2014 On September 4, 2014, the top brass of the Hellenic Coast Guard held a rare press conference at their Piraeus headquarters. Commodore Yiannis Karageorgopoulos presented a series of slides showing the Aegean and Ionian seas, plus a portion of the east Mediterranean south of Crete, which comprise the Coast Guard’s vast jurisdiction. Against this he flashed the number of intercepted entries of migrants seeking refugee status — 1,627 in 2012, followed by 12,156 the following year. Arrivals in 2014 suggested that Greece was on track for 31,000 arrivals. This was an underestimation. The annual total that year would almost quadruple, to 43,938. The Coast Guard’s concerns were very clear. Half of all the arrivals were Syrians. A third were Afghans. The Arab Spring that had resulted in regime change in Tunisia and Egypt and plunged Syria into catastrophe three years earlier was compounding the effects of America’s regime change efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which created lengthy insurgencies, to produce unprecedented waves of refugees, and these crises were growing worse. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which emerged in Iraq’s insurgency, had that summer taken control of Mosul, was slaughtering Yazidi in northern Iraq, and was marching across Syria. NATO’s destruction of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya had led to civil war there, further inflaming regional instability. The Greek authorities knew that this spontaneous population of asylum-seekers had created a human trafficking industry in Turkey, just a few miles from Greece’s easternmost Aegean islands. The vast majority of Coast Guard interceptions had taken place in the narrow straits between the Anatolian mainland and the Greek islands of Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Kos, and Leros. The smugglers were astute. They had launched refugees on inflatable dinghies with the following instructions: “When a Greek patrol boat appears, let them approach and THEN make a hole in one of the air tubes with the knife… Don’t be afraid. Greeks will rescue you. They cannot repatriate you back to the Turkish mainland.” (This note was found by the Coast Guard in the possession of asylum-seekers, and it is corroborated by my own interviews with refugees.) This was true. International maritime law obliges any sailor to rescue anyone who is shipwrecked, and the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees prevents national authorities from repatriating asylum-seekers to areas where they may be in danger — a hazard accurately known as refoulment. The fact that Turkish smugglers were taking commercial advantage of humanitarian law struck the Greeks as cynical, but what alarmed them were changes in trafficking methods. “Because of the geographical configuration of the east Aegean islands and their proximity to Turkish coastlines,” Karageorgopoulos said, “facilitators may no longer be needed and it is the migrants themselves who navigate the small boats.” Earlier that year I had travelled to Kos to report on this shift in tactics. Two boatyards were full of court-confiscated speedboats that had come from Turkey, filled with refugees. Some of their outboard engines had bullet holes — even those whose owners had fitted them with additional fiberglass casings. “Last year we were facing a kind of invasion of very fast boats with a smuggler on board, and we needed to deploy our patrol boats to tackle this situation, and make some hot pursuits as well,” the harbor master Ioannis Mispinas explained to me. The loss of these vessels had raised smugglers’ costs and led to lengthy imprisonments of up to twenty-five years. 2014 was the year in which smugglers realized that they could reduce their legal risk and costs by setting up production warehouses of two-tube rubber dinghies with plywood floors and small outboard engines assembled in Turkey. This worked. The proportion of arrested facilitators to refugees went down over two years, from 1.2% to 0.8%. More importantly, it meant an inexhaustible supply of boats and an explosion of turnover, and it was beginning to overwhelm the Greeks. The authorities were looking at the numbers and had become genuinely concerned about their ability to police their borders. But asylum law is concerned with individuals, not masses, and balancing national security with humanitarian values was now a challenge. I remember meeting a Syrian man as he huddled with his children on the harbor wharf on Kos, having just been picked up by the Coast Guard. “I want safety,” Hany Asef told me. “I am coming from death — I am and my family — coming from death. I want any safety.” Asef’s children had seen Aleppo reduced to rubble. More than once, their parents said, men’s throats had been cut before their eyes. The Asefs were not rich. Hany worked in the water utility. His wife, Bara’a, was a teacher. They had spent all their savings — $3,500 dollars — on this crossing. It is precisely for people like them that the Geneva Convention was drafted. How was Greece to reconcile its obligations towards individuals under the Geneva Convention with its obligation to safeguard its borders, which are also the European Union’s external borders? 
2015 If 2014 had troubled the Greeks, 2015 was apocalyptic. The September 2014 press conference had been held out of alarm at more than 17,000 refugee arrivals so far that year. At another press conference in September 2015, it was revealed that January-to-August arrivals numbered over 230,000. Showing aerial photographs of dinghies setting out from Turkey, Deputy Merchant Marine minister Christos Zois told journalists, “Here you see a dozen craft setting sail within thirty or sixty minutes of each other — in other words, almost simultaneously. I’m not allowed to use the phrase ‘sea landing,’ because it’s not one in the strict sense. But these pictures show that we are talking about an organized industry that takes advantage of human pain and human need. And it’s up to the Hellenic Coast Guard to respond in real time.” The Hellenic Coast Guard wasn’t by then responding in real time. Only fifty thousand asylum-seekers had punctured their boats to be plucked from the sea. Many had
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