by Nick Thorpe
Was IS using the refugee wave to get people into Europe, or using more traditional ways of switched identities, and roundabout flights to other capitals, I asked.
Both. But now it’s easier to use the refugee wave to hide them. Surgical operations, to change faces, and create false identities are very easy. The problem is, they don’t only use this channel to send back fighters to their home countries. They also use these channels to traffic the money these people need to perpetrate acts of terror. Because it’s very expensive to organise something like the Paris attacks.
The French may claim credit for preventing four attacks in 2015, he said, but they missed the fifth. A 20 per cent failure rate was pretty disastrous. The only way to deal with the refugee problem, and the terror problem, was at the source, he believed. Thirty countries around the world supported IS, including Saudi Arabia – a key Western ally. Even the refugees could have been handled in a better way. If they had been allowed to proceed in a slower way, through four or five different channels, they could all have been properly registered, screened and processed. The lack of coordination between different countries, as they blamed one another, meant that people with bad intentions could easily slip through the net.5
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In mid-December 2015, I travelled to Greece for the first time to cover the refugee situation. Not to the islands, or the border with Macedonia, but to Athens and the port of Piraeus where the big passenger ships arrived from the islands.
For the refugees, there was distressing news from the north. On 23 November, the Macedonian foreign minister Nikola Poposki announced that from then on, only Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees would be allowed to enter his country.6 A few days later, the Macedonian army began building their first fence at Gevgelija, next to the main road border crossing. Several of the first migrants stranded on the Greek side at Idomeni sewed their lips together in protest. The Macedonian move came in response to similar decisions by the Austrian, Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian governments – a domino effect. That immediately caused a tailback to develop at Idomeni on the Greek side of the border. This was the Vardar River valley, the route since time immemorial for travellers and invaders from Greece to funnel up into the Balkans.
Beside the river, a railway track and a road jostled for space in the narrow, fertile valley which wound northwards towards the cities of Veles and the Macedonian capital, Skopje. The Vardar River empties into the Aegean just to the west of Thessaloniki.
Dressed in early winter sunlight, Athens looked dowdier than I had ever seen her. Many shops were boarded up, and there was graffiti everywhere. There were also many migrants and refugees sleeping in the city’s squares, especially in Omonia and Victoria. And almost daily protests against austerity measures, initially opposed, then reluctantly instated by the government of Alexis Tsipras, at the behest of the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission.
The day I arrived, the Greek finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos announced that he had agreed on the reform steps necessary for Greece to receive the next €1 billion tranche of the bailout. The new privatisation fund would generate revenue from the sell-off of state assets. The funds would be used to lower the debt and encourage investment. In particular, the reforms would affect state-owned power generating companies and the electricity distribution grid.
The Taekwondo stadium in the Palaio Faliro district of Athens had seen better times. Opened in 2004, a few days before the Olympic Games were due to begin, it hosted first handball matches, then Taekwondo – a Korean martial art which mixes karate with high and spectacular kicking moves. A report in the Guardian newspaper from August 2014 showed it in a gallery of photographs of half-ruined, crumbling venues, ten years after the Games.7 Now it was a bustle of activity again. Two thousand five hundred refugees had been brought here by bus from the Greece–Macedonia border in the past twenty-four hours alone. In the meantime, two or three ships docked each day at the port of Athens, in Piraeus, from the Greek islands, with up to 700 migrants on each. The decision of the Balkan governments to limit the flow was turning Athens into the latest bottleneck on the Balkan route, or, as the Greek minister for migration put it more poetically, a ‘warehouse of souls’.8
The Greeks, rather late in the day, tried to accommodate those sent back from the border at the Taekwondo stadium and at Elleniko, the former Athens International Airport – now a derelict, windy space on the edge of nowhere.
Reporters were not allowed into the stadium, but an Iranian refugee filmed conditions inside for me on his mobile phone. Overcrowded corridors, filth and chaos in the bathrooms, not enough mattresses and blankets. At the main gate there were daily protests by refugees. Many of those I spoke to were from Iran, Pakistan and North Africa. They waved signs with slogans like ‘Help – we’re suffering here!’, ‘We need solution, we die slow-motion’ and ‘Open the border, we’re human too!’ Those queuing for food in a long orderly line across the tarmac were mostly men, but included many women and small children too.
The camp was not closed. Anyone could leave who wanted to, and most chose to do just that, collecting their small rucksacks and clutching black plastic bags with any clothes they had picked up on the way, they walked away up a busy road towards the centre of Athens. A woman wearing an eggshell blue cap and jacket, carrying a clipboard, moved through the crowds, a permanent smile on her face, asking questions. We reporters mounted our cameras outside, or did interview after interview, then sat in a café across the street editing our material and sending it to our editors. The weather was still warm in the day but getting chilly at night. Boys sat wearily on the grass, resting their heads on dark blue UNHCR-issue sleeping bags. Deep in conversation or studying their phones. They had to find a way north, then a way through Macedonia’s new defences.
Majid was thirty-eight, from Iran, travelling with his wife and two children. He wanted to weep when the Greek soldiers ordered them onto the bus at Idomeni for the 600-kilometre journey back to Athens. But it would have been too shameful to cry, he told me, as head of the family. They had spent just one night at the stadium, with two blankets between the four of them. Anything was better, the Greek migration minister said, than sleeping in the fields. And he gave those now in Greece, or still arriving at a rate of 3,800 a day, a choice. Apply for asylum there, or accept an offer from the International Organization for Migration, for a plane ticket home. Another Iranian I met had decided it was time to give up and go home.
Hamed was thirty-two. He had left Iran, he said, because he missed freedom to think, freedom to move. And he was fed up with corruption. ‘Everything is arranged through contacts, or through money, not through ability. They make us stay inside all the time, smoking drugs. It keeps you passive. You don’t do anything.’
In search of a better life, in Sweden, he had flown from Tehran to Istanbul. As an Iranian, he didn’t need a visa for Turkey. He had been travelling for a month. He spent four days in Istanbul, then travelled with smugglers to the Turkish coast near Izmir. He crossed by boat at six in the morning, to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. The journey from Tehran to Athens had cost him €3,000 so far. He was upset to be going back but didn’t like the idea of crawling through the ever lengthening barbed wire on the Macedonian border, only to be thrown back again and again till he succeeded. He had already been to the Iranian embassy, to apply for a new passport. There was a queue of over a thousand people there, with the same idea, he said.
Would he be punished for leaving? He had thought this through, too: ‘As soon as we arrive, we will be called in for an interrogation which lasts three or four hours. There will be questions. Like where we lost our passports. If you have no police record they will let you out. The Iranian government does not want to appear cruel to people.’ His plane left at 9.20 that evening. He was looking forward to seeing his family, but brooding over the failure of his journey, and the loss of so much money.9
We were talking downstairs in the recreation room of a former hotel, squatted by
Greek anarchists who turned it into a safe house for refugees. It was full to capacity, with people sleeping on the upper storeys on mattresses, several to each room. There was food, water, washing facilities, and medical care, all provided for free. The anarchists were wary of journalists in the house but tolerated our presence for a while.
Another man, Hasan, twenty-eight, said if he went back to Iran he would get, if he was lucky, a prison sentence for life, but more likely he would be hanged. He had worked for PAVA, the General Security and Intelligence Police, most recently ‘as a body guard for important people.’ As someone who knew state secrets, they would never believe, if he returned, that he had not divulged them. He would be tortured and probably killed. From the careful, contained way he spoke, in Farsi through an interpreter, and from the way other Iranians treated him, with a mixture of fear and respect, his story seemed authentic.
He had got out by applying for a passport to visit Iraq. From there he flew to Turkey. He had left the documents proving his background in the hands of a smuggler he trusted in Istanbul, out of fear that they might be taken off him or get lost on the way. They were his passport to political asylum, somewhere, he hoped. He also had some Iranian documents with him, he said, but as Iranian citizens were not allowed across the border, he was planning to buy forged Iraqi or Syrian documents in Athens.
Victoria Square was already established as the main focus of the many migrant communities passing through Athens. There was a metro stop with trains to and from the port of Piraeus. There were cafés and small restaurants on all sides, and the side roads were riddled with money-changing shops, small travel agents from which smugglers operated, and mobile phone shops. There were also cheap hotels where, for €20 or €30 a night, you could find a small room, if the owners were not already so fed up with the migrant influx that they were turning them all away. In the square, Greek and foreign charities operated. The Dutch-based Boat Rescue Service were especially active. Refugees collected in national groups – mostly Afghans, Pakistanis, Iranians and Moroccans. The children fed stale bread to the pigeons and small boys kicked a deflated football. Clusters of exhausted men gazed at their mobile phones or disappeared into the side-streets to talk to the smugglers again. Middle-aged Greek men, some walking dogs, tried to pick up young migrant men and boys, desperate for money. If they were lucky, they would be paid €10 for sex, usually standing up against a tree in another, more desolate park, a few streets away. Or in the rooms of yet another shabby hotel.
In the middle of the square stood the dramatic bronze statue of Theseus rescuing Hippodamia from the Centaur Eurytion, made by the German sculptor Johannes Pfuhl in 1906.10 The enraged centaur has one arm around the poor Hippodamia’s waist, and wields a rock in his other fist, which he clearly intends to bring down on Theseus’s head. Theseus clutches a dagger, in front of the rearing centaur, which he is trying to plunge into the animal’s neck. Another of the girls at the wedding feast, half naked, lies swooning on the ground.
In Greek mythology the centaurs – half men, half horses – were invited by Pirithous to his wedding with Hippodamia. The centaurs got blind drunk and tried to abduct both the beautiful bride and her entourage. Theseus and his entourage defended their honour, and thus began the long feud between men and centaurs. Homer invokes the story as a cautionary tale against drinking too much wine. Most of Pfuhl’s other sculptures were destroyed in the First or Second World Wars, but his depiction of the German mystic Jakob Boeme still stands in a park in his home town of Gorlitz, the most easterly town of Germany. The sculpture in Victoria Square, frozen in mid-abduction, seemed strangely peaceful among the crowds of refugees, a resting place for the pigeons staining the heads, knees and breasts of the main protagonists white.
Sitting on a bench not far away, I found Hooman, his wife Naghmeh and their six-year-old son Arian, from Tehran. They were converts to Christianity from Islam. There are many Christians in Iran, Hooman explained, but they are not normally persecuted if they shut up about it and don’t try to spread the faith. But what the regime cannot tolerate is conversion from Islam to Christianity. Hooman had a good job as a graphic designer, and Naghmeh as a software engineer. They had a large, comfortable flat, and Arian had his own room, full of toys. Then Naghmeh’s father found out about their conversion. He was a powerful figure in the Revolutionary Guards and was furious that his own daughter had ‘betrayed’ him in this way. He broke Hooman’s fingers on one occasion. The three of them discussed the situation, and even little Arian agreed that the best thing would be to leave Iran, despite the many dangers they knew awaited them on the journey. A year earlier, they had begun the paperwork to apply for asylum in the United States, but this was known to take three years, and there was no guarantee of success. So they set out, across Turkey, three weeks before I met them. The boat across the Aegean was particularly frightening. ‘Arian was singing at the beginning – by the end he was crying, like everyone on that boat.’
There were fifty-two people on board, and it was leaking heavily by the time they saw the coast of Lesbos. ‘I tried to do everything for my child, he wore a life jacket, but I couldn’t do much, just trust God, and that’s all.’
The volunteers on the beach near Mytilene, including several from Manchester, waded out to rescue them. After several days, registering under their correct names and nationalities, they could continue to the mainland. Rather than staying in the stadium, Hooman had found a single room for the three of them near the square for €35 a night. The journey, including flights and smugglers, had cost them $10,000 so far, he said. Now they were down to their last $500, so it was time to go to a refugee camp. As we talked, Arian smiled serenely and hugged the teddy bear he had brought with him all the way from Tehran to his chest. What’s his name? I asked. Abri – meaning Tiger in Persian, he said.
Hooman pondered raising more money from somewhere, and paying smugglers again, but decided not to risk it. If he was alone, he might have, but not with his wife and small child. As a graphic designer, he was also skilled in making documents. He said he was tempted to forge them new Syrian or Iraqi papers, but had decided against that too, because of the risk of prison or worse in Macedonia or Serbia. My Greek colleague rang the refugee camp at Eleonas, which at least had containers in which the family could stay together and have some privacy. To their good fortune, one container was about to become free, that day, in the overcrowded camp. We paid for a taxi to take them there.
Tariq’s claim to refugee status, anywhere in Europe, was much flimsier. Aged thirty-seven, a handsome man with a neat beard and moustache, he had a good job as an electrical engineer in Morocco, specialising in water systems and pumps. He had once earned several thousand euros a month working for a big multinational company in several African countries, he said, as we sat sipping tea in a bar not far from Victoria Square. He left Morocco because he found it too repressive. Because there was no real democracy, no freedom of expression. He was an admirer of Europe, and wanted to live there for a while, a few years perhaps, and go back to Morocco on holiday.
On Facebook, he found a site run by smugglers advertising journeys to Europe. He rang the number. Then bought a plane ticket to Istanbul. He and several others were picked up by the smugglers at the airport and taken to a safe house. After a night in Istanbul, they were taken by van the next day, eight of them, to Izmir on the Turkish coast. They waited in the woods near the sea for two hours, before the boat arrived to take them across. The person who steered the boat went free, the smugglers explained. But only an hour out to sea, the 15-horse-power motor stopped, and would not restart. After three and a half hours adrift, they hailed a Turkish fishing boat, which towed them back to the mainland. The next boat too broke down, just 200 metres off the Turkish coast. They travelled back to the safe house in Istanbul. Three days later, they were taken to the coast again, and this time they reached Lesbos, in a convoy of sixty boats. On the way they followed the advice they were given of tearing up their passports and throwing
them into the sea. They spent three days on Lesbos, getting registered and fingerprinted – ‘I gave my real name’ – then paid €45 each for the eighteen-hour ferry journey to Piraeus. From Piraeus he paid for a bus straight to Idomeni on the Greek-Macedonian border. There he teamed up with four Moroccan men and a girl, and got advice from a taxi driver about where to cross, at a point where there were no soldiers.
At six in the evening we crossed the border normally. There was no fence, nothing. On the other side we looked for the railway, because if you walk close to the road the police can find you. We walked till four in the morning, then stopped for a brief rest. We slept an hour or two, then continued walking.
At eight o’clock that morning, two men in combat uniform, one of them carrying a rifle, stepped out of the woods and confronted them. They claimed to be police but Tariq said they were not fooled. First they asked for €100 to allow them to go on their way. Finally that dropped to €25, but they still refused to pay, claiming that all their money had been stolen by previous smugglers.
‘Then we found a railway station, with many people hiding in the woods around it, waiting to jump aboard. Suddenly the army was there, thirty soldiers. They took away one large group of Pakistanis but they didn’t find us. Then we continued walking up the railway line, all night, and crossed the mountain overnight.’ When they tried to buy a ticket, at another station, the clerk refused to sell it when they admitted they were from Morocco. So they boarded the train without tickets, only to be thrown off by a policeman on the train, at the next stop. They got as far as Veles.
After crossing the bridge over the Vardar, Tariq went into a filling station with one of his companions, to buy food. The others carried on without them. Once again they were stopped, now just two of them, in the woods by armed men. At gunpoint, the men took most of their remaining money off them. Fortunately, though, they missed his phone.
