U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts was in Greece on a fact finding mission, accompanied by New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen.
The trip focused largely on economic issues and the Syrian refugee crisis. Warren spoke of the despair she witnessed first hand on the shores of Greece.
The bottom of the rafts that refugees use to travel from Turkey to Greece are “paper thin.” The life preservers are children’s pool floaties. There are areas where children are being held alone, without their parents, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts told The Boston Globe.
“Think about what it means to live in a world where parents would send young children off on their own because they were [living in an area]regarded as so dangerous,” Warren said.
“The desperation of people fleeing Syria is something you can touch,” she said. “Everything you read about the number of people trying to get out of Syria, who are trying to make it to a place of safety, changes when you see them in person.”
During the trip to Ukraine, Greece, and Germany, the senators visited the Greek island of Lesvos, where they held meetings with Greek and United Nations officials on the shoreline where refugees first arrive from neighboring Turkey.
Warren said refugees were told by traffickers that if they encounter the Greek Coast Guard, they should cut the bottom of the raft with a knife so they begin to sink and the Coast Guard is forced to rescue them.
“Traffickers are getting paid outlandish sums of money to put people in those boats,” Shaheen said. “It’s such a human tragedy, we need to look at what we can do.”
“We met civil engineers, we met PhDs. We met people who in any ordinary time could build a strong future for themselves and for their country. But they have no opportunities in Syria,” Warren said. “We are all deeply concerned about security issues and the importance of vetting people. It’s clear that good procedures are not yet in place. But it’s also clear that there are many people here who could benefit Europe, the United States.”
In addition to the Syrian refugee crisis, the trip is aimed at discussions on the Greek debt crisis and eurozone economic policy. Warren, who has built her political career largely on her policies on the domestic economy, diagnosed some of the issues she sees with the European financial crisis.
“In Greece and Ukraine there are problems with corruption, weakness in the rule of law, the lack of a strong civil society, that completely undermine the economic system,” she said. “I taught commercial law for many years and I understand, it’s not possible to build a strong functional economy without rules . . . most business will follow.
“But instead much of the economy in Greece is run by oligarchs. In Ukraine, 50 percent of the economy is black market now,” she added. “Reforms are urgently needed.”
The problems are compounded, in her view, by the austerity measures being pushed by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Those measures, she said, “provoke political backlash, making it much harder for the leaders in either country to develop the kind of countermeasures to corruption that they need to develop.”
“My message to the officials in Greece, to the government of Ukraine, is to focus on transparency, of ridding the country of official corruption,” she said. “But my message in Germany was not to undermine those goals by insisting on unrealistic austerity measures that will ultimately make it much more difficult for either country to grow.”
