THE AIR smells of smoke: olive wood. Late into the night tractors laden with hessian sacks make their way to brightly illuminated village presses. The fine weather over New Year has rallied all to the fields to harvest the green gold. For in Messinia, there is no space, no matter how hard to reach or unpromisingly small, that cannot support an olive tree. It’s the time of year when city boys return from Athens to their grandparents smallholdings. They’ll be pleased that if Samaras, the Peloponnesian, achieves nothing else, the new motorway joining Athens airport to Kalamata has cut the journey in half, to around two hours. Even so, there are not enough hands to help, without the migrant ones of Albanians and Romanians and, as in our small town, British.
With the rise of Golden Dawn and the damning Amnesty report on the treatment of immigrants in police custody, Greece has taken, some say totally deserved, a grilling. They are accused of racism and xenophobia, of brutality and incitement to hatred. There is no doubt that the prison cells of Athens see their share of abuse. Along with the rest of Europe, the rise of the far right encourages the fear and suspicion of strangers who threaten jobs. But I have some sympathy with the Greeks.
For years, they have been raising the issue with the EU of the number of illegal immigrants breaching their porous borders by boat, road and foot. For years, that have explained they have not had the resources to monitor the situation properly, that Turkey turns a blind eye and waves, the mainly young men, through. Economic refugees from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and beyond, sent out by their families to forage the riches of the West and send home the spoils. Young men, with no papers, no documentation: forced often, like the North Africans swarming into southern Italy, to make dangerous and expensive journeys only to find no welcome.
It is estimated that 80 per cent of all illegal immigration enters the EU via Greece. For many migrants that is where they stay. Greece is being urged to detain them, deal with them, but how can such a small country in such dire economic straits be the EU’s border control?
Of course, like the bands of illegal migrants that huddle at the unofficial job centres of city street corners in any country in Europe some will be used for daily cheap labour in fields and factories. No questions asked. All over Europe heavy manual work from construction to cultivation has been reliant on such cheap labour, but times have changed. Austerity and auditing are reducing the opportunity. Without work, no legal right of abode (unless they can claim refugee or asylum status) this underworld of desperate workers are forced to beg, steal or move on to survive.
But before we condemn the Greeks, we should ask what the US, Russia or China would do? I think we know that answer.
