What's Going On With the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Greece?
These refugees will be in the midst of dangerous journeys across the ocean, having fled their homes. Some come to the shores of Greece for a shot at a better life, but most come simply to survive.
One Border Falls, Another Closes
Last week, Idlib—one of the last rebel strongholds in Syria—began to crumble as Russian-backed airstrikes eviscerated its infrastructure. Surviving residents fled in huge numbers to the neighboring nation, Turkey.
Turkey has been shouldering the vast majority of the world's refugees since the worldwide crisis coalesced in the 2010s, and they currently host over three million refugees. Following Idlib's fall, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared that Turkey's borders were officially open because his nation could no longer handle the flows of refugees rushing out of Idlib.
This action was in violation of a 2016 Turkey-EU deal, in which the EU promised $6 billion to Turkey in exchange for their closed borders (though Turkey has only received roughly $3.2 million, which is perhaps the cause of Erdoğan's violation).
Many of Turkey's migrant population, aided or pushed by Turkish police, immediately attempted to flee Turkey for Greece, embarking on a journey across the Aegean Sea. Across the nation, Greek citizens and law enforcement officials have reacted violently, greeting refugees with tear gas, water cannons, and brutal attacks. Millions of refugees are now in prison-like camps on Greece's borders; others are still at sea, blocked by government ships on both sides.
Lesvos: A Microcosm of a Macro-Disaster
The island of Lesvos has seen a particularly harsh fallout from these recent events. Since the news from Turkey broke, local islanders have launched huge protests, establishing roadblocks and patrols to prevent migrants from moving from the sea into the camps.
In February, seven Lesvos inhabitants were arrested for planning violent attacks on migrants; following Turkey's announcement, journalists and aid volunteers have been injured by locals, and warehouses containing supplies and donations have been burned. Many of the organizations providing life-saving resources to refugees have been forced to shut down, and locals have been forcing boats to turn away from the island, resulting in the death of at least one child.
A far-right neo-Nazi party known as the Golden Dawn, which may be gaining prominence on the island, may be behind some of these actions.
Crumbling Patience: Lesvos Takes Fallout from the Syrian War
Lesvos's inhabitants were once praised for the strength of their solidarity. The island is vast and full of empty stretches of land, and the makeshift camps only take up a tiny fraction of its dry mountainous areas; but lately, the influx of migrants from Turkey and the threat of new government-built migrant centers have catalyzed a new wave of xenophobic violence.
The horrors of Lesvos's one major holding camp—Moria—are difficult to describe. The camp, designed to hold 3,000, currently holds over 20,000 refugees. Many languish there even though they have family and job prospects in the EU, held in limbo and exposed to disease and traumatizing violence, both of which run rampant in the camps.
In light of the recent riots, North Aegean governor Kostas Moutzouris has called for the declaration of a national emergency. However, politicians and human rights organizations have constantly called for an end to the misery on Lesvos since the crisis began five years ago.
Greeka.com
Of course, all these events are tragic consequences of much bigger political movements. The EU's failure to accept more refugees—and its failure to support the people living in its nation's camps—have burdened the island with far more refugees than it can handle. "The Lesbos community has been abandoned by its own government for almost five years to deal with the consequences of a failed reception system. Like the refugee community, it is tired," said Sophie McCann, a Doctors Without Borders advocacy advisor.
Al Jazeera
In turn, the proliferation of refugees is the result of a complex humanitarian disaster, one that often has unfortunate consequences. "Refugees are not a bargaining chip to be played with at the whims of political leaders," said EuroMed Rights President Wadir Al-Asmar. "Europeans cannot look away from what might become one of the worst humanitarian disasters the war in Syria has brought on its people. Respecting international humanitarian law as well as the human right to protection and refuge remain the sole possible answer in the face of such indiscriminate violence."
The Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, has killed 500,000 people, coming out to nearly 1 in 10 Syrians. The conflict was caused by many complex forces—including climate change, which led to a drought that resulted in congestion and economic stagnation in Syria's inner cities.
Big Data and Our Elections
That said, there is no hard evidence of collusion, but rather a string of awkward encounters by Trump's largely inexperienced, and frankly stupid, staff. The meat of Russia's "interference" came in the form of social media bots, fake accounts that would automatically repost sensationalist headlines to drum up support for Trump. These accounts are pretty easy to spot however, as they don't even come close to passing a turing test.
Blaming Russia is too easy
Still, the creation of Russia's bot army had to be predicated on some form of information, and many have accused Putin's government of tracking users' Facebook data in an attempt to gain a psychological understanding of the average American voter. This is where Aleksandr Kogan comes into play. Kogan sold the data of some 87 million Facebook users (collected via a quiz app) to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm hired by the Trump campaign. Cambridge Analytica's goal was to create psychographic voting profiles. While there's no definitive connection between Cambridge Analytica and Russia, the precedent set by CA and their illegal exploitation of Facebook is a frightening one. If a private company is collecting data on citizens, it's a pretty safe bet that governments around the world are doing the same. While the Democratic Party's Russophobia is definitely a reaction to losing in 2016 more than anything else, but it accidentally shed light on an important issue: our data isn't safe, and with recent improvements AI and voice recognition software, we'll soon have the technology to not only create comprehensive individual psych profiles, but to tailor campaigns to individual voters.
Obviously companies like Google and Facebook have large stores of internal data, and they've certainly been amenable to selling it, but academic researchers (like Kogan) also have large data caches. Behavioral psychologists use Facebook in studies all the time, and the academic world isn't particularly well-known for its cyber security. Even in the event that these databases aren't hacked, there's nothing to prevent a researcher from selling their findings after their study is complete. The quick fix is to let Facebook block third parties from collecting data on its users, and for its part, Facebook has done just that. They've begun blocking apps from collecting information, and have also limited the number of researchers allowed to look at data on the site. Only academics researching political elections through the lens of social media are permitted to apply for access to Facebook's database.
Cambridge Analytica
At a glance, these robust safety measures are a breath of fresh air. It isn't often that a tech company is so committed to its customers' privacy. That said, when things look too good to be true, they usually are. If Facebook continues its path to prohibition, "only Facebook will really know very much about how Facebook actually operates and how people act on Facebook," warns Dr. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen of Oxford University. Sure, measures like these could protect data from outsiders, but it would also give a private company sole proprietorship over the most comprehensive database of human behaviors and tendencies ever created. Facebook would have even more sway over our local and national elections than it already does, and would gain a monopoly over 2 billion people's personal data. Essentially, Facebook could name its price. Because of the way the Internet works, there's no way to effectively protect our Facebook data without severely compromising our freedom. And even if we were to let Zuckerberg shut everyone out of Facebook's data vaults, this doesn't prevent other websites or services from collecting information on us. It doesn't make us any safer. Our sensitive information is freely available to anyone who knows how to access it.
As technology improves, it's going to become more and more difficult to tell what is and isn't fake news–whether or not that article you just read was an advertisement for Tide or some political campaign you weren't aware of. For better or worse, we've set out to map the entire spectrum of human behaviors. Eventually, marketing campaigns will be so advanced, so accurate in their mapping of our desires, we may forget that we ever had the capacity to think. Somewhere, the ghost of B.F. Skinner smiling.
Matt Clibanoff is a writer and editor based in New York City who covers music, politics, sports and pop culture. His editorial work can be found in Inked Magazine, Popdust, The Liberty Project, and All Things Go. His fiction has been published in Forth Magazine. -- Find Matt at his website and on Twitter: @mattclibanoff