by Nick Thorpe
They finally reached the Macedonian capital, Skopje, only to be caught by police five minutes before their train would have taken them on to the Serbian border. The police took them all the way back to Gevgelija. ‘The Macedonian army took us to another point, about a kilometre from the main road crossing point. At this place there were many Moroccans and Pakistanis. Soldiers in uniform beat us with iron cables as we lay on the ground.’ Then they were pushed back through the fence, two by two, after another beating. This time they were just kicked and punched. Tariq’s first visit to Macedonia lasted six days. He rested at the ever-growing camp at Idomeni. There, early one morning at around six o’clock, they were woken rudely by Greek police and put on a bus back to Athens.
Now he was planning his next attempt on the border. We arranged to meet a few days later, for a beer.
What would he be doing if he was home on a Saturday evening, I asked. ‘Much the same,’ he smiled. ‘Drinking beer, maybe going to a disco later.’ Would he ever consider giving up the attempt and going back to Morocco, perhaps with the help of the International Organization for Migration? ‘No way. I’ve spent €3,000, and I’m more than halfway to Germany!’ He had €470 left and was trying to get more money wired to him by his cousin in Sweden. But, without proper documents, neither Western Union offices nor MoneyGram would give him access to the money he knew was waiting for him. The only way was to cancel that transaction and get the same person to wire the money to someone who still had a passport – who would then also take a cut of the amount.
‘Now I’m looking for people to take us to Europe. For €1,500 they say they will take us by car across Macedonia and Serbia to Austria.’ But first he had to find a smuggler he could trust. ‘You put your money here, in a locker, and you devise your own [numerical] code. When you reach Austria you ring the man and give him your password, and he gets your money.’
‘Who are the smugglers?’ I wanted to know.
Normally mafia people from North Africa, Egypt, Algeria, and Syria. They pay the police and take you in open cars. You pay less for a bus, more for a car with only four others in it. At each of the borders, you get out and walk, and the car crosses empty, only to pick you up again at a pre-arranged point near the woods the other side.
As we sat there, he was cheered by a message on WhatsApp from a Moroccan friend who informed him that he had just got as far as Serbia, after paying a similar smuggler. If this man proved reliable, and he could get his hands on the money sent by his relatives, he would try again soon.
On 14 December, the EU announced the creation of a new border and coast guard, a sort of beefed-up Frontex. It would have its own personnel of 1,500 officers.11 One of the weaknesses of Frontex was that it depended completely on many states who frequently failed to send enough police. Frontex was now lobbying for the power, in exceptional circumstances, to take over control of a country’s border. That was a step too far for the Greeks and several other countries.
On 15 December, I interviewed the Greek minister for migration, Yannis Mouzalas. He cut an unusual figure for an employee of the Interior Ministry. In round glasses, slightly unshaven, wearing a beaten-up jacket, he looked as though he had never worn a tie in his life, and could easily have been mistaken for an artist from the left bank of the Seine in Paris, or a Czech dissident. He began by cautiously welcoming the new, stronger international border guard. ‘We will have to allow the centre to control some of our sovereignty,’ he admitted. But not too much.
Greece stood accused by the EU of only registering and fingerprinting 121,000 of the approximately 500,000 migrants who crossed its territory between 20 July and 30 November. ‘The responsibility for this also lies with Europe. Because we were not supplied with fingerprinting machines, even though we kept asking for them. As soon as the machines started coming and as long as they keep coming, we reacted better and our fingerprinting and registration procedures got better and better.’ One machine could only record a hundred individuals a day, he explained, and for the first six months they only had ten. Now they had fifty and were asking for a hundred.
The two terrorists posing as refugees, who took part in the Paris attacks were identified by the Greek authorities, he explained.
Shifting to the future, and the strains around the stadium, the disused airport and, above all, to those now stuck at the Macedonian border, he explained the plan in detail: 20,000 people would be housed in private accommodation, either empty flats or with host families. Genuine refugees should be relocated around Europe. Economic migrants should return home, either through voluntary repatriation, or be deported. The stadium and the airport were ‘temporary solutions’ to prevent people sleeping rough in Athens.
At the centre of our political approach is that you have to stem the migrant flow on the Turkish coast. Europe should focus now on the resettlement scheme. That means that the refugees should be resettled directly from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan to Europe. This would prevent the refugees from falling victim to the smugglers, drowning in the Aegean, and end this situation where Europe cannot control the migrant flow.
Some European leaders describe Greece as an open vineyard – meaning our borders are wide open, anyone can just walk in. But our land border with Turkey, on the Evros River, is secure. There is no influx there, only over the sea. The only thing we have to do on a sea border, following the UN rules and the Geneva Convention, and the European and Greek laws, is to save the lives of those at sea. We will not push people back to Turkey, we will not sink the migrant boats.
Mouzalas was an obstetrician, I noted from his biography. Did he feel he was now delivering the baby of a new Europe, I asked, or attending its funeral?
Exactly because I am an obstetrician, I am aware how difficult, how strenuous, how expensive, and how many hours it takes to give birth. For this reason I am very angry how many lives are being lost, in war, at sea, in this flow of migrants. And I am also angry that thousands of children are losing their childhoods in this crisis. This is really tragic. We are witnessing history. No one knows the outcome.
CHAPTER NINE
THE EU–TURKEY DEAL
If possible I would like to become a doctor. My sister told me once that our mother would not have died if she had received proper medical care. I have suffered very much in my life. I would like to lessen the suffering of others.
Eric Özeme, refugee from Democratic Republic of the Congo
On the evening of 31 December 2015, several hundred young men of North African and Middle Eastern origin were among the crowds of revellers who converged on Cologne for the New Year’s Eve celebrations. Some had agreed on Facebook in advance to congregate there. Many came with the express aim of groping women. It was a phenomenon known as ‘taharrus dzsamaj’, and also occurred during the Arab Spring, most notoriously in Tahrir Square in central Cairo, where many local and foreign women were molested.1
Some of those who travelled to Cologne were immigrants who already had asylum status in Germany or Belgium. They came from cities including Brussels and Aachen. Others were more recent arrivals, including some who had only been in Germany a few weeks and were living in temporary asylum-seekers hostels in or near the city.
As midnight approached, fuelled by several hours of drinking, the organised assault on women around the main railway station began. Firecrackers were thrown into the crowd, causing panic and confusion and distracting the attention of some 300 police on duty. In the mêlée, the men began surrounding women, corralling them into groups, groping them, and stealing their purses and mobile phones. The victims were mostly German, but also included women from other European countries, and women and girls who were themselves refugees from countries including Afghanistan and Syria. The perpetrators were ‘mostly men of North African or Middle Eastern appearance’ but included some Germans. Some Syrian men in the crowd, when they saw what was happening, also tried to protect groups of women.
The police were overwhelmed. In the following days and weeks, 1,092 cr
iminal complaints were filed, including 446 cases of sexual assault, and 3 cases of rape. Both the police and mainstream media initially tried to avoid any ethnic stereotyping of the perpetrators. As word spread on social media that they were migrants or immigrants, however, more and more reports appeared stating that the men were overwhelmingly of ‘immigrant’ appearance. The mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, only realised how serious the situation was when Angela Merkel rang her on the evening of 5 January. The events of that night, not only in Cologne but to a lesser extent in eight other German cities, did more damage to the ‘welcome culture’ towards refugees and migrants than any other single incident.2 In fact, they dealt a devastating blow to Germany’s remarkable willingness to offer a safe haven. In Germany itself, across Europe and the United States, the harshest critics of Angela Merkel’s open-door policy cried out with vindictive joy. Now the Germans had got what they deserved, ran the story. How foolish they were to welcome such ‘animals’ to their country! Even those who had cautiously welcomed refugees until now, had to reconsider their faith that Germany and Europe could integrate the newcomers.
Were those events proof of a genetic weakness in men from non-European cultures? Were they terrorist attacks, as devastating as any use of Kalashnikovs or suicide belts, designed to destroy the goodwill in Germany towards Muslims? Or simply an extreme case of men behaving badly, if they think they can get away with it, and a failure of the police to act in time? IS and Al-Qaeda propaganda has long maintained that Christians are waging a never-ending crusade against Islamic civilisation. The independent investigation carried out by investigators from Nordrhein-Westphalen was published on 7 April 2017.3
‘The 2015–2016 New Year’s Eve attacks could have been prevented, for the most part, if early and resolute action had been taken at the first criminal offences. The overview and the necessary forces were lacking for such a procedure,’ the report concluded. The failure of police to intervene early on, according to one expert cited in the report, caused a ‘snowball’ effect, whereby men thought they could get away with violence. A police decision to reduce the police presence at New Year’s Eve celebrations throughout the county was fiercely criticised. The police communications after New Year’s Eve, were ‘false and misleading’.
The report shed little light, however, on the degree of organisation, or the motives of the perpetrators. One psychologist, Rudolf Egg, who studied more than a thousand of the cases of assault, said he found no evidence of organised criminal activity behind the attacks. He too blamed the police for giving men the impression that they could get away with assault by not intervening in time. Sixteen months after the events, only five men had been arrested, and one sentenced. A twenty-six-year-old Algerian, Hassan T., was sentenced to one year in prison.
*
Savigny-sur-Orge is a small town of 23,000 inhabitants, 19 kilometres south of Paris. Once a collection of homes around a castle, the construction of the railway line in the late nineteenth century turned it first into a suburb of the French capital, then a dormitory town. Now it is home to Eric Ozeme, the refugee from Congo whom I met at Ásotthalom in June 2015. He was waiting for me at the railway station when my train pulled in from the Gare d’Austerlitz. He was wearing the same grey pullover that he wore when he crossed the Serbian border eight months earlier. His face was more relaxed. He liked being in France, and the French had been civil with him, he told me, as we walked the streets from the station to the third floor flat in an apartment block provided for him by the French Red Cross.
His flatmates were all from Africa. The flat was small – a bedroom, a living room/kitchen and a bathroom – sparse, but clean and welcoming. He had the top bunk in the room he shared with the four other asylum seekers. There was ample space. None had sufficient clothes or possessions with which to clutter it up.
From the roadside in Hungary I had a short audio recording of him and some of the group of thirty or so other mostly Congolese with whom he walked much of the way from Athens. But this was my first chance to hear his life story.
Eric was born in Matita, near Kinshasa in October 1995. He never met his father, who died before he was born. His mother, who worked as a small trader, sold coffee and manioc root on the streets of Kinshasa until she died of illness when Eric was seven. He lived with his older sister and brother, went to school for three years, then had to leave at the age of eleven to work on the streets himself, buying and selling small items in order not to starve. In February 2011, when Eric was sixteen, the police burst into his house early in the morning, in the Kinshasa suburb of Ngaba. His friend Jean-Luc had been arrested for plotting to assassinate President Joseph Kabila, they said, and he was suspected as an accomplice. Contemporary news reports make no mention of any plot to assassinate the corrupt Joseph Kabila in 2011. He won his second term as president in December 2011, in an election in which the ballots from 2,000 polling stations, in areas known to favour the rival candidate, went missing.
Congo is one of the richest countries in the world, in mineral deposits. It earns a billion dollars a year from the export of gold alone. It also has rich deposits of copper, cobalt, manganese and diamonds. Its wealth has attracted the greed of the world powers, past and present, and of its African neighbours. It is the second biggest producer of copper in the world after Chile.
A small modern car contains 12 kilos of copper, an expensive model 25 kilos.4 Because of its excellent conductivity properties, the metal is used in the brakes, the electric driving controls, the gearbox and the heating system. As Eric made his way across Hungary in the summer of 2015, he passed close to factories which manufacture half a million Mercedes, Suzuki and Opel cars each year. Each contains hundreds of metres of copper wiring, which probably originated in his home country. The ruthless exploitation of Africa for its minerals, and the misuse of the proceeds from that wealth by the ruling elite, past and present, is the backdrop to his journey, and that of millions of others over the past decades.
In Hungary and Romania, Bosnia and Bulgaria, France and Spain, I have watched the Roma – Europe’s other strangers – push their carts from door to door, collecting scrap metal. Copper is the most prized, above the twisted aluminium and rusting iron. It is paid for by the gram, rather than the kilogram, at the grim recycling centres on the edges of town where the Roma wheel their barrows. Copper offers an interesting interface between wealth and poverty on the capitalist roads of Europe. We look at our faces in copper mirrors, and study the distorted images of ourselves and others, for clues.
Eric, aged sixteen, orphaned and likely to be sentenced to death with his friend Jean-Luc for a crime he did not commit, struck lucky. A prison guard took pity on him. ‘Don’t you have any friends who have money?’ the guard asked him in his cachot, the dank underground cell beneath a police station in the Ngaba district of Kinshasa where he was nervously awaiting his fate. It was nightfall on 28 February 2011. He knew just one man, a friend of his brother’s, whom he could ask for money. A human rights activist. The man was called and arrived after dark. A pile of Congolese francs, depicting the stripy zebra-like symbol of Congo, the okapi, on one side and the manioc fruit his mother once sold in the street on the other, changed hands.
With his friend’s help Eric fled, first to the Kinshasa district of Masina, then in a pirogue, a narrow dug-out canoe, across the Congo River to Brazzaville. Congo is divided into two states, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, of which Kinshasa is the capital, and the much smaller Republic of the Congo. The two cities, Brazzaville with its 1.4 million inhabitants, and Kinshasa with 11 million, stare uncertainly at each other across the Congo River. They are the two closest capitals on earth and provide a useful refuge for those fleeing one or the other.
Eric hid for three months with the family of his friend Jean-Luc, of whom there was no word. Almost certainly he was killed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo police. In May he got a phone call from the friend who bribed him out of prison. The police were still watching his home, h
e said. His sister had been imprisoned. His brother Patrique had fled to Angola. He could get him false papers to go to Turkey. He took another pirogue, back across the Congo River. Later the same day he was at the airport, on a flight to Morocco, with his own photograph in his passport, but a false name. In Morocco he changed planes and flew to Istanbul. He arrived there with $200 in his pocket, knowing no one, with nowhere to go.
At Istanbul airport, he befriended a Senegalese man who took him into town to the sprawling Aksaray neighbourhood, where he spent his first few nights in a room with two dozen other African migrants. Aksaray means ‘the white palace’ in Turkish. It was given this name by migrants from a city of the same name in central Anatolia, who were moved to Istanbul (then called Constantinople) by Sultan Mehmet II, to fill the city after its conquest by the Ottomans in 1453.5
Aksaray today is a rough neighbourhood, also notorious for prostitution, especially for women from the former Soviet Union. In Aksaray in the early 2000s, years before Eric reached here, I tried to trace Chechens coming and going from the war in their country against Russia, until I was warned to stop asking questions for my own safety.
Eric scraped a living in Aksaray, collecting plastic bottles from rubbish bins and selling them to be recycled. This paid for his rent, basic food and his bus tickets to Konya, where the Turkish authorities said he should move to a camp – as a minor he was not supposed to be living rough in Istanbul at all. His only official document was a single sheet from the UNHCR office in Ankara in 2011 cited earlier:
To Whom it May Concern: this is to certify that the above named person has been recognised as a refugee by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, pursuant to its mandate. As a refugee, he is a person of concern to the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, and should, in particular, be protected from forcible return to a country where he would face threats to his life or freedom. Any assistance to the above named individual would be most appreciated.
