Trapped in No Man’s Land

While Europe reels, thousands of refugees have nowhere to go.

Around midnight on March 13, a young Syrian man named Abdo stepped into Tent No. 1 of the refugee camp of Idomeni, in northern Greece, and asked the men inside to gather around. Scores of asylum seekers had been living in that tent for about three weeks, mostly packed into tight rows of bunk beds, some sleeping on the wooden floor. The rain had been pouring down for days. Most of the camp’s 12,000 inhabitants–nearly all of them Syrians, Iraqis or Afghans–had been huddling in their shelters atop the mud. Inside the tent, the air was musty with the smell of bodies and wet blankets as Abdo arrived to make his pitch.

According to several of the migrants who listened to him in the darkness, his words were painful to hear. Abdo said there was practically no chance they would be allowed to cross the border and continue into Western Europe, the path that more than a million asylum seekers had used to reach Germany last year, going from Turkey to Greece and up through the Balkans. From Macedonia and Serbia to Hungary and Austria, the countries along their way had closed their borders to transiting migrants. Worse, the E.U. was close to clinching a deal with Turkey that could leave them stranded in Greece.

Most of the migrants had heard rumors of the deal being negotiated in Brussels.

Greece, their gateway into the European Union, will become a virtual penal colony for asylum seekers under the terms of the deal, which E.U. leaders finalized on March 18. In Turkey, more than 2 million Syrian refugees will remain stuck with little access to decent jobs or education. And in the process, many of the E.U.’s founding principles–such as the free movement of people, the offer of sanctuary to the persecuted, and the commitment to compromise and consensus among the E.U.’s 28 member states–will have to be suspended. “The Brussels deal doesn’t solve the problem with refugees,” says Ioannidis Eleftherios, the mayor of the northern Greek town of Kozani, who has aided the construction of shelters in the area. “It just allows some countries to shut their doors and leave the problem for their neighbors. Its basic idea is, Not in my backyard.”

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