Why Not Just Make Them Walk the Plank?

The rightwing government currently in power in Greece is testing a new solution to unwanted refugees cluttering up its beautiful islands - haul them back out to sea.

The Greek government has secretly expelled more than 1,000 refugees from Europe’s borders in recent months, sailing many of them to the edge of Greek territorial waters and then abandoning them in inflatable and sometimes overburdened life rafts. 

Since March, at least 1,072 asylum seekers have been dropped at sea by Greek officials in at least 31 separate expulsions, according to an analysis of evidence by The New York Times from three independent watchdogs, two academic researchers and the Turkish Coast Guard. The Times interviewed survivors from five of those episodes and reviewed photographic or video evidence from all 31. 

“It was very inhumane,” said Najma al-Khatib, a 50-year-old Syrian teacher, who says masked Greek officials took her and 22 others, including two babies, under cover of darkness from a detention center on the island of Rhodes on July 26 and abandoned them in a rudderless, motorless life raft before they were rescued by the Turkish Coast Guard.

Since 2015, European countries like Greece and Italy have mainly relied on proxies, like the Turkish and Libyan governments, to head off maritime migration. What is different now is that the Greek government is increasingly taking matters into its own hands, watchdog groups and researchers say. 

For example, migrants have been forced onto sometimes leaky life rafts and left to drift at the border between Turkish and Greek waters, while others have been left to drift in their own boats after Greek officials disabled their engines.

This sounds monstrous but it's the sort of thing that some have predicted may become commonplace once climate breakdown really kicks in, perhaps over the course of this decade.  Gwynne Dyer, in his book "Climate Wars," writes of Pentagon planners tossing around ideas to prevent mass migration out of Central America seeking refuge in the United States.  Some of the technology under review is pretty gruesome such as automatic (robotic) free fire buffer zones.