Police have discharged fire extinguishers at crowds of migrants on the Greek island of Kos, as authorities struggle to deal with what the UN says is a 750% year-on-year increase in migrant arrivals to the country.
Dramatic pictures showed migrants fleeing clouds of vapour emitted by the extinguishers on Tuesday, after police tried to disperse a group of recent arrivals to Kos who were protesting about the length of time it was taking to process their paperwork.
The eastern Greek islands are now the main point of entry for migrants seeking to reach Europe by boat, with 124,000 arrivals so far this year. The number has outstripped the level in Italy, traditionally the principal gateway for maritime migrants, but which has seen 20,000 fewer than Greece in 2015.
Cash-strapped Greece is struggling to deal with the unprecedented influx, the majority of whom are from Syria and Afghanistan, and large parts of the humanitarian response have been carried out by volunteers rather than the government. Last week, the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, said: “The immigrant flow to Greece is beyond what our state infrastructure can handle.”
The chaos has led to heightened tensions on the islands for several months, with Tuesday’s incident the latest in a series of standoffs between migrants and the authorities. Earlier in the summer, the Greek army was forced to keep order and provide extra supplies at a migrant camp on the island of Lesbos, where the civilian authorities had run out of food to feed the residents.
