Time
January 7, 2011
Even with guards patrolling the Greek-Turkish land border, Nadir Abdullaweh says no one stopped him when he walked in the dead of night to the Greek border village of Nea Vyssa. Abdullaweh, 37, who's from Oran in northwestern Algeria, says the police didn't catch up to him until dawn, when he and about 10 other migrants were walking along the train tracks on the outskirts of the village. "It did not seem so hard to get here," he told TIME in November, after his release from the Fylakio detention center near the border. "It seemed like a path into Europe that everyone knew."
Now Greece's Public Order Minister Christos Papoutsis wants to block that path with a border fence. Over 128,000 undocumented migrants crossed into Greece last year, more than 40,000 of them along the land border with Turkey, he said as he announced the plan in an interview with the Athens News Agency on Jan. 1. Many crossed along an 8-mile stretch that diverges from the Evros River, which marks most of the Greek-Turkish border. And that's where Papoutsis would like to see the fence, which is made of reinforced barbed wire and concrete. Greece, he said, can no longer manage the flow of illegal migrants into the country, even with the help of Frontex, the E.U. border-patrol agency that sent an emergency force there in November. The government said on Wednesday it also wants to add new detention centers in the area — the old ones are so full that human-rights groups have criticized the conditions as inhumane and deplorable. "Greek society has reached its limits in taking in illegal immigrants," he told the Athens News Agency. "Greece can't take it anymore."
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