Following in refugee footsteps

Three years ago, from a roadside in Kabul, I witnessed one of many refugee camps clinging to the outskirts of the sprawling city. The people inside were the survivors of another freezing winter in which young an old alike had frozen to death due to the hard choices between buying wood, food or clothing. They were the ‘internally displaced’ of southern Afghanistan, fleeing from fighting in Helmand between Taliban, local groups, and troops from my own country. Without means of provision, without employment, without hope and without freedom of movement, they, like the many others, were confined to scratching out a survival as best they could. 

Back then people had been smuggling themselves out of the Afghanistan for some time, propelled by enduring conflict and a lack of economic progress, pulled by peace and prosperity elsewhere, escape at all costs was the solution – if you could afford it. During my flight home I was intrigued: how do people with minimum means escape, what is their route; who are the smugglers, how might they reach Europe? Over the next couple of years my migrations would haphazardly follow theirs.

Next stop, Istanbul. In among the cafés and canteens in the immigrant rich part of town people were trapped in similar circumstances to Afghans; but this time they came from a wider world: from Syria, from Palestinian territories, from failed African states. With no access to offical work in Turkey, people faced the similar frustrations of thwarted life opportunities. Those on the move were literally being fenced in – along the Bulgarian and Greek borders wire walls were springing up. People were smuggling themselves through European borders in the engines of trucks and suffocating on exhaust gases or frying in the process.

People filled with the promise of something better, but frustrated in their progress towards it, will always embody a ‘nothing left to loose’ desperation, ripe for exploitation. Incidentally, it should be noted that at this very moment no less than nine ethnic, sectarian or separatist civil wars are spread out in an arch stretching from Pakistan to Nigeria: North West Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Israel Palestine, Libya, Sudan, Nigeria – not to mention frozen conflicts – so there is seemingly no end to those with nothing left to loose.

Following the smuggling routes my journey continued to Kosovo – another country once ravaged by conflict but in comparison to Afghanistan a paragon of peace and progression, if not prosperity for all. People were confined here too; with a startling 70% unemployment among the young. There were rumors of smuggling routes out, but the dam of frustration was to burst in a much more dramatic way. Stories spread that Germany was allowing people to seek work, and when visa restrictions were dropped to travel to neighboring Serbia, tens of thousands sold up, bought bus tickets, and walked frozen fields on the Hungarian border to the Schengen zone. Many returned empty handed when their asylum claims were refused.

Simultaneously the borderlands of the Balkans were bursting, sending hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees along railroad tracks and roads to northern Europe. What had started as a slow stream was now a tidal wave. Please excuse if these words are politically incorrect, but it’s next to impossible to find any other metaphor, other than the drama of flood, to describe the scale. and the scenes of chaos.

Gevgelija, Macedonian-Greek Border 2015