Sarah Griffith, founder of local charity Bridge2, has returned recently from Samos, one of the three main ‘hot spot’ refugee camps in Greece.
With tears in her eyes, she described some of the horrors that people seeking asylum were living through.
‘They are given minimal food, it comes in boxes the size of a side-dish from a takeaway, and more often than not it is completely inedible.
‘You wouldn’t even give it to your dog,’ she said.
The food is either hard because it is under-cooked, or has turned to mush because it has been so over-cooked.
A video of one of the sandwiches went viral online because it was crawling with maggots.
‘And that’s not just a one-off,’ she said. ‘This is the whole delivery that comes from the military.’
As a caterer herself, Ms Griffith would take on cooking responsibilities happily, but the authorities there will not let her, or any of the other non-governmental organisations.
‘The camp commanders will not listen, there is a complete lack of willingness to do anything to improve the condition of the camps for these people – from the commanders, to the military, to the United Nations Refugee Agency, to the UK government,’ she said.
‘And the refugees are so frightened of the authorities that they will not complain, they just take it – they’re too afraid that they will be hit or taken away or ignored entirely.
‘But that’s what I’m there for. These are just people. They are people like you and me – and they are being treated and cared for less than animals.’
She said it went further than being insulting to them, it was de-humanising.
‘One man was filming the slop they were served for lunch one day to send to me as evidence and was caught and taken off by the police.’
And their living conditions are not much better than the food they are given, she said, explaining how when it rains the mud slides down the mountain into the camp, bringing with it faeces because there are not enough toilets for people to use.
'Refugees are being treated worse than animals'
SEEING at first-hand the refugee crisis in Greece, local aid worker Sarah Griffith is determined to do what she can to improve the situation.
She was appalled at the condition of the refugee camps and the treatment of the people in them when she was based in one of the ‘hot spot’ camps, Samos.
‘These are just people, who are looking for a better life but are being held on these little islands in Greece and are being treated worse than animals – it’s totally disgusting, even de-humanising,’ she said.
‘These camps should not even exist, and there is a real lack of willingness by anyone to improve the situation.’
Working with other non-governmental organisations to support the refugees with clothes, shelter and hygiene packs as much as possible, she has witnessed a number of illegal activities.
‘But they [the Greek authorities] just keep getting away with it,’ she said.
‘The camps should be a bouncing-point, where refugees wait for a couple of days while their papers are being processed before being allowed to move on elsewhere, but they’re now holding them there. The processing is also incredibly inefficient.
‘They’re doing illegal push-backs where they put people who have already landed on the island on life rafts and push them back towards Turkey, and there’s a group of boys in a prison cell with no windows who get randomly beaten up by officers – and they’ve been there since 28 February,’ she said.
In an effort to put a stop to all of this, Ms Griffith and a couple of other volunteers are paying for an independent lawyer to interfere and push things through the typically very slow legal system in Greece.
She is also collecting evidence of out-of-date and mouldy food that enters the camp to chase down that issue so the refugees can eat properly.
But the big hitter is a series of letters to the Home Office in the UK to highlight the reality of the crisis and demand to see a paper trail of the money being pumped into Greece by the UN because she believes it has not gone where it should.
‘If I could I would sit on the doorstep of Priti Patel [the UK’s Home Secretary] until she faces the reality of her actions, and goes to Brussels to see the European Commission,’ she said.
‘But Covid is not making that possible. We just need transparency, and not even the EU is asking for transparency.’
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