Under heavily guarded escort, including riot police and helicopters, roughly 200 migrants were loaded on boats and shipped back to Turkey on Monday, marking the start of a contentious EU-Turkey agreement that critics have said reduces human suffering to a mere bargaining device.
“A deeply shameful day for the EU,” was how humanitarian organization Global Justice Now described the moment.
Three boats made the journey across the Aegean Sea to the Turkish port of Dikili. Two boats, carrying 131 mainly Pakistani migrants, departed from Lesbos while a third brought 66 people, most of whom are Afghanis, from the nearby island of Chios.
And while officials emphasized that the all individuals “left voluntarily,” the migrants were escorted by mask-wearing officials from the EU border agency Frontex while police helicopters buzzed overhead.
Ninety percent of the 2,800 detainees being held at the Moria detention camp in Lesbos have applied for asylum. Reporting from Lesbos, reporter Andrew Connelly wrote on Monday that it “seems far from certain that all migrants deported from Lesbos today were aware of their rights or understood the asylum process in Greece.”
Volunteers with refugee rights groups also questioned how much information or choice the first forced deportees were given.
“These people risked their lives to get here. Were they given the right information? Did they know their rights?” Steffi De Pous, a Dutch volunteer, told the Guardian adding that many volunteers were going to Moria with megaphones to “let them know what their rights are so that they are not bullied into this process.”
“This is the bargaining and bartering of human bodies—it’s treating humans as goods,” added Baran Doğan, a refugee rights campaigner from Izmir, Turkey.
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