Word: greekness
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...Pulled aboard the coast-guard vessel one by one, each man looks around, eyes wide with fear, shivering from the cold. One of the Greek sailors, who wears plastic gloves and a headlamp, speaks to the men in broken English. "Where you from?" he asks. Eventually, one softly responds. "Afghanistan," he says, and the others repeat the word. None have identity documents. It's past 1 a.m., and the coast-guard captain estimates the raft left the Turkish coast four hours earlier. The men have rowed more than halfway across the strait, a few hundred yards into Greek territorial waters...
...gaping new hole has opened in the border between Europe and poorer, war-torn corners of Asia and the Middle East. As growing numbers of people flee Iraq, Afghanistan and the Caucasus, human traffickers have begun using the route from the southwest coast of Turkey to several eastern Greek islands as a back door to European territory, adding it to more familiar passages from North Africa to Sicily, Lampedusa, Malta and the Canary Islands. The number of illegal immigrants arriving in Greece has surged over the past year. Interior Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos estimates that 150,000 of them will...
...narrows to just three miles, traffickers zip immigrants across by Jet Ski. But the usual form of transport is a humble dinghy or decrepit motorboat crammed past capacity, and destined to be abandoned after the crossing - if the boat and its passengers make it. In October, in separate incidents, Greek and Turkish authorities recovered 18 bodies; the E.U. estimates that 3,000 or more people die annually attempting to slip into Europe by sea. Before setting out on the patrol I accompanied, one of the Greek sailors shakes his head and sums up the situation in a single word: "Chaos...
...wind up in the state-run detention center located on a dusty hilltop two miles from Mytilene harbor. Conditions at the facility, a cream-colored converted warehouse, have human-rights advocates concerned. They say detainees don't always get proper medical care and that the warehouse is unhygienic, though Greek authorities claim to have improved the center recently, adding more bathrooms and introducing rules that allow for greater use of the outdoor area. Construction is also under way on several new centers to try to ease the burden. Still, Giorgos Karamalis, the head of the government's Civil Protection operations...
...illegal immigrants - another source of concern for refugee advocates and human-rights groups. Last year fewer than 1% of those who applied received asylee status, far below the rate in Germany (18%), Italy (11%) or even Spain (4%). Giorgos Karagiannis, country director for aid group Doctors Without Borders, says Greek authorities should be doing more. "Ours is not a political argument. It's practical and medical," he says. "Let's at least meet the minimum standards. We do it for natural disasters. It's not easy, but it's possible...