19-07-2025
Inside Crete's migration crisis manufactured by Libyan warlord
He walks over, a tall, rangy figure with a polite smile, to ask for an explanation.
Having fled the war in South Sudan, 25-year-old Ras has been detained for the past week inside an abandoned exhibition centre on the Greek holiday island of Crete.
The hall is hot and crammed with about 450 men, an odour of sweat and urine emanating from the row of portable lavatories lined against one wall.
'Look around,' he says. 'It's a bad place. Do you know why we are still here?'
While every one of the migrants who lie on foam mattresses or scraps of cardboard will have arrived on a unique path, there is one unifying reason for their current predicament.
Without their knowledge, they have become pawns, moved across the Mediterranean by smuggling gangs under the control of Gen Khalifa Haftar, the Libyan warlord.
His aim is twofold: to extort money from the European Union and tilt the balance of power in a grand geopolitical struggle over oil-and-gas exploration in the sea's depths.
From July 1 to 13, 2,619 migrants landed on Crete, a surge far beyond anything previously experienced on the idyll beloved by British tourists.
Almost all of them – a mixture of Egyptian, Sudanese, Bangladeshi and Pakistani citizens – departed from the eastern coast of Libya, where smuggling gangs operate under Haftar's influence.
'Human-trafficking mafia'
'It was hell there,' says Rabi, a 22-year-old Bangladeshi man held in a disused warehouse on the outskirts of the northern city of Rethimno, one of several informal reception centres hurriedly set up across the holiday island.
'Every moment we were in Libya, our lives were at risk because of the human-trafficking mafia,' he says.
The small, overloaded dinghy he was put on ten days ago by the traffickers ran out of fuel amid rough seas.
Luckily, the men were rescued by another vessel and carried to port in Crete.
But his arrival, along with thousands of others, has ignited a political firestorm in Greece and singed the international system of asylum that has been in place, despite growing pressure, since the end of the Second World War.
On July 11, the Greek government took the unprecedented step of suspending the right to asylum for all migrants who cross the sea from North Africa.
The move was fiercely resisted by the country's Left-wing politicians and sparked condemnation from the UN Refugee Agency as well as Europe's leading human rights official.
But it was needed to counter an 'invasion', said Thanos Plevris, the new migration minister in Greece 's centre-Right government.
Tourism fears
Local officials fear the effect on the tourism industry – remembering the scene when a migrant boat landed on a beach in southern Agia Galini, scattering swimmers and sunbathers. Or the night when protesters fired flares at migrant tents set up on a football field in Rethimno, setting several ablaze.
While the suspension is scheduled to last three months, Mr Plevris told The Telegraph it would continue 'as long as it is needed when we have a large influx of migrants.'
Anyone who arrives after July 11 must either volunteer for deportation or face up to five years in prison – and that holds the same for a refugee from a war zone as an economic migrant whose only threat back home is the grind of poverty.
International law forbids the maltreatment of asylum seekers and 'refoulement' into life-threatening situations.
But the 1951 UN convention on refugees does not 'take into account the large migratory flows that exist' today, Mr Plevris said, nor the fact that many economic migrants pose as refugees to gain access to Europe's labour market.
In a way, Ras is one of the lucky ones. Like everyone in the Agia Convention Centre, which still contains posters advertising 'Alternate Activities' tourists can enjoy on Crete, he arrived before July 11. Coming from South Sudan, he has a chance of gaining asylum and starting life anew in Europe.
Around 100 migrants per day are taken by ferry to Athens, where they can begin the formal asylum process. The government has refused to use the navy to move more, and local ferry operators will not take large numbers during tourist season, says Eleni Zervoudakis, deputy mayor of the city of Chania, where the Agia centre is located.
'That means many are left waiting for days in these centres,' she adds. 'We could manage 300, but ten times that amount is impossible'.
On a walk around the Agia centre, The Telegraph was allowed to take pictures but forbidden from interviewing the migrants. Many held up their wrists imploringly, tapping a wristband with the number indicating when they had arrived.
In one corner of the room, a man washed himself down with a hose. In another, the room's only female occupant, a hijab-wearing mother-of-two, had set up a corner shelter using two covered guardrails.
'She asked for that,' said a coastguard official as he pointed to the makeshift barriers, 'for her own safety.' Tempers can flare in the hall: fights have broken out over pillows and bars of soap, he added. 'There are too many men.'
Besides their own, deep-rooted desire for a better life, the reason these men are here stems from a battle over marine exploration rights between Turkey and Greece.
In June, Athens offered a set of licences to drill for oil and gas reserves off the coast of Crete, in what is internationally recognised as its own exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
But the move sparked a backlash from the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, which claims the waters as its own. For years, without any international backing, Ankara has claimed a stretch of water running from its coast past Crete to the eastern flank of Libya.
But Mr Erdogan's cunning management of Libya's civil war has earned his position the backing of both Libya's official government in Tripoli and its reviled enemy, Gen Haftar's parallel administration in Benghazi.
In 2019, Mr Erdogan came to the rescue of the government in Tripoli, providing them with drones and other weaponry to defeat the forces of Gen Haftar, who turned back from the capital and retreated east, where they now hold sway over the human-trafficking gangs that operate out of the port city of Tobruk.
But the Turkish president then also 'seduced' the Haftar family, providing them with military supplies and training, says Jalel Harchaoui, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute.
Shift from Italy to Greece
The fruits of Mr Erdogan's efforts became clear on June 19 and 20 when, one after the other, Libya's two parallel administrations issued statements joining Turkey's condemnation of the Greek sea-mining plans. And they became clearer still when, in the ensuing days, boat after boat set sail from Haftar-controlled Libya to Crete, loaded with the men who now lie sweltering in the Agia Convention Centre.
'General Haftar is a terrorist,' curses Ms Zervoudakis, who blames him for striking a deal with Turkey to organise the sudden increase. 'He controls everything.'
'You can like Turkey, or dislike it,' says Mr Harchaoui, 'but it is very logical, and it is far, far better at foreign policy than the Europeans.' Greece, in particular, has been caught napping.
In 2023, soon after Gen Haftar opened up Libya's north-eastern coast to the human traffickers who had already ran from the west, Italy faced a surge of arrivals. Giorgia Meloni, the country's prime minister, met with Gen Haftar to discuss the flows, which then shifted to Greece.
In 2023, Crete had 800 arrivals. This year, the figure is more than 10,000.
Belated efforts by Athens to negotiate with Gen Haftar ended acrimoniously on July 6, when a European delegation, including the Greek interior minister, was deported on a flight out of Benghazi.
'Italy did its homework, but Greece didn't,' says Mr Harchaoui. 'In other words, [Greece did not go] to Haftar and say, amongst gangsters, what kind of gifts can I give you?'
Back in Crete's southern coastal town of Agia Galini, Constantinos Katzanakis looks out over the tables of Alikes Taverna at the sparkling waters of the harbour below.
Over the past weeks, the restaurateur has seen the orange coastguard ships bring back load upon load of migrants. Mr Katzanakis is sympathetic to their plight. The West, with all its 'gold and diesel', should help them more in their own countries.
But if they keep coming at this rate, 'there will be nothing left of the Cretan people,' he says, dusting his hands for emphasis.
This weekend, the wind is due to change. That could herald a fresh surge of migrant crossings, as favourable conditions often do.
Athens is hoping that its threat of years-long imprisonment for any arrival stops the boats, with migrants dissuaded from stepping on board. But it is in a game of chicken with a warlord who treats the men he transfers across the sea like so many carcasses, good for nothing but making him richer.
