It was still dawn on 5 January 2024 when an explosion tore through the early morning silence of Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus. A bomb shattered the windows of the small office of KISA, an organisation that supports and defends asylum seekers.

It was the first time that a civil society organisation on the small Mediterranean island was targeted with violence. While no one was injured, the offices have yet to be fully repaired and the organisation is still unable to operate normally.

“This attack didn’t come out of nowhere. For months we have been the victims of a smear campaign and have had administrative barriers placed on us that have prevented us from operating,” explains Doros Polykarpou, director of KISA. He also points the finger at the coalition government of Níkos Christodoulídis, which has sown mistrust of organisations like his, as well as at the rise of the far right.

In February 2024, 41 organisations signed a letter condemning the harassment and attacks that KISA suffered. They denounced the escalating violence against foreigners and asylum seekers, as well as the troubling silence on the part of the Cypriot government and the European Union.

“There hasn’t even been an investigation. What kind of signal are they sending by remaining silent?” asks Kondylia Gogou, a researcher at Amnesty International, one of the signatories of the letter.

European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson visited the island in January 2024. While Doros Polykarpou of KISA welcomed her visit, Amnesty International, in an email responding to questions from Equal Times, asserted that it must be followed up by action, specifically to “ensure that human rights defenders can work in complete safety”.

As for the Cypriot government, Andreas Georgiades, head of the asylum department at the Ministry of the Interior, said: “If the attack on KISA was based on xenophobic behaviour, of course we condemn it, and the police came after the explosion”.

A tense atmosphere surrounding migration

Cyprus now has the highest rate of asylum seekers in Europe, most of whom are fleeing Syria and Afghanistan, as well as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon and Bangladesh, to reach Europe in the hopes of a better life. The number of asylum applications lodged on the island peaked at 21,564 in 2022. While the number had fallen to 10,585 by 2023, 5 per cent of the island’s population that same year were asylum seekers, the highest portion in Europe.

In the face of this influx, xenophobic violence has increased, fuelled by the rise of the far right, whose ELAM party has just elected an MEP for the first time in the recent elections. In August 2023, 300 ELAM members violently attacked the homes and businesses of foreigners in Paphos. A month later in Limassol, a group of 200 Cypriots destroyed businesses run by foreigners with Molotov cocktails. More recently, an armed man attacked around 30 Syrians in Paphos in March 2024.

“We’ve seen the direction things have taken. Racism has increased at a time when we need workers. The people we help report a lot of verbal abuse. And police profiling has increased,” says Corina Drousiotou, project coordinator for the Cyprus Refugee Council.

In addition to the violence they experience, asylum seekers also complain about the difficulties they face on a daily basis, including meeting basic needs. Finding housing or a job can be an obstacle course that leads through a legal grey zone.

Ferit is a Kurdish asylum seeker who arrived from Turkey in December 2022. Lacking money and work, he has been living on the streets since his arrival. He currently spends his days on the bridge above the Venetian ramparts of Nicosia. “I came here because I thought it was a welcoming country for Kurds. I wanted to stay but I have no rights here. I’m not allowed to work,” explains Ferit. Since December 2023, asylum seekers have had to wait nine months after registering their application before they can work.

While some prefer to wait so as not to jeopardise their status, many have no choice but to work to pay for their housing and daily expenses in a country with high inflation. “We need to work, this is no way to live,” says Junior, who arrived in Nicosia from the DRC five years ago. His application was rejected but he never left. “I can’t go back to Congo. An NGO lawyer is working on my case,” explains the young man. He has submitted CVs to work in tourism, a sector in short supply of labour. In Nicosia, asylum seekers keep the hotels and restaurants running, especially in the high season. The rest of the time, they cycle around the city delivering meals to Cypriots.

Leading Europe in deportations

At the same time, in the face of rising immigration, the government continues to drive a hard line. “The Cypriot government’s priority is to prevent people from coming and to facilitate the departure of those whose applications are rejected,” explains Drousiotou of the Cypriot Refugee Council. And since December 2023, access to Cypriot nationality has been conditional on a B1 level of Greek and sufficient knowledge of the island’s culture and history.

In 2023, the EU invested €22 million (around US$23.5 million) to renovate the island’s first reception centre, the Pournara Camp on the outskirts of Nicosia. For Ferit, who lived there when he arrived in early 2023, the experience was dehumanising: “I stayed for three months and there are a lot of problems with the housing there. Nobody is happy, the food isn’t good, it smells bad. I was given just one piece of bread. And when you try to talk to the people in charge, they get angry and don’t listen.”

Expansion work is still in progress and will provide accommodation for around 1,000 people. Motivated by outdated reception capacity and living conditions condemned by both asylum seekers and civil society, the main aim of this investment is to speed up the processing of applications. Whereas most people used to spend several months in the camp waiting to be released, the average wait time today is two weeks, according to Stéphanie Violari, the camp’s procedure coordinator.

While conditions at the camp have improved, it is still very isolated and feels like a prison. Residents have to pass through a barbed-wire gate to get to the houses, which are cold in winter and stifling in summer. There are no trees to provide shade for the roughly 1,000 people waiting there.

By processing applications more quickly, the authorities hope to facilitate the return home for those who have been rejected. This measure is in line with the policy of the outgoing European Commission and the new Pact on Migration and Asylum voted in April 2024. In February 2022, Cyprus and the EU signed an action plan to improve reception capacity and facilitate returns.

In Cyprus, asylum seekers who have had their applications rejected are eligible for ‘voluntary’ return programmes, where they receive a plane ticket to a so-called ‘safe’ country and around €1,000. According to the Ministry of the Interior, 96 per cent of applications are refused, making Cyprus one of the leading European countries for deportations proportionate to the number of asylum seekers in the country. The authorities base their decisions on a list of 27 ‘safe’ countries, which includes Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Pakistan. Nationals of these countries are systematically refused asylum on the grounds that their applications are ‘unfounded’. Those granted asylum are primarily Syrians and stateless persons, though their applications are often suspended.

A relocation programme put in place to send accepted asylum seekers to countries like Germany, France and Bulgaria has been suspended since July 2023 as authorities believed it would “open the floodgates”.

“The government’s new policy is based on humanitarian values. It’s not a question of whether or not we want asylum seekers, it’s a question of reception capacity,” says Georgiades of the Ministry of Interior.

As he explains, the country has recently been facing an “extreme” influx of Syrians arriving from Lebanon, “which Cyprus cannot absorb”.

The government cannot send Syrians back to either Syria or Lebanon. For some months now, it has beenurging the EU to declare certain parts of Syria as safe zones for repatriating Syrians who have been refused entry. With more than 2,000 people arriving between January and March 2024, the Cypriot President said that the country was facing “a serious crisis with these almost daily arrivals”.

The island also wants to sign an agreement with Lebanon to reduce the number of asylum seekers arriving on its territory, as confirmed by the Commission last March. Amnesty International has concerns about this plan which, as it wrote in its email, is similar to agreements with Tunisia and Egypt that fail to “take into account the clear evidence of abuse and serious human rights violations in the countries with which these agreements are negotiated”.

As European politics shift to the right, NGOs are being left to fend for themselves

The outgoing European Commission has continued with its border control policies, spending €26.2 billion (US$29 billion) on migration and border management (including €5.6 billion, or US$6.3 billion on Frontex, its border protection agency, between 2021 and 2027), and has just voted in favour of the new Pact on Migration and Asylum, which specialists such as Olivier Clochard see as a “short-termist policy moving in a restrictive direction”. This is reflected in the ambition to speed up application processing by “filtering” at the borders, as well as the ability to order administrative detention of up to nine months in any country facing an exceptional number of arrivals, as was the case in 2015-2016.

“They want a faster system that sets an example for respecting human rights while quickly processing applications. But people need time to talk in confidence and to understand their situation,” explains Clochard, a researcher associated with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

The Pact was voted on in the run-up to the European elections on 9 June 2024, which saw major gains for conservative and far-right parties. “With 80 per cent of decisions adopted under the co-decision procedure, there is a risk that this will influence migration policy,” says Philippe Icard.

On the ground, asylum seekers are the ones who mainly suffer from European policies. They depend on the work of a diminished civil society that the government does not financially support and even mistrusts.

While the NGOs we spoke with say that they have not changed their working methods and do not feel threatened like KISA, they are witnessing an increase in security. “We’re not afraid but it’s not great to have police checks near our building. It doesn’t send out the right message because people come here seeking help,” explains Elizabeth Kassinis, director of Caritas Cyprus.

The Caritas Cyprus migrant centre is located next to the Paphos gate and the border with Turkish Cyprus. A small brigade of police officers is stationed next to it to carry out identity checks. They target people who appear foreign.

For their part, the Refugee Support Group has suffered the consequences of the law banning asylum seekers from working for nine months: “We used to give everyone food every week for four to six weeks until they could work. But since this has changed, we can no longer support them,” laments Natalie Holmes, head of communications.

Compounding matters, Cypriot NGOs, like many others around the world, are suffering from a decrease in international funding, which is struggling to keep up with the growing number of crises.

“We have no choice but to adapt, select and reference as best we can, despite the small number of organisations,” explains Drousiotou of the Cyprus Refugee Council. The handful of NGOs and informal associations have the impression that they are working against both their government and the European Union, and have no choice but to concentrate on at the very least providing a “dignified welcome” – until those they welcome are deported.