Greek police have begun to clear Europe’s largest informal refugee camp, where thousands of people have been stranded for months.

About 400 riot police entered the camp at dawn on Tuesday to order the approximately 8,500 camp residents to leave. By sunset, around 2,000 had left voluntarily in 42 government buses for government-run camps, but thousands were still left in Idomeni overnight.

The refugee children of Idomeni: alone, far from home but clinging to hope Read more

As the day drew to an end, Katy Athersuch, a spokesperson for Médecins Sans Frontières at the camp, said: “It’s still a non-violent situation, but it doesn’t mean it’s a normal situation. It’s not like people are being asked, they’re being told. There’s a very heavy police presence, with police telling people to leave – and then bulldozers coming to push over their tents.”

Idomeni was the informal crossing point through which hundreds of thousands of refugees entered Macedonia in 2015. Refugees started camping there when the Macedonian government began shutting the border to certain nationalities last November. Once the border shut entirely in March, the site became a full-scale camp, and an emblem of Europe’s failure to manage the refugee crisis.

The Greek authorities have tried for weeks to transfer people from Idomeni to formal camps north and north-west of Thessaloniki, in former factories and warehouses. Aid workers said this constituted a seminal moment in Europe’s refugee response.

“What is happening signals the start of the establishment of medium- to long-term camps on European soil,” said Melanie Ward, associate director of policy and advocacy at the International Rescue Committee. “This poses the question: how long do we expect people – so many of whom have fled war and conflict – to be living in tents in refugee camps in Greece?”

Greece’s migration spokesman Giorgos Kyritsis said that, though rudimentary, the new camps had electricity, running water, telephones, shower and toilet facilities.

“Seven of the shelters are in industrial buildings and two are open-air tent sites,” he added. “Tents and office-style cubicles will be used for the privacy of families. Some will have air-conditioning and food will be provided.”

Many refugees, however, have been reluctant to leave because some still hope that the border will reopen. Others intend to cross with the help of smugglers; still more are frightened of being locked inside hurriedly finished government-run centres.



Under an EU agreement made last summer, the refugees are technically meant to be relocated to other countries in Europe – but so far the EU’s members have failed to live up to their promise.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Riot police stand between tents inside the Idomeni camp on Tuesday morning. Photograph: Darko Bandic/AP

Kyritsis said he expected the evacuation to last “no more than a week”. Refugees, many holed up in Idomeni since March, were eager to leave, he said.

“Most have understood the borders are not opening and realise the conditions in these shelters are going to be better,” Kyritsis told the Guardian. “They know that where they are being sent is going to be organised, that asylum requests and relocation [procedures] will be speeded up, that their papers will be renewed, that conditions will be much better.”

He said that media had been banned from entering the area to ensure the evacuation was not held up. “The citizens protection [public order] ministry felt that if cameras were in the middle it would delay people gathering their things,” he said.

The few aid workers allowed into the camp told a different story. MSF’s Athersuch said: “People are rushing into our clinic and saying: ‘Please, please, can I have some medicine?’ because they don’t know if there will be medicine in the new camps. And that’s something we don’t know either.”

Athersuch added: “One of our doctors who just came off shift said she is seeing so many blank faces. They look like people who have completely lost hope.”

The head of MSF’s mission in Greece, Loic Jaeger, argued that the evacuation constituted a failure of European solidarity. “Everyone is very excited about the evacuation – about whether it’s violent or not violent – but that’s not the point,” he said. “The point is that they should be in an apartment somewhere in Europe: there are only 8,000 of them. Why are we putting them in buses to put them in half-finished camps in Greece, when Europe has promised to relocate them?”

Elsewhere in Greece, 50,000 refugees have been stuck in limbo since March, when the countries of the Balkans closed a humanitarian corridor that had brought hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers to countries including Germany and Sweden in 2015.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police and buses seen through the wire fence on the perimeter of the Idomeni camp. Photograph: Darko Bandic/AP

Thousands are stuck in wretched conditions in detention centres on the Greek islands, and dozens are on hunger strike to protest at their treatment. “This is my seventh day on hunger strike,” said Wassim Omar, a Syrian teacher detained on the island of Chios. “We don’t want to spend our lives here.”

Some are still attempting to reach Germany with the help of smugglers. “We hear that tomorrow we will all go to camps,” Abdo Raja, a 22-year-old Syrian at Idomeni, told the Associated Press on the eve of Idomeni’s clearance. “I don’t mind, but my aim is not reach the camps but to go Germany.”

The dire humanitarian situation in Greece, coupled with the closure of the border and the threat of deportation back to Turkey, has resulted in the number of refugees arriving in Greece dwindling in recent weeks.

But a Greek appeals committee recently decreed that Turkey was not a suitable country for refugees – meaning that refugees could once again have an incentive to sail to Greece from Turkey.

Greece has spent roughly €280m (£215m) handling the refugee crisis since the start of 2015 – money the debt-stricken country, dependent on emergency bailout loans to keep afloat, has struggled to find. The European Union has reinforced coffers with just under €100m in funding in recent months.

Lack of adequate finances partly explains why Europe’s largest informal refugee camp had been allowed to remain in Idomeni for so long.

“Greek companies and the Greek railway network OSE have lost between six to seven million euros [since March],” said Kyritsis referring to the damage suffered as a result of refugees obstructing the free flow of traffic and exports because of encampment on railway lines. “The money that we have spent has come from national resources in the middle of our own crisis.”

Human rights organisations welcomed the news that asylum procedures would be expedited at the new camps. “The provision of on-site pre-registration for asylum is an important development and a good incentive for refugees to leave Idomeni,” said Panos Navrozidis, the International Rescue Committee’s country director in Greece.

“The current asylum process is inadequate and slow. Improved resources are urgently needed to provide refugees safe and legal routes to sanctuary in Europe and to reunite with family members.”

The backlog in asylum procedures meant refugees could be waiting for months until their case was even heard, he said. “This is not acceptable anywhere but particularly not in Europe. Greece must be given the support it needs to move the process along in an efficient and thorough way.”