Greece ready to deport illegal migrants

Greece said Thursday it would seek to deport
economic migrants, who had been blocked at its
border with Macedonia after Skopje clamped
down on entry, if they are not entitled to asylum.
“Those without papers, the so-called
illegal migrants, have the right to
request asylum (or) the right to
voluntary repatriation,” junior interior
minister for migration Yiannis Mouzalas
told reporters.
“If they do not request either within 30
days, they will be returned to their
countries of origin,” he said.
Athens on Wednesday mounted a police
operation to remove some 2,300 mainly
African migrants from its border with
Macedonia, where they had been blocked
for days following the neighbouring
country’s refusal to allow economic
migrants to continue their journey to
Europe.
The migrants will be temporarily housed
in a former Olympic taekwondo hall in
southern Athens until December 17,
Mouzalas said.
Other former Olympic facilities around
the capital have also been used in
rotation to house migrants since the
crisis began earlier in the year.
A day after their arrival, officials said
hundreds of migrants were already
leaving the taekwondo hall for central
Athens, hoping to come into contact with
smuggling networks and continue to
western and northern Europe.
“I have family in Denmark,” one migrant
told state television ERT outside the hall.
Asked how he planned to get there, he
replied: “I don’t know”.
Another man from Morocco said he was
heading for a hotel in central Athens as
the stadium facilities “smell bad.”
Hit by economic crisis for the past five
years, Greece has struggled to manage
the unprecedented influx of exiles —
mainly refugees from war-torn Syria.
The UN says migrant and refugee
arrivals in Europe for 2015 could top one
million by year’s end.
Greece has called for additional EU
assistance in funds and manpower to
better screen the migrants and root out
possible extremists.
At least two of the participants in last
month’s jihadist attacks in Paris came
through Greece posing as Syrian
refugees.
Greece’s efforts to repatriate migrants
have been fraught with difficulty.
Athens recently attempted to return
some 50 Pakistanis but Islamabad
accepted only 20 of them, Prime Minister
Alexis Tsipras said this week.
“We have asked Turkey to honour
readmission agreements and have asked
the same to happen with… Pakistan and
Morocco,” Tsipras said.
“Greece cannot become a warehouse of
souls for people who don’t want to stay
here,” he said.