A letter from the border.
By Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi
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A Syrian women and her son wait for help to erect
their tent at a refugee camp in Bab al-Salam on the Syria-Turkey border.
Photograph: Getty Images
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A question for the European politicians thrashing out a plan to provide “assistance” to
Syria: if a bedraggled
Syrian escapes the war, if he escapes the chaos of the refugee camps in
Iraq or Jordan or Turkey, if he arrives tired but
hopeful on your doorstep, what will happen to him?
Reporting at the European Union’s most porous borders where Greece and
Bulgaria merge with Turkey I was struck by the story of a Syrian refugee who
risked drowning to avoid the clasp of the EU’s tortuous asylum and immigration
system.
After relating the story of how he was deposited on
the banks of Turkey by border patrol officers in
Greece,
I assumed my interview with Farouk, a Syrian refugee, was finished. It was
twilight, and the shabby cafe on the edge of the tiny Bulgarian village was
empty. I sat at the head of a small wooden table scribbling into the silence as
a dozen pair of striking eyes, various shades of green, watched me curiously.
They were all Syrian, thrown together by the war. The two teenage boys were
awkward, goofy grins even as they imitated the sound of bombs. The old man,
stooped and pot-bellied, eyed me suspiciously. Farouk’s friend spat furiously
in Arabic, insisting that he keep quiet. They ate from a large dish of
sunflower seeds. I swallowed the remains of a thick, bitter Bulgarian coffee,
clumps of sugar clung to the tiny shot-sized glass. “So after that you
travelled from Turkey to Bulgaria? How
did you cross the border?” I asked.
“No, that’s another story.” We ordered more coffee and Farouk told me
about his second “push-back”.
Following his encounter with the border police on River Evros in Greece, Farouk went back to his smuggler, who
sent him to the Aegean Sea. He was packed into
a large wooden boat bound for Italy
with more than 100 other people. Very soon they lost control of the boat, and
could do little as it spun in the middle of the ocean between Turkey and Greece. “After three or four
hours people started to throw up,” he said. “There was a problem inside the
boat, the water started to enter. Everyone was scared and thinking about dying.
We had suffered too much.”
On this occasion the Greek maritime police tried to rescue them, but the
appointed captain of the boat, another Syrian refugee, deliberately thwarted
the attempt. “He had a problem with Greece
because he had been caught in Greece
before,” said Farouk. Rather than find himself back in Greece, the
desperate captain threw an anchor into the sea, which caught on something
solid, so even as the Greek officers tried to pull the boat to safety it would
not budge and looked certain to capsize. Farouk’s rising terror was compounded
by the screams of his fellow passengers, among them young children.
It was the Turkish maritime police that eventually saved them. One of
their officers jumped aboard the boat, wrested control from the captain, and
steered the boat back to Turkey.
All the while the refugees cheered, clapped and sang, “Long live Turkey”.
What made the Syrian captain risk the lives of everyone on the boat to
avoid Greece?
The fingerprints of any non-European person who has travelled
“unofficially” across borders are taken on arrival in any European Union
country. If you want to make a claim for asylum, under the EU’s Dublin II
regulations you must do so in the first EU country you enter. There is a
European database containing the fingerprints of all irregular migrants and
refugees (Eurodac) to track their movements. If you try to make a claim in
another EU country, your fingerprints will pop up on a central database
indicating the country of entry, and you will be deported back there.
Dublin II could only work if each and every EU country operated an
efficient, fair and humane asylum and immigration system. Most EU countries
appear to have coherent structures in place, but in reality all over Europe there are hundreds of genuine refugees and
children detained in prisons or holding centres, sometimes for months, living
in extreme poverty, and stuck in limbo for years while their applications are
processed.
From the signing of the European Convention on Human Rights more than 60
years ago to the first tentative steps towards a common asylum system in Dublin
in 1990, every piece of EU legislation on asylum and immigration policy has
reiterated the continent’s commitment to freedom and justice for all. Indeed
when the European Council met to discuss a common asylum system at Tampere in 1999, it was said that to deny those from less
free and democratic societies would be to betray Europe’s
liberal traditions. But the poor implementation of the current system means
Europe is edging toward the betrayal of those traditions, and why a terrified
Syrian refugee would rather drown than go back to Greece.
Greece is a tragic
example of where Europe’s common asylum system
is failing. Up to November last year 26,000 refugees and irregular migrants
entered Greece
illegally, with Syrians the largest group after Afghans. Around 90 per cent of
all migrants and refugees entering Europe unofficially enter through Greece, which
embodies the worst of the differing national asylum and immigration systems
across the European Union’s 27 member states. Greece’s system had already
collapsed before its financial problems hit. By 2010 the backlog for asylum
claims had crept towards 70,000; Médecins Sans Frontières declared the state of
immigration holding centres “medieval”; and a quarter of a million undocumented
migrants and refugees haunt the city of Athens alone trapped in various states
of destitution, unable to leave legally because of the Dublin II regulations.
Najib tried to escape his Greek nightmare several times. The 25-year-old
Afghan made it as far as Germany,
where he lived for one year before he was caught and told to leave within 10
days. He went to the Netherlands;
they sent him back to Germany,
where he spent a month in prison before being deported back to Greece, the
country of his first fingerprint. Confined to Athens, Najib contends with daily harassment
from the police and Golden Dawn.
When a Golden Dawn supporter
beat him up, he went to the police, who asked for his ID, and on seeing his
temporary residence permit was out of date, jailed him for 10 days.
I don’t know what happened to the captain who panicked, but others on
the boat were forced to go back to the Aegean Sea.
Many could not afford to find a safer passage. They drowned when their boat sank killing 60 people on 6 September last
year.
Shaken, Farouk decided to stick to land for the rest of his journey, and
hoping for a warmer European reception elsewhere, he crossed the border into Bulgaria.
Published 08 March 2013 16:40
