“We were expecting protection from this country, were not expecting from the Greek police and Greek army to behave like this.”
The respondent was pushed back from Greece to Turkey 15 times. The following testimony documents what happened on his second and his last push back.
The second push back happened around the end of November, beginning of December 2017. He was with 35-40 people when they were intercepted by the police and sent back to Turkey. There were Pakistani people, Syrians and Kurdish people. The police were dressed in ‘normal police clothes’ and had one car and one van. They were putting people into the van and then they drove them around for a few hours before it was dark, and pushed them back to Turkey. They did not take them to a police station. At the border, there were people wearing military clothes. Their clothes were green in color. He could see their faces like the normal police.
The respondent stated that when anyone tried to talk to them about their families, or about seeking asylum, they were told to stay silent. He stated that they ‘did not want to listen or hear anything from us. They did not care’. He said that they were all speaking in Greek. He says that the military guards were helping with the push back, one of them was driving a boat and the other was pushing the boat. He claims that each time he was pushed back, it was from a different point.
The respondent stated that on the 15th time he was pushed back, he was brought to a ‘detention center’. They were about 100km from Thessaloniki when their car broke down. As they attempted to fix the car, they were caught by the police. He claims he was caught at Komotini. The police brought them to a police station where they took his fingerprints. ‘Not the Dublin one, not the Eurodac ones, but the normal one- with the color, the ink’. Then, they were taken to a village in the Turkish-Bulgarian-Greek border. It was called ‘flakkoo’ or ‘fleekko’. Here, there was a big jail. They stayed here for 8 days. After, they were taken to a closed camp, ‘a detention camp’. They were told they would stay in the camp until they gave fingerprints. After 21 days, they gave fingerprints and were allowed to leave. Before leaving, they were given a Kharti, a police note.
The respondent noted that during his second push back, he was beaten by the Greek police. During each push back, he also was made to strip naked in front of everyone during the search. He claims that the experience was extremely negative for him ‘we were expecting protection from this country, were not expecting from the Greek police and Greek army to behave like this’.