The Road Before Me Weeps

by Nick Thorpe

  I interpreted this as directed to me personally and took him out to lunch. Meanwhile he told me the rest of his story.

  Many of the Syrians and Iraqis crossing Turkey in 2015 also found themselves in Aksaray. From its days as a hub for trafficking women from Eastern Europe to Turkey, there was already a well-established network for smuggling migrants in the other direction, across Eastern to Western Europe. And there was money to be made, hand over fist.

  For refugees who decide to stay and come with money in their pockets, Turkey is a relatively easy country in which to integrate, and even a good place to make a business. From 2011 to 2016, 4,000 new businesses were set up by Syrians in Turkey. An article in the Financial Times in October 2016 highlights the case of Remo Fouad, a fifty-year-old pastry chef from Aleppo, who started with a small sweet shop and has been expanding his business ever since.6

  ‘They didn’t like us blacks in Aksaray because they thought we would rape the women,’ Eric told me. ‘We also had a lot of trouble with Syrians and Kurds. My friend from Brazzaville was shot dead there. Aksaray was too bad. If the police there see a white hit a black, they stand back. But if they think the black is guilty, they shoot you. Blacks have no value in Turkey. I was afraid to live there.’

  In October 2013, after his eighteenth birthday, Eric moved to a refugee centre in the Kadikoy district of Istanbul. By the spring of 2015 he was weary of his hand-to-mouth existence. He’d been living on the streets since the age of seven.

  I saw Syrians passing through Istanbul with bags on their backs. By then I had saved €400 from collecting materials for recycling from the bins. The Syrians said they were going to Europe. So I went with them to the coast. Others paid €1000, but I was with a Syrian, he accepted €300 from me, and I crossed to [the Greek island of] Kos. The police came and took me to a centre, and gave me refugee papers.

  Eric spent a month on Kos because he had no more money. Then another Syrian gave him €50 for the boat fare to Piraeus. In Athens, he survived on the fruit and vegetables thrown away at closing time in the open-air markets. Then he teamed up with other Congolese and a Mauritanian, and set out on the long trek northwards. They walked all the way to the Greek border with Macedonia, 550 kilometres. Then through most of Macedonia, and managed to cross much of Serbia by train and bus, without tickets. Then they walked into Hungary from Subotica.

  After I watched him and his companions board the white police bus at Ásotthalom, he was taken to the fingerprinting and registration centre in the blue hangar at Röszke, and the next day to the refugee camp at Bicske. Sitting on his bunkbed in Paris, he showed me his Hungarian ID card, number 135836, dated 1 July 2015. Valid until 14 October 2015 – his twenty-first birthday. But he didn’t wait long in Bicske, just a month, figuring out his next move. With a small group of fellow asylum seekers, he caught the train back to Budapest, and boarded the Munich train when the police guarding it were looking the other way. That must have been in early August, before the big crackdown and closure of the station later that month. Miraculously, no one checked the ticket he didn’t have, either on the Budapest to Munich or the Munich to Cologne train. In Cologne he banded together with some other refugees, and they travelled by car to Paris, arriving sometime in October 2015.

  Eric comes across as a winner, no matter how poor the cards he is dealt. He is serious most of the time, then smiles easily. It’s easy to relax in his presence, easy to trust him. He ate a kebab, ‘in the Algerian style’, in a buffet beside the station, while I sipped a fruit juice. His asylum claim in France had been rejected, but he didn’t seem unduly worried, even by the prospect of being deported back to Hungary under the Dublin procedures. He showed me a letter asking him to present himself at the Prefecture, the district council in Essones on 19 February, for deportation to Hungary – the first EU country in which he was registered – where ‘your claim for asylum will be processed’. When he turned up obediently on that day, clutching all his possessions in a small knapsack, he was given another paper saying that it had not been possible to return him to Hungary yet because ‘no flights were available’. This was an odd explanation, as I had just arrived from the Hungarian capital on one of the four flights between Paris and Budapest each day. Perhaps the French were reluctant to send him back, because of Hungary’s poor reputation for handling asylum seekers. German and Swedish judges had publicly proclaimed that asylum seekers could not be returned to Hungary, because they would not receive a fair hearing.

  More likely in this case, the Hungarian authorities refused to accept him back – a growing trend. According to the OIN, there were 133 returns under the Dublin regulations in the first three months of 2016, most of them from Germany. The office declined to say how many they had refused. Hungary’s hostility to asylum seekers, for once, was working in an asylum seeker’s favour.

  Eric was given a new date in April to turn up to the Prefecture. In the meantime, I helped him find a good human rights lawyer. He won his appeal and was allowed to stay in France. When he gave me the news, on the phone, just a month later, he sounded overjoyed. ‘What are your plans now?’ I asked.

  ‘I would like to go back to school, and learn to read and write properly,’ he told me, proudly. It was only then that I realised that he was almost illiterate. And then? ‘If it is possible, I would like to become a doctor. My sister told me once that 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 told me.

  Issa was another of the men in the small group I met at the roadside in Ásotthalom. Now thirty-six, he was a sports instructor and judo teacher in Kinshasa. In 2010 he was recruited, along with other sportsmen, by President Kabila’s People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy (PPRD). He left in 2011, disgusted by orders from the party to violently disrupt anti-government protests. He took part in an anti-Kabila rally in November 2011, on the eve of the election.

  We were in a large crowd of singing people, when I saw a line of police jeeps arrive. At first, I thought they were there to keep order, but then they jumped on us. They knocked me to the ground and dragged me and threw me in the back of a jeep. I was imprisoned in a dungeon, underground, without light, water, food, or toilet. I was tortured and beaten.

  Joseph Kabila declared himself the winner of the December 2011 elections, but his rival Etienne Tshisekedi accused Kabila of falsifying the vote to win a second term in office.7 The bishops of Congo also condemned what they called the ‘treachery, lies and terror’ of the election. In January 2015 Issa took part in renewed protests against Kabila and was in the crowd when police opened fire with live ammunition, killing and injuring many. The police later came to his home, searching for him, and threatened his father.8 His partner Fatouma was attacked and raped by police officers when she refused to tell them where he was. He escaped across the Congo River to Brazzaville, where Fatouma joined him. Their first son, five years old, was left behind with relatives. They lay low till April 2015, then took a flight to Istanbul.9

  After I last saw him, on the border at Ásotthalom, he and Fatouma were registered by police then made their way to Budapest. They managed to board a train from the east station in Budapest and crossed the border into Austria. After being ordered off trains several times across Europe because they had no money for a ticket, they finally reached Brussels a month later. There, they slept in parks as homeless people for the first few weeks, until a Belgian couple took pity on them and offered them a room in their flat, while they applied for asylum. After a while, they felt they would stand a better chance in France. After several months, they were sent to a camp in Béziers on the south coast of France. Their baby daughter Taslimah was born, safe and healthy, despite the traumas of the journey, in January 2016, in the hospital in Carcassonne. Béziers had a mayor from the anti-immigrant Front National. More serious was that the family’s application for refugee status was turned down in early 2017 by the French Office for Immigrati
on and Integration (OFII). They moved to a crowded refugee centre in a former hotel in Montpellier. At the time of writing, the family’s situation was extremely precarious, as they waited for their appeal to be considered by the National Court of Asylum. The day Taslimah reached eighteen months of age, they were no longer entitled to receive milk formula or nappies under French asylum regulations.

  The French Socialist government, like the Conservative British government led by David Cameron, preferred the idea of accepting refugees directly from the camps in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, rather than those rushing overland to get into Europe before the gates clanged shut.10 The idea was that they applied at European embassies in the countries where they were living, were carefully screened and then, if successful, finally invited to travel. Such cases would be given all the help they needed to get established in their new country.

  Amena Abomosa, a science teacher in a secondary school in Syria, was one of the successful applicants, described in a report by Angela Charlton and Mirko Krivokapić in the Associated Press in October 2015.11 She and her family fled Syria to Jordan in 2012, after her husband Abdul was killed outside their home while trying to help an injured child. He was not involved on any side in the war.

  Amena, her mother Hanna, her teenage daughters Isra and Reemaz, and twelve-year-old son Muhammad were all issued refugee visas, and flew in style into Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. They spent two weeks in a transit centre in the suburb of Creteil, then were sent to a small town in Brittany. ‘I had to do something. I feel responsible for my family,’ Amena told AP. ‘They need the important things, food, shelter, a daily life.’ She still has deep scars on her stomach from the day Syrian soldiers smashed their way into her flat, and she was injured by flying glass. She would like one day to go home to Syria, she said, but only when it is safe to do so.

  *

  On 1 January 2016, the Netherlands took over the rotating presidency of the European Union. With thousands of asylum seekers still streaming over the borders from the south, despite the onset of winter, it was clear that migration would dominate the country’s office. The European Commission was still in a state of confusion. ‘There was a feeling of the end of the world in Brussels. They were just thinking in terms of giving Turkey a lot of money to stop people travelling on, and quickly sending back economic migrants,’ Gerald Knaus told me, having met with European Council president Donald Tusk in early 2016. Tusk remarked that former president of Poland Lech Wałęsa had joked with him that when you want the EU to fall apart, just put a Pole in charge.

  Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte took an early interest in the ESI plan, but it was the Dutch Labour Party leader Diderik Samson who adopted it and shepherded it through the European agenda. Samson visited Turkey in December 2015. ‘Someone put a copy of our plan in his reading folder. When he read it he decided – let’s do this right away, we won’t wait for the European Commission,’ Gerald Knaus told me.

  At a European level, the former ‘coalition of the willing’ – countries that wanted to seek a solution – had more or less collapsed. Austria had essentially defected to the Hungarian side, Sweden had introduced identity checks on the Øresund Bridge linking it and Denmark in order to reduce the flow of migrants, and Denmark too had introduced controls on its borders.12 Through the Balkans, Austrian efforts to close their border with Slovenia forced that country as well as Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia to deploy their own militaries. The Schengen system of open borders inside Europe was falling apart. The Germans, Dutch and Turks were left to work out a plan.

  ‘We agree that the pressures causing migration must be reduced. If the Schengen system [of border-free travel] is destroyed, Europe will be seriously endangered – politically and economically. That is why we Europeans have to invest billions in Turkey, Libya, Jordan and other countries in the region as quickly as possible – everybody as much as they can,’ German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble told Der Spiegel.13 Intense discussions began between Angela Merkel and prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu. There was talk of a ‘strategic partnership’ between Germany and Turkey. The Turkish government, which had for so long felt neglected and disliked by the European Union, appreciated the attention it was getting. The right deal would both grant Turkey a strategic partnership with Germany and solve the crisis. A key element that would bring all the EU countries on board would be for Turkey to offer to take back those arriving in small boats across the Aegean.

  Gerald Knaus travelled to Washington and spoke to Kemal Kirişci, an influential leading Turkish expert on migration, then working at the Brookings Institution. Kirişci then wrote a paper which made the point that even given President Erdoğan’s ‘illiberal’ Turkey, it was important that the EU remain liberal. If the migrant crisis led to the rise of the far right in Europe, and if the Orbán line won on migration, this would be very bad for Turkey too. The time for talking was nearly over. A breakthrough was urgently needed.

  Germany, having chosen to accept so many refugees, was also investing large sums in housing, feeding and looking after them. Most of the initial funds came from the €12 billion budget surplus. Schäuble’s own idea of a fuel tax, to be paid by all Germans, to accommodate and integrate the refugees, found little support in Germany. He was disappointed. ‘At the moment, we are lucky to have a budgetary surplus and don’t need such a tax. But Germany cannot handle this task on its own, that much is clear.’14

  According to a study by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research (IW), €50 billion would be needed to shelter, feed and educate refugees in Germany in 2016 and 2017.15 Housing, food and welfare would cost €12,000 per refugee per year, with language and integration classes adding another €3,300, making a grand annual total per refugee for each German tax payer of over €15,000. The study estimated possible 2016 first-time asylum requests at 800,000, and 500,000 in 2017. In practice, the numbers proved to be 718,000 in 2016, plunging to 198,000 in 2017.

  The IW researchers estimated that 99,000 people in 2016 would be able to afford their own housing and subsistence costs, with that number rising to 276,000 in 2017. These people would still need state subsidies for language and integration classes, however. On the other hand, they would by then also be paying taxes and social security contributions. ‘If all goes well, 10 per cent of refugees will find work during their first year,’ the director of the Federal Labour Office (BA) told the Süddeutsche Zeitung. ‘Fifty per cent will find work after five years here, and 70 per cent after fifteen years.’

  *

  6 March 2016 was a Sunday. Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu sat down with Angela Merkel and Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte in the office of the Turkish ambassador to Berlin Selim Yenel, and reached agreement on all the details. All three governments agreed to what was still in essence the ESI plan.

  When the EU–Turkey summit began in the Bergmont palace in Brussels, EU heads of state were astonished to be presented with a fait accompli.16 They asked for another week to discuss it. Austria and Hungary expressed severe misgivings, arguing that it placed EU security too much at the mercy of Turkey, but the majority were in favour, preferring it to the extreme alternative of closing one border after another.

  On 18 March, all twenty-eight prime ministers of EU member states gathered to agree to what became known as the EU–Turkey Statement.17 It was the most important international agreement in the eighteen months since the influx began in earnest, and was designed to slow, or even stop the influx of migrants and refugees across the Aegean Sea. And to ‘destroy the business model of the smugglers’ who were bringing them, as politician after politician emphasised.18

  There were four main points. First, all new ‘irregular migrants’ crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands would be returned to Turkey. Second, for every Syrian returned to Turkey from the Greek islands, another Syrian would be resettled in the EU. Third, Turkey pledged to prevent new sea or land routes for irregular migration opening from Turkey to the EU. And fourth, once irregular cro
ssings had ended or been substantially reduced, a Voluntary Humanitarian Admission Scheme would be activated.

  In exchange, the procedure for Turkish citizens to receive visas to visit EU countries would be rapidly liberalised, meaning that by the end of June 2016, Turkish citizens would no longer need visas at all. The distribution of the €3 billion Turkey had already been promised by the EU to help care for the 2.7 million refugees already in the country, would be speeded up. And a further €3 billion would be given by the end of 2018. The EU also promised to ‘re-energise’ Turkey’s accession talks on joining the EU – a process which began in 1963. And Turkey and the EU agreed to work closer together to improve humanitarian conditions inside Syria.

  The agreement would come into force at midnight on Saturday 20 March 2016. It could not be termed a legally binding agreement because, as one EU lawyer pointed out two months later, it actually had no legal force. It was rather a ‘press communiqué’ the unnamed lawyer told MEPs in the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament. No leaders actually signed the document. It was not published in the Official Journal of the European Union. In the press photograph, Donald Tusk stands in the centre, with Davutoğlu on his right and Juncker on his left, clutching the document. The three dark-suited men’s hands are clenched in a ball of agreement, a triple handshake. Davutoğlu, in yellow tie, is grinning broadly, Tusk in dark blue tie, has the shadow of a smile, while Juncker in the red tie looks unusually serious.

  The terminology showed clearly the watershed between those who saw the crisis primarily as humanitarian, and therefore sympathized with the refugees, and referred to them as irregular migrants – most in the European Commission – and the governments of hostile countries like Hungary who saw the arrivals primarily as illegal immigrants, seeking a better life in Europe. Whatever they called them, the most controversial part of the Action Plan, and the hardest to fulfil, was the return of asylum seekers from the Greek islands to the Turkish mainland. According to the document, ‘people who do not have a right to international protection will be immediately returned to Turkey’. There were two obvious problems with this. First, the word ‘right’ and, second, the word ‘immediately’. The new arrivals always argued that they did have to right to protection, and if the Greek asylum authorities ruled against them, they had a right to appeal under both international and EU law. Under the plan, the authors tried to reassure those who criticised the deal on human rights grounds: ‘There will be individual interviews, individual assessments and rights of appeal. There will be no blanket and no automatic returns of asylum seekers.’ The word ‘immediately’ thus became difficult to implement. The original assessment, and the inevitable appeals process, would take time.