They never gave us any interviews, only slaps and kicks. Nobody there spoke Arabic. When they released us from jail, they gave us a paper telling us we had to leave the country in one month. It was written in the Greek language. I asked a guard what the paper meant. He slapped me and told me to sign.187 A 25-year-old Afghan told Human Rights Watch about his treatment by the guards at Mitilini: The only times the guards spoke to us was to shout at us to shut up and to call us “Malaka.”188 We had no other contact with them. They stayed outside the door. They didn’t ask us a question. When we were first taken to the hospital for chest x-rays, they wouldn’t touch us; it was like we weren’t human. We had one guy who was sick from having been in wet clothes from the sea. They didn’t let him see a doctor. When they fingerprinted us, one 16-year-old kid made a mistake, so they started slapping him. An 18-year-old Afghan who was 17-years-old at the time he was in Mitilini as an unaccompanied child, said: I was detained at Mitilini for two days. Conditions were very bad. There was no food. Once a day we got something to eat. Because the bed was so dirty nobody wanted to sleep on the bed. I slept on the floor. I had a thin blanket. We could not sleep because there were crumbs on the floor and small black animals from the woods and a lot of fleas. In one cell there were 25 persons. The room was about 40 meters. There were younger boys. The police brought us food. They put one dish in front of the door and said everybody should take one. S0me took two, some only one.189 187 Human Rights Watch interview (name withheld, B-7), Athens, May 24, 2008. 188 The term “malaka” is a common insult in Greek, used pejoratively and often abusively to indicate that a person is cowardly, worthless, stupid or idiotic. 189 Human Rights Watch interview (name withheld, S-114), Athens, May 28, 2008. 77 Human Rights Watch November 2008