Long day's journey into night

Yet presently we are slightly disturbed. Disturbed, and ambivalent about what to do next. The source of this irritability is a new kind of a tourist frequenting this area lately. They arrive in large crowds, mostly young men but the occasional woman and child also accompany the group. They are not here for the same reasons as we are, but the darkness of the nights, the lack of human crowds, and most importantly the proximity of Lesbos attract them. They are passers-through, really, they come here just to go as soon as possible, as secretly and silently as possible, en route to a different world, to the European Union, where they hope to find prosperity, a decent job, better healthcare and a safer home. They arrive in groups of 20 to 100 people. They pay, we are told, between $1,000 and $5,000 to smugglers who bring them to these shores as well as other parts of Turkey, where EU soil is close enough to arrive in a shoddy boat with a small engine in less than half an hour. It is not as easy as it sounds, however, since the sea is usually very rough, the currents strong and the Greeks are understandably not very hospitable. Should they be spotted by the coast guard before they set foot on Greek soil, life has the potential to become very unpleasant, even more than what they have already gone through. What they go through until they reach these shores is no easy task. Smuggled out of their homeland in trucks with poor ventilation, no food or water, harsh treatment by the officials wherever and whenever they are spotted and hostility when encountered by locals, theirs is a journey through hell. My wife calls it the "Black Journey," in contrast with the ever popular "Blue Journey," cruising around the Aegean and Mediterranean shores in comfortable sailboats.

Locals not hostile

The locals in and around Assos are not actually hostile to these people. The initial fear of them gradually subsided as more and more people understood the human tragedy involved in their stories. Once referred to as the "pejmurges" locally, a made-up word combining "peshmerge," which means "warrior" in Kurdish, adding a sense of fear, anger and hostility to their presence, (suggesting a link to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) or anything illegal and unwanted) and "pejmurde," meaning "homeless" or an untidy or poorly kept property, now they simply refer to them as the "gocmenler" (immigrants). Their presence has emerged from "being seen from a distance by so and so the other day," to locals gradually leaving watermelons and bread in the areas where they are known to gather, or nodding a hello to a bunch of them carrying water to their hideout, behind the large rocks where they will take off the next night in their flimsy craft. Almost all the households of the village have some paraphernalia from inflatable boats left behind from these groups; pumps, oars, even an actual boat complete with engine. On one occasion, a group of immigrants who managed to swim back to the Turkish shore after their boat capsized -- some say the Greek coast guard sunk their boat and threw some life vests and told them to swim back to Turkish shores -- were fed by workers on a construction site for a while, given a boat and a mobile phone and sent back to Lesbos, from where they have called back to say they have arrived safely. Gradually more and more of them are seen during daylight on the rocky beaches, and more and more of them are coming.

Ali's house is the last house on the beach, right before the large rock formation. Around the corner we can see only more rocks, steep hills surrounded by acres of olive groves and one abandoned half-finished house. From his house one can see the houses of Lesbos clearly; it is only 4.5 miles, about 7.5 kilometers, a 10-minute boat ride with a good engine. It is right around this large rock where they gather before they set off to Greece, and this is where Melissa came back from half-an-hour ago, running, scared and surprised. She had not only encountered a lot of garbage, syringes and discarded medication, but a group of young men huddled and waiting silently as she was exploring around the rocks. Melissa is Ali's daughter, a Turkish-German, living in Germany with her German mother most of the year. She is a very pretty young woman, curious and profoundly interested in environmental and sociological issues. She was visibly shocked by encountering something she was not expecting to see, and though they did nothing exactly to scare her, she was scared.

Ali was obviously not happy about the presence of these people right around the corner from his house, where the nearest house was half a mile away, and with only a few houses on a beach several miles long. I felt threatened by the possibility of a similar but more unpleasant encounter involving my daughters, who were younger than Melissa. Being a surgeon, I may sometimes be more inclined to radical and severe solutions -- which are not always the best ones -- so I suggested calling the local gendarmerie and make sure that they are gotten rid of. The gendarmerie has involved themselves less and less with these immigrants recently. We heard stories that it costs about $1,000 to send each immigrant back home, whereas it cost nothing to avoid seeing them, so neither the police nor the gendarmerie acknowledged their presence as a problem, as long as they were not involved in criminal activity.

"We will call the gendarmerie and tell them to do something about these people," I said firmly. "Otherwise pretty soon all the young men from Mauritania will end up on this beach." "Mauritania," said a young soldier I gave a lift to on his way to his post the other day, "most of them are from Mauritania these days. It used to be Bangladesh and Ghana." He had no idea where Mauritania was when I asked him.

Melissa seemed more concerned about them all of a sudden. "What do you think the gendarmerie or the police will do? Will they treat them badly?" My wife said, "They will just keep coming back, anyway." My youngest started crying, "Will they put them in jail? There are babies, too." My older daughter pointed out that if and when they reach Greece, the treatment they get there may not be very welcoming, either.

Ali is an old socialist, not trusting any institution nowadays, he said we should perhaps start from the borders and see how these people manage to get in to Turkey. We should try and see who is collecting all the bribes and letting these people travel in Turkey.

It looks like we will end up meeting these guys next door over dinner, discuss the issues in Mauritania or wherever they are coming from these days, organize a committee to overthrow the present government if they have one, and head for those shores in a run-down boat with sticks and stones, if we can appoint a Che for the occasion.

Until then we will avoid letting our girls go around by themselves to explore and keep leaving watermelons and bread where they can be easily found. Also, spreading the news that the area has been infiltrated by "pejmurges" may indeed keep the crowds and construction companies at a distance.