,

because of his age, we’ve changed his name.

BILAL: When I reaching Faros I think I born now.

KEMP: You were born?

BILAL: Yeah, I born now, because when I was in Afghanistan,

my place is very bad. Kunduz now there is Taliban and Daesh.

KEMP: Isis?

BILAL: Isis, yes. And now I have there two brothers, and last

night I called him. How is life going? And he told me, oh don’t speak about life. After 6 or

5pm, we can’t go outside, my brother told me. If I go outside, maybe the Taliban or Isis

killed me.

KEMP: Do you worry about them?

BILAL: Of course I worry about them, because I don’t have

father or mother. My father dead, the Taliban killed him. Two brothers dead in suicide bomb

and then my mother. I’m sorry, I can’t say.

KEMP: It’s okay, take your time, take your time.

- 6 -

KEMP cont: After a moment collecting his feelings, Bilal explains

he’d also lost his mother - to cancer - so his older brothers had to raise him.

BILAL: I love my brothers, like father and like mother.

KEMP: It must have been so hard for you to leave them.

BILAL: It was difficult for me. They told me if you go Europe,

I think your life be better.

MUSIC

KEMP: Bilal tells us for a time he worked in a factory in Iran,

making women’s dresses. He would sleep at work after the lights went out, afraid he might

be caught by the police if he was spotted outside for being in the country illegally. Before

long he’d earned enough money to pay some smugglers to get him to Europe.

BILAL: I had one time twenty hours hiking mountain. It was

very bad for me because I didn’t have water and I didn’t have food, so I was there like this,

oh help me, help me, I don’t have water, I don’t have water, please help me.

KEMP: So were you all on your own?

BILAL: I was alone, so I was in Turkish four days and then I

came to Greece. That’s more difficult.

KEMP: What was that like?

BILAL: Oh, boat makes from balloon tube, balloon.

KEMP: So like an inflatable boat?

- 7 -

BILAL: Yeah, yeah. 43 or 45 people in the boat. We didn’t

have place for sitting. When I reached the middle, here is Turkish, here is Greece, my boat

finished gas.

KEMP: The boat ran out of gas halfway to Greece?

BILAL: Yeah, yeah. We were there five hours, six hours,

everybody crying, oh my God, help me, oh my God, help me, oh my God, help me. And

some person told me, do you speak English? So I called Greece police, I told them police,

please help us. There were children and oh, I can’t say, it’s difficult, yeah.

KEMP: Is it hard, hard to remember?

BILAL: Yeah, yeah.

MUSIC

KEMP: After concern across Europe about the scale of the

crisis, the countries along the so-called Balkan route to the EU – Macedonia, Croatia and

Slovenia - closed their borders to migrants last March, trapping tens of thousands of them

inside Greece. The EU also signed an agreement with Turkey to send back anyone who

either doesn’t apply for asylum or has their claim rejected, in exchange for accelerating

Ankara’s plans for accession. As a result, last year the number making the journey to Greece

fell by around 80%. But what was hoped would be a solution has created a whole new crisis.

Closing the borders means that the migrants that are here - still around 60,000 - have to enter

a Greek asylum system overwhelmed by the task it faces. Since the deal with Turkey, just

162 unaccompanied migrant children have been relocated from Greece to other European

countries. To put that into context, there are currently an estimated 2,300 children in the

country without their families. Bilal is just one of many desperate to move on.

BILAL: I don’t like to learn Greek because I don’t want to be

here.

KEMP: You don’t want to stay in Greece?

- 8 -

BILAL: No, I don’t want to stay here.

KEMP: Georgia Spyropoulou is a human rights lawyer who

compiles monthly reports on the situation for migrants and refugees for the European Union

Agency for Fundamental Rights. She’s highly critical of Europe’s response since the height

of the crisis.

SPYROPOULOU: It’s definitely worse than it was in 2015. What is

happening now is that Greece has turned into a great warehouse for refugees. Fifty thousand

people are living in this situation, worse than if they lived in an actual warehouse. I mean, if

you see the refugee sites that people are staying, they are not a way of living, it’s not a proper

way of living in the 21st century in a European member state. We cannot actually compare

the situation in 2015 with the situation in 17, because what happened in 2015 was an

emergency situation. We shouldn’t approach the situation as an emergency situation. It’s

not. We should talk about something that’s in a way permanent, because these people, until

they are either relocated or their asylum applications are examined and taken the status of

refugee, they will stay in Greece and they will stay in these camps until they are fully

integrated or relocated. We should have a coherent way of providing shelter and services and

this is not the case in Greece today.

ACTUALITY BUSKING IN MAIN SQUARE

KEMP: Here in Athens’ main square, there’s little sign of the

warehousing Georgia Spyropoulou told us about, but you don’t have to go far to find it.

We’ve heard that, on the outskirts of the city, there’s an old airport that’s been brought back

into service as a kind of bizarre migrant village, so we’re about to jump on the metro and see

what conditions are like for the hundreds now living there.

ACTUALITY ON METRO

ACTUALITY OUTSIDE AIRPORT, RAIN

- 9 -

KEMP: Well, this is completely surreal. I’m standing in what

must have been the old forecourt to the airport and there are children out playing in the

puddles as lightning flashes in the distance, and I can see tiny handprints painted on the walls,

where this must be used as a kind of nursery during the daytime. There’s just an

overwhelming sense of futility about the place - toddlers’ clothes hanging out to dry in the

middle of a torrential downpour and hundreds of migrants sleeping in the middle of an old

airport terminal who, ironically, aren’t going anywhere.

ACTUALITY INSIDE AIRPORT TERMINAL

KEMP: Up the stairs in the old terminal building, migrants

have put up tents, hanging bed sheets between them in an attempt to give themselves and

their families some privacy.

ACTUALITY OF CHILDREN PLAYING IN THE RAIN

KEMP: Outside on the balcony, children play in the pouring

rain. We were told a toddler had died previously falling onto the car park below.

Inside, we find a shy 17 year old Afghan boy called Mustafa. The spot where he pitched his

tent is near to the sign for passport control. But he had no use for this. The border out of

Greece closed just three days before he arrived there. With the help of an interpreter,

Mustafa shows us where he’s sleeping.

Can we see in your tent?

MUSTAFA [VIA INTERPRETER]: Yes, why not?

KEMP: The blue one in the corner here?

MUSTAFA [VIA INTEPRETER]: In the corner, yes.

KEMP: You have got a little padlock here. It’s all locked up.

MUSTAFA [VIA INTERPRETER]: The tent, because I have some of my important papers

inside of the tent.

- 10 -

KEMP: You’ve got your pillow, there’s a sheet down for you

to sleep on. Have you got a blanket in the corner there?

MUSTAFA [VIA INTERPRETER]: Yes, it’s a small blanket.

KEMP: Is this everything that you own in the world here?

MUSTAFA [VIA INTERPRETER]: Yes, this is all of my life I have in the world, without

money. Just this tent. Everything you see inside.

KEMP: One tiny tent.

MUSTAFA [VIA INTERPRETER]: I don’t have any family. The Taliban killed my

parents.

KEMP: So you’re all on your own in Greece?

MUSTAFA [VIA INTERPRETER]: Yes, I live alone. I had a brother; I lost him on the

border of Iran.

KEMP: Why did you leave Afghanistan?

MUSTAFA [VIA INTERPRETER]: Because, you know, in my village, in Kunduz, it is war,

and the Taliban told my father, he was a farmer, they say you should make opium, and my

father doesn’t accept it. For that reason they killed my father and because of that we left.

KEMP: It wasn’t safe for you to stay?

MUSTAFA [VIA INTERPRETER]: Yes, yes they told us they will kill us and they are

searching for us. For that reason, we leave.

KEMP: There are lots of people living here. Are there other

young men like you who are living on their own, without their families, in this building?

- 11 -

MUSTAFA [VIA INTERPRETER]: Yes, is there a lot of like me and younger than me, but

nobody cares about them. Some of them 16, 15 or some 14 years, and some of them, they

went with traffickers; the people who had money, they went with traffickers, but we are the

people who doesn’t have money in there.

KEMP: What do you think is going to happen to you all?

MUSTAFA [VIA INTERPRETER]: I don’t know anything about my future.

MUSIC

KEMP: Mustafa’s situation is far from ideal, but there are

children even worse off than him. At the charity Human Rights Watch, Eva Cosse has been

investigating what’s happening to the many unaccompanied migrant children who don’t get

places in official shelters. Some, she says, have even been kept in police cells.

COSSE: During our research, we met children who you could

see in them the high impact of detention in their psychology and mental health. I mean, when

I was interviewing them, they were not looking me in my eyes, they were looking down or

looking on the floor or they were doing nervous moves, going back and forth. And we also

interviewed children who had self-harmed while in detention, children who had cut

themselves, in some cases children told us how they thought about ending their lives. I

remember in one police station, we were at the first floor sitting next to a balcony and the

police brought one of the kids so that we can interview him. And he ran towards the balcony,

before we managed to speak to him, and he said, ‘Ah, the sun – freedom.’ And it was just an

immediate reaction; he hadn’t seen the sun for more than four weeks.

KEMP: How long are some of these children staying in those

conditions?

COSSE: Generally speaking, the Greek law says that children

shouldn’t be detained under exceptional circumstances for more than 25 days. What we’ve

seen is that children have been detained for weeks and months. We even spoke to children

who had been detained in detention centres for more than two months without having access

- 12 -

COSSE cont: to any interpreters, without knowing why they are

there, what will happen to them. Often we were the first persons from the outside world that

they saw.

KEMP: We asked for permission to see for ourselves what

conditions were like for migrant children staying in detention, but we were told for official

reasons that wasn’t possible.

MUSIC

KEMP: Hear the word ‘detention’ and a police cell might well

be the image that comes to mind. But young migrants are also being detained in what are

known as reception and identification centres or hotspots on the Greek islands, in conditions

that will be familiar to those who’ve seen images of the former camp in Calais.

ACTUALITY ON AEROPLANE

KEMP: We headed to one of the islands in the Aegean Sea

closest to Turkey and on the frontline of the crisis, where we’d heard hundreds of migrants

were being kept in one of these centres.

EXTRACT FROM SAMOS TOURISM VIDEO

PRESENTER: Samos, birthplace of Pythagorus and Bacchus. The

island of choice muscatel wines …

KEMP: For much of the year Samos’s beaches and azure sea

make it a popular destination for tourists. The island’s economy is almost entirely dependent

on it. But come the winter, the weather makes this place almost unrecognisable from the

holiday ads. As we arrived, heavy rain was being replaced by near freezing temperatures.

ACTUALITY WITH VOLUNTEERS

- 13 -

ANDREI: Nine to thirteen, teenagers. All our donations are here,

sorted by age category, and now what we are seeing is kids’ jumpers. They are really needed

right now because it is getting very, very cold outside.

KEMP: Bogdan Andrei is one of the coordinators of the charity

Samos Volunteers, which plays a key role in offering aid and support to refugees, working

closely with international NGOs. The volunteers, like Bogdan, come from across Europe.

In a cabin next to their warehouse, he told us what had changed on the island since he arrived

a year ago.

ANDREI: Beforehand, people are just transitioning to the island.

They were arriving, they were staying for a few days, getting their registration paper and then

boarding on the first ferry they could get and continue their journey to the mainland and then

to the European country that they wanted to get to.

KEMP: So what’s the longest they might have stayed last

winter?

ANDREI: I think the longest was three weeks. The situation

changed a lot since the EU-Turkey deal in the end of March. There’s people now for eight

months in the camp.

KEMP: They might spend the whole winter under canvas here?

ANDREI: Yes, yes. And there will definitely be people spending

the whole winter in these conditions. I’m worried that there’s not going to be a solution

found for the people that are living in these tents, because they cannot survive for three

months or more on these conditions and it’s going to rain quite often.

ACTUALITY IN STORE

ANDREI: Can you help Costas to find ….

COSTAS: I need two pairs of shoes.

- 14 -

MAN: What size?

COSTAS: 44, for men.

ANDREI: There’s not enough items for everyone, there is not

enough services for everyone, and now the rains have started and people are really in

appalling conditions here. They come to us with their baby completely wet and he had to

wait till in the morning to get a new set of clothes. It happens very, very often.

KEMP: What do you say to someone like that?

ANDREI: What can you say to someone like that? You just help

as much as you can, you alleviate a bit of suffering on the moment but you know that this is

not a long-term solution, because the winter season just started now and rains will come again

and again.

ACTUALITY IN STORE

COSTAS: Fantastic, yes, good.

KEMP: Progress in moving migrants on from Samos has been

slow. The UK, for example, only accepted around 140 unaccompanied children from the

whole of Europe between January and October of last year. Later, more than 750 were also

transferred from France after the Calais camp closed. The Home Office couldn’t tell us how

many had come to the UK from Greece specifically. We wanted to visit the children staying

at the hotspot on Samos, but were refused permission. What we’d heard was so concerning,

we decided to try anyway.

ACTUALITY OF DOG BARKING

KEMP: So it’s getting late, towards the end of the day, and the

last bit of light is fading behind the hills here. We’re walking up to the back entrance of the

camp here on Samos. High metal fences with barbed wire at the top. In front of us there’s

- 15 -

KEMP cont: tents all the way up this hill. UNHCR emblazoned

canvas on our left, being held down with large rocks so it doesn’t blow away. So this is a bit

of extra cover they’ve been given to guard against the rain and the cold. The truth is,

although it’s supposed to be a closed camp, the gate at the back of this place is wide open and

we are just walking in now.

Once properly inside the camp, we were joined by a Palestinian man who was living in Syria

before the war forced his family to flee. He agreed to interpret for us.

ACTUALITY OF WILD ANIMALS

MAN: This sound every night, same this sound.

KEMP: What is that noise?

MAN: Animal maybe.

KEMP: Some wild animal?

MAN: Yes, animal. I don’t know which kind of animal, but

every day same. Coming from that area, see. Now this area you will find minors, all underage.

KEMP: We’re now approaching a gate in the wire fence here

with some white metal containers on the other side - the kind of temporary structure you might

find on a building site back home to give workers a place to rest and make tea. It doesn’t look

like the sort of place that was ever intended to house teenagers for months on end.

ACTUALITY - KNOCK ON DOOR

KEMP: Hi there.

MAN: These are from Syria …. He is 16 and 7 months, from

Syria.

KEMP: Shall I take my shoes off?

- 16 -

MAN 2: No.

KEMP: Are you sure?

MAN 2: No problem.

KEMP: Okay. So you’ve invited us into where you’re staying

here. Around me we’ve got two bunk beds. How many of you are sharing this space here?

MAN: Okay, four minors.

KEMP: Four of you.

MAN: Yeah, four underage, yeah, only.

KEMP: And are you all here in the camp on your own without

your families?

MAN: Yeah, yeah, alone.

KEMP: Under the harsh electric light of the container, we get

talking to a 16 year old from Damascus. We decide to call him Adil to protect his identity.

He sports a curly black beard that looks out of place on such a boyish face. As a young

Syrian woman watches from one of the bunk beds, incongruously dressed in a donated

Ludlow School sweater, we hear yet another story of a family torn apart by conflict.

ADIL [VIA INTERPRETER]: He lose his family at Damascus.

KEMP: When you say you lost your family in Damascus, does

that mean ….?

ADIL [VIA INTERPRETER]: Father and mother from Russian plane and a bomb

coming from Russian plane and his mother and father dead.

- 17 -

KEMP: I’m so sorry to hear that.

The trauma of losing his parents a year earlier is clearly still very raw for Adil. He focuses

his frustrations on the monotony of life in the camp, which consists of little more than eating

what he says is terrible food, and sleeping. At 41 days, his stay at the hotspot has already

breached the 25 days we’ve been told was the legal limit for children to be detained.

ADIL [VIA INTERPRETER]: Nobody cares. You can go, come. Nobody asks you.

When he came, first reception bring him to this room and finish. Now he has too many

things – for example, water not working. He go to first reception – please come to repair, we

need maintenance. Nobody care. About 23 times he ask. Nobody care. Any problem, they

told him, this is your responsibility, what you will do.

KEMP: The camp is already three times its capacity. In places,

it’s hard to find a path between all the tents that have gone up on the other side of the wire

fence to where Adil is staying. This overcrowding of migrants from so many different

communities has led to some violent tension. As a 16 year old on his own here, Adil says it’s

hard for him to sleep at night.

When you think about the situation you’re in now, do you ever regret having left Syria to

come to a place like this?

ADIL [VIA INTERPRETER]: Better in Syria for him. When he saw this country, this

Samos, like this situation, he like to be in Syria. This is prison for us, because we want to go

out of Greece.

KEMP: But if you go home, you could die, like your parents.

It’s a warzone.

ADIL [VIA INTERPRETER]: At Samos, he think it’s more than Syria, because no

food, nothing and no future - until now it’s black. No future.

KEMP: We wanted to speak to a minister in the Greek

Government about conditions in the camp and why there were so few places in official

shelters for young migrants. But we were let down on three separate occasions. We did

though speak to European Commission spokesperson on migration, Natasha Bertaud, and I

- 18 -

KEMP cont: asked her whether there is concern at an EU level

about the situation for migrant children in places like Samos.

BERTAUD: We are very concerned and in fact this is something

that we have been consistently raising with the Greek authorities, as this is something that the

Commission feels very strongly about, that all children in need of international protection

have a right to care and protection under both international and European law, and we are

very concerned to make sure that is the case in Greece.

KEMP: We have seen and heard from children being detained

illegally, longer than the 25 day legal limit that exists in Greece. What kind of oversight do

you have of that?

BERTAUD: Under European law, detention of any refugee and

particularly of unaccompanied minors has to be only used as a very, very last resort and only

for very limited periods of time. And from a legal perspective, in Greek law indeed it says

that unaccompanied minors cannot be held for longer than 25 days, and the information that

we have is that that is respected. The hotspots are not closed facilities, but what the Greek

authorities are doing is issuing migrants - and that includes unaccompanied minors - with no

travel orders, so they can’t leave the island, but they can leave the hotspot asylum centres as

they please.

KEMP: So that is the argument that’s made, is it? Because

they leave a gate open at the back of these hotspots, that then these children are not being

detained illegally?

BERTAUD: Well, in any case the children shouldn’t, in most cases,

be in hotspots unless it is in their interests. What we are trying to do is make sure there is

always dedicated facilities that unaccompanied minors are transferred to, so that they are not

left with the rest of the general population, and this is what we have been pushing the Greek

authorities to ensure.

- 19 -

KEMP: Many we spoke to in Greece told us that money wasn’t

the problem. Since the beginning of 2015, Greece has had 352 million euros in emergency

assistance. The EU has given a further 198 million euros to NGOs providing emergency

support. Some charities we spoke to said it wasn’t always easy to see where the money had

gone.

ACTUALITY PLAYING POOL

KEMP: Others, like Praksis, a Greek NGO which runs a shelter

on Samos, say it’s not a lack of money, but excessive bureaucracy that’s the problem.

Praksis has room for 25 young migrants on the island, but when we take a tour of their

accommodation with coordinator Alex Vallidis, we discover only 22 boys are currently being

looked after.

So we’ve got a room here ….

VALLIDIS: We are using them as storage.

KEMP: So we’ve got two bunkbeds.

VALLIDIS: Three.

KEMP: But that’s beds here that aren’t being used – three in

total?

VALLIDIS: Yes. We are pushing and pressing everybody to get

their papers in two weeks. It’s an output of a lot of pressure to get even in two or three

weeks.

KEMP: How does it make you feel to see that?

VALLIDIS: It’s clearly a waste of space, clearly a waste of

opportunities for the children that are accommodated in the camp.

- 20 -

KEMP: And all the while there’s potentially dozens of

unaccompanied migrant children up in that camp, sleeping under the stars tonight.

VALLIDIS: Seventy to eighty, we can say approximately.

KEMP: Back in his office, Alex explains that before filling a

place, Praksis has to wait to get a formal referral from EKKA - that’s the government agency

responsible for providing social care to crisis-hit populations. But austerity has hit Greece’s

public services hard and the civil servants who survived the cuts are overstretched.

VALLIDIS: Due to their bureaucracy and due to their understaffed

service, sometimes we have to wait two months to get the children, which is really

frustrating, because we cannot go there and take them from their camp. We need to have a

specific placement from EKKA.

KEMP: And all because of bureaucracy?

VALLIDIS: Capacity maybe it is a problem. What is the

experience of the Greek Government to respond to a problem like this?

ACTUALITY OF SAMOS PROTEST

KEMP: There has been widespread concern across Europe

about the scale of migration and the threat from extremism that some have linked to it. It’s

no different in Samos, where there have been protests about how Greece is being left to

shoulder the burden of the crisis. The Greek Government refused to respond to any of our

points about how they’re dealing with migrant children or about reasons for the delays in

processing asylum applications. But Natasha Bertaud from the European Commission says

progress has been made.

BERTAUD: The efforts that Greece has made in the past two years

have been herculean if you think that they only had, you know, around a hundred reception

places to start with. They’ve now got 70,000 reception places for refugees in the whole of

Greece. But what we are still missing is enough dedicated accommodation places for

- 21 -

BERTAUD cont: unaccompanied minors, and this is something that we

are working with our international partners to change. We have already created around 700

places for unaccompanied minors working with the UNHCR, and about another 150 working

with Save the Children and Terre des Hommes, which is another NGO, and just in December

of last year we signed an agreement with Unicef to create another 250 places for

unaccompanied minors, so it is improving, but there is still a lot to be done.

KEMP: The effect of the EU-Turkey deal is that there are now

approximately 60,000 migrants trapped in Greece with very little idea about when they will

receive news about their asylum claims. Was the deal a mistake?

BERTAUD: No one could sit idly by as people were drowning in

the Aegean. You couldn’t have an uncontrolled flow of people into a European Union

member state to the extent that it was happening last year. The agreement has been effective

in stopping that. We had 10,000 people a day arriving in October 2015 and now, since the

agreement has been in place, less than a hundred arrive a day.

KEMP: But arguably that crisis has been replaced with another,

hasn’t it? These thousands of migrants who are trapped in Greece, waiting for news about their

asylum claims, and one human rights lawyer that we spoke to said the situation for those migrants

is now worse in 2017 than it was in 2015 when they could at least move on from Greece.

BERTAUD: But it was an unmanageable situation to have people

relocating themselves in a completely disorderly and illegal manner, just walking across the

European Union. No one is saying that the crisis is over and there is not still a great deal of

work to be done in Greece to improve the situation.

KEMP: There are more than two thousand unaccompanied

migrant children though in Greece. When will those eligible be moved out of the country?

BERTAUD: Unfortunately, I wish I was in a position to give you

concrete timelines, but I’m frankly not in a position to give that. All the European Union can

do is continue with its combination of political pressure and financial and technical support to

the Greek authorities to improve the situation as quickly as possible.

- 22 -

KEMP: The European Commission set a target date of

September this year for any migrant eligible for relocation to be transferred out of

Greece. Perhaps cold comfort to the children we met [MUSIC]. But with youth comes

optimism. Fifteen year old Bilal at the charity, Faros, is determined, whatever the odds, his

future will be a bright one.

BILAL: It’s not dream for me. I want to be in the future doctor.

If I can’t be doctor, I want to be engineer. If I can’t be engineer, I want to be a lawyer.

KEMP: Well, you’ve certainly got the brains for it.

BILAL: Yeah, of course [LAUGH]

KEMP: And the confidence.

BILAL: Yeah.