The Other Greek Crisis : The New Yorker
►http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/09/afghan-asylum-seekers-in-greece.html
Mohammadi Younus grew up in Ghazni Province, in the east of Afghanistan, and studied medicine in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. He had “a problem with the Taliban… a political problem” during the dark days of their rule, and he landed in jail. He decided to leave the country and crossed into Iran.
He bought a fake passport for a little more than two thousand dollars and made it to Turkey. He registered there as a refugee with the United Nations and chose Greece as his next destination because he had learned the Hippocratic oath, and Hippocrates was Greek. In 2004, he applied for asylum and was accepted, probably because of his medical education.
It was a rare achievement. That year, he estimates, about six thousand migrants applied for asylum in Greece; he was one of eleven who were accepted. Now there are about twenty-five thousand undocumented Afghans crowded into the country; the backlog of asylum applications has reached sixty thousand. Younus tries to aid the more recent arrivals from back home. He directs the Afghan Refugees and Migrants Community Organization from a modest office off Omonoia Square, in Athens. As he put it succinctly one recent afternoon, “Asylum doesn’t work.”
Not for Greece, at least. The country has been saddled not only with unmanageable debts, austerity budgets, and German condescension but also with the frontline burdens of a broken European Union asylum and migration regime that combines high ideals with deep denial.