The Full Catastrophe (23 page)

6
Europe’s Hopefuls

I am an unfortunate foreigner in distress, and do not know one in your town and country.

—Odysseus, in
The Odyssey
by Homer

T
ychero is a somnolent Thracian town close to the muddy Evros River, which marks Greece’s northeastern border with Turkey. The town, named after the Greek word for “lucky,” sits in a humid river delta dotted with fields of cotton, wheat, and sunflowers, and the skies above it are trafficked by raptors, pelicans, and other migratory birds of increasing rarity. On a chilly December morning in 2011, on a quiet hillside road on the edge of town, I saw a group of nine people—most of them Africans—walking like weary soldiers in dazed retreat. One of them, a very tall and stunningly beautiful woman, was dressed in a bright red wool coat and designer jeans. For footwear, she had on gray socks and flip-flops. The pair of shoes she had been wearing apparently hadn’t made it across the Evros River earlier that morning. At the time, the river was becoming the primary means by which migrants escaping the war and poverty that afflicted large parts of Africa and Asia entered the European Union. In the otherwise uneventful Greek border towns of the Evros River Valley, scenes like this had become commonplace.

As the group of nine approached me, I asked if anyone spoke English. They took the opportunity to pause and sit down on the redbrick sidewalk. “Very tired,” said one young man who wore large aviator sunglasses and a winter cap. “Where is the police?” I pointed downhill in the direction of the police station, a plain white building next to the train tracks where incoming migrants were detained. Earlier that morning, I had walked by the station and seen a painter applying a fresh coat of white to its facade, as if to cloak the poor state of its interior. Conditions in this police station, and in other places where migrants were detained after entering Greece, had drawn the attention of numerous human rights agencies. In this particular station, according to a Human Rights Watch report, migrants said they had slept on cardboard boxes and, because they had no access to toilets, urinated in a corner. Guards from the station were seen escorting detainees into the fields so they could defecate, and children and women were often confined to the same overcrowded, cramped space as men. Some detainees, according the report, said guards at the station beat and kicked them because they’d asked for water. Migrants nevertheless often voluntarily turned themselves in to police. Unlike in the United States, where the law allowed for authorities to more quickly deport illegally crossing migrants with no plausible asylum claim, EU law protected migrants from summary deportation in order to ensure they had an opportunity to apply for asylum. The Greek police therefore would initially detain entering migrants but later release them with a document allowing them to stay legally in the country for a limited period of time—usually a month, though sometimes longer. With that paper, one could travel legally to Athens and apply for asylum—a long process that very rarely ended in receiving it, but allowed migrants to legally extend their stay.

Tens of thousands of people passed through border towns like Tychero that year, their numbers increasing just as the country was entering a high point of its political and economic convulsions.
Greece was never an especially welcoming place for immigrants, but this was a particularly bad time. Afghan asylum seekers constituted the largest number of arrivals that year, though when they arrived, they found Greece did not offer them much if any assistance. At the same time, a large number of Pakistanis and an increasing number of Bangladeshis were arriving, hoping to find black-market jobs just as much of that work was drying up due to the economic collapse. The smugglers the migrants paid to get them to Greece were not forthcoming about the unpleasant realities they would encounter, and many received a very grim education upon their arrival. Those that knew better had no intention of staying in Greece, but planned to sneak on to another European country. They were coming for Europe, and though Greece was technically Europe, it wasn’t the Europe they had in mind. Asylum seekers had hopes to get to places such as Germany, Norway, or Sweden, where they had a realistic chance at being granted protection and the benefits this entailed. Unfortunately, getting out of Greece was often a lot harder than getting in.

On the sidewalk in Tychero that morning, most of the migrants were from Somalia. One route into Europe for Somalis at the time involved a flight from Africa to Syria and then an arduous trek on land through Turkey and into Greece. This provided a safer alternative to the common and more hazardous method of crossing the Mediterranean on the shaky, overcrowded boats that departed for Italy from Libya and often did not make it. One of the Somalis, an eighteen-year-old named Abdulkadir Osman, wore a black leather jacket that seemed a few sizes too big for his thin body. He had a slight fuzz of a mustache, and carried with him a large woman’s handbag that served as his suitcase. “The situation is so bad in Somalia,” he told me. “My country is very dangerous, especially for young people. Greece has peace and stability. It’s good to life for me.” That was about as much talk as anyone in his group of travelers could stomach. Having taken a short rest, everyone stood up and continued their procession to the police station
with the tired urgency of people expecting to be rewarded with a place to recover after a long trip.

Locals had gotten used to seeing migrants emerge from the farmlands to the east and wander into town. On the same road where I met the Somalis, I walked by a large café full of
kombolói-
tossing retirees. This appeared to be one of Tychero’s busiest establishments on a weekday. A few of the men sat at a table out front, and as I passed, they guessed my bearded face had come from Afghanistan. “Not exactly,” I said to them in Greek. They excused themselves for this mistake, but said they couldn’t be blamed, given the situation. “They dirtied up the whole country!” said one man, who was wearing a longshoreman’s cap. I probably made a disapproving face, because he felt the need to justify himself. “We’re afraid,” he said. “If you were an old man and saw fifty blacks walking down the street past your house—and I’m talking
very
black—wouldn’t you be afraid?” I told him I had just met a group of Somalis, and there was nothing scary about them. Another retiree intervened, thinking he could broker an understanding. “America is half filled with blacks and so he’s used to it,” he explained to his cohort. Sure, said the man in the cap, “but America is very big. Here, we’re just one handful. They’re going to fill the whole country.”

I’d heard such comments about the blackness of black skin and the “dirtying of the place” often enough that it no longer surprised me. In fact, shortly after I left the café, I got into a conversation with a stout, middle-aged Greek woman with thick-framed sunglasses as she waited for the bus. “They’re blacks,” she said of the immigrants she’d seen walking into town of late. “They are black, black.” Of course, the migrants didn’t bother her, she added, but then she proceeded to say things a bothered person would say. “They dirty up the place,” she said. “And the Bulgarians and the Gypsies. We eat their dirt.” I asked the lady if she knew anything about the conditions for migrants inside the police station in her town. She said it was “a joy” inside the station. “They have shelter,
food, and in the summer, they even bring catering,” she said. “And it costs money,” she added. “We’re working for the foreigners now.”

She seemed to be warming into a polemic, but we were both distracted by the presence of a woman in a plaid headscarf and a bandage on her forehead, walking down the street in the company of a boy who seemed about five years old and wore a yellow winter coat that said
JUNIOR LEAGUE
on it. “Salaam,” said the woman as she walked up to us. She was from Eritrea, she told me in pretty good English. I asked her what happened to her head and she explained that she had hit it against the ground when her legs gave out during her journey to Greece. She had crossed into the country several days earlier with her husband and two sons. The older boy, an eight-year-old, was still being detained even though the rest of the family had been freed. When border authorities had asked the boy where he was from, he wrongly answered “Somalia” because it was what he heard the other migrants around him say, the mother said. Because he gave a different answer than his parents, he was separated from them. The mixup meant that they had been waiting six days for their son to be freed, she said. During this time, the rest of the family had been staying in a partially built house up the road.

A bus pulled up and the Greek lady, who had remained silent, said good-bye and stepped inside. I then asked the Eritrean if she would show me the house where she was staying. She agreed and we walked uphill toward it, passing the desolate train station and, beside it, a series of tin-roofed sheds containing improvised cardboard mattresses on which migrants had slept. For their accommodation, the Eritrean family had opted to stay in the redbrick skeleton of a house someone had started building but never finished. Flattened cardboard boxes covered the gaps where the windows and doors were supposed to go. The family slept in a room with a large opening in the wall facing the street. On the ground was a stained mattress they had covered with cardboard
to insulate themselves from its filth. A couple of broken plastic yard chairs constituted the rest of the furniture. The neighboring room was blocked off with a pink “Hello Kitty”–themed towel behind which lived another family. Given these circumstances, the Eritrean mother and her child looked dignified and neat. The woman wore a white winter coat that was spotless, and the little boy was playful and smiling. I took out a camera and asked if I could take their photo, and the woman nodded. Standing at the opening to their temporary home, they posed. The boy decided on a standing position that he thought looked the coolest, like he had some boy-band pose in mind. His mother held her hands together in front of her stomach and looked off into the distance. She made an expression that seemed to contain sorrow, resolve, and fear all at once.

Her husband arrived from town, where he said he’d been making a few phone calls. He was a slim, scholarly-looking man. The family had walked from Eritrea to Sudan, he told me, and from there they boarded a Nile riverboat to Egypt. In Egypt, they paid for fake passports and flew to Istanbul, and from there they traveled to the border by walking much of the way. They left Eritrea, he told me, due to some troubles he’d had with the government, which he described as “very bad.” He asked me not to mention his line of work, the nature of the trouble, and other biographical details he thought might reveal his identity, because he was afraid for his extended family back home. He then excused himself. He and his wife wanted to go to the police station and visit their son.

In early 2008, an Afghan interpreter in Kabul who had worked for international troops, believing his life to be in danger from the Taliban, decided he ought to leave Afghanistan in a hurry. While working with foreign forces, he had met some Belgians and
found them to be quite nice, and so Belgium, he thought, might be a good place to go. The Afghan paid a smuggler 12,000 dollars to get him to Europe. He traveled for several months, passing through Iran and Turkey. In December, he entered the European Union by boat, arriving on the Greek island of Lesbos, a rugged, windswept place off the Turkish coast. In Greece, the Afghan learned that it would be much harder to move on to Belgium than he’d thought. A few years later, the story of his efforts to get there became the subject of a case before the European Court of Human Rights, which was tasked with determining whether Greece and Belgium had subjected him to torture.

On Lesbos, the Afghan, who in court records was identified only as MSS, was detained for one week and released with a piece of paper ordering him to leave the country. The Afghan did so, and arrived in Belgium a few months later, where he applied for asylum. According to a European Union regulation, however, the member country where a migrant first arrives is responsible for handling an asylum claim. For the Afghan, this meant that because he’d entered the European Union through Greece, Belgium could send him back. This practice was a source of resentment in Greece, as well as in Italy and Spain, because it placed a greater burden on them by virtue of their proximity to poorer and more violent parts of the world. Greeks had taken to calling their country “Europe’s basement,” where unwanted migrants were kept. In the Afghan’s case, Belgian officials contacted the pertinent Greek authorities and requested they take charge of the asylum claim. The Greeks didn’t respond. The Belgians, after a two-month wait, took the Greeks’ silence as an implicit acceptance of their request, and deported him. When the Afghan arrived in Athens by plane, he was detained in a holding center next to the airport. He said he was kept in a small space with twenty other detainees and “was given very little to eat and had to sleep on a dirty mattress or on the bare floor,” according to court records. Three days later, the
Afghan was released with a “pink card,” a piece of paper indicating he was an asylum seeker. Though it allowed him to stay in the country pending the outcome of a hearing, he had almost no chance of receiving asylum. The year he first arrived, no Afghan asylum seekers in Greece were given protected status the first time they applied for it, while other EU countries, on average, gave Afghans protection half the time.

After his release, the Afghan said, he lived in a park in central Athens. Two months later, he was arrested at Athens International Airport as he was attempting to get on a flight out of Greece with a fake Bulgarian identity card. Police detained him in the same place they’d put him the previous time. This time, the police beat him, the Afghan alleged. After seven days, he was released. About a year later—his asylum case in Greece still undecided—he tried to escape the country again through the port city of Patras on the northern Peloponnesian coast, where migrants often tried to sneak onto departing cargo ships to Italy. Greek police apprehended him there, then transported him across the country to the Turkish border, where they tried to force him and other migrants into Turkey, the Afghan said. Human rights groups had repeatedly documented allegations of this practice, referred to as a “pushback.” On this occasion, according to the Afghan, the plan was foiled by the presence of Turkish police on the other side.