Afterthoughts from the Balkan refugee camps
From the moment we had arrived to the first camp in Croatia, there was something amiss. Even with a truck load of supplies and four volunteers ready to dedicate their time and energy to help care for a mass of desperate people escaping destitution, the police officials there were sending us on what could instantly be recognized as an endless, pointless paper chase. Three of us were from countries with efficiently run bureaucratic structures, two from Germany, and one from the Netherlands, so following instructions to get to the necessary result seemed natural. Soon came the realization that these officials were sort of just making it up as they went along, so we had no choice but to follow the wild goose chase to see where it was going to lead us. This required that we go from one camp to another, and then wait another couple hours to be registered; of course, when we finally got back to the first camp, we contacted some other volunteers inside the camp who helped us get inside, but only because they knew a particular friendly police officer. We had to pretend as though we were already registered and we did all the paperwork, even though I suspect that this official registry system did not really exist. Welcome to the Balkans.
The three friends I had made were travelers who had no prior intention of going to refugee camps. The Germans were only about 19 but had both had dabbled in various sorts of activism in the past; they had planned on touring the coast of Croatia, but decided to interrupt their journey and head east after they were informed of the situation. The other friend was from the Netherlands, but had lived in Georgia for the last couple years. We all met up in a town called Vincovici, close to the border. We had stumbled upon one of the friendliest places I had ever visited; a horde of young people welcomed us guests, gave us a place to stay and donated some food and clothes. Many in the Balkans have already gone through a similar experience with refugees, and were empathetic to the cause. Though we had a healthy shipment of goods to bring to the border, not all of us were truly mentally prepared for what we were about to face; my friends it seemed, were traumatized from the first moment, frantically starting to hand out food while trying to hide their shocked faces with forced smiles.
Everything is subject to some sort of legalistic scrutiny presented as a safety or health issue, but more likely fueled by less noble intentions. For example, cooked food was not to be served, regardless of how hungry people were, because of health code violations; though nobody but volunteers would do anything about the sanitation issues anyway as evidenced by my having spent a couple hours dealing with human excrement. Any shipment of goods coming in or out of the camp, or going through borders, had to go through its own wave of paperwork. Some of these bureaucratic structures were expected, but others, actually seemed to make the problems much worse.
The situation in Croatia was bad, but nothing compared to what was happening in Serbia and Bulgaria. On the Bulgarian-Serbian border, an underlying blanket of xenophobia and intolerance continuously waters down the possibility for empathy. Groups of Afghan, Kurdish or Arab speaking refugees would show up tired, hungry and cold after going through miles of forest while running from Bulgarian legal and extralegal authorities. If they are caught, they are sent to horrid detention centers for an indefinable and arbitrary amount of time. Anything valuable would likely be stolen, either by officials or by gangs of refugee hunters, who have been recently thanked by Prime Minister Boyko Borisov for their service to the country. Repeatedly, I would hear about horrid camp conditions, or about how bad captors would treat them.
Though xenophobic policies are much less explicit in Serbia, it still does not bode well for those seeking safe passage. In most countries, refugees need to register as an asylum seeker to be able pass through the country by obtaining the so called, white slip; a piece of paper which explains that refugees have three days to get to an asylum in the country, but most want to keep moving west. However, since local mafioso control the bus and taxi transportation, even if they had a white slip; and decide to find their own way, police would bring them back to the border camp, ensuring that they would find a way to raise the money to only be using the transportation offered by the local police-mafia alliance. One particularly cold night, all the refugees were kicked out of the camp at simultaneously the bus prices were doubled. Many were forced to walk, but the likelihood that they would be picked up and sent to another camp was very high. If volunteers decided to help with transportation they could be charged with trafficking; while mafioso who would make prior deals with the police, would never have to worry about such charges. The guys waiting at the bus and taxi stops would not be too happy when volunteers would give refugees travel advice; information was gold as many people had no idea where they were. So from time to time, volunteers were faced with broken windshield wipers, stolen goods and other bullying tactics that would make their lives harder than needed to be.
The extent of police corruption in Serbia would depend on the particular shift of police. The police would extort money from non-Syrian vulnerable peoples in exchange for receiving their white slips; usually they were given out for free, especially to Syrians; the corruption was obvious because of the arbitrariness by which the police would extort money, sometimes giving them out for free, and sometimes taking up to 40 Euros. Without these papers, they would not be able to travel through the country. They would threaten refugees with violence or with threats of sending them back to Bulgaria, and everyone was aware of how the Bulgarian police were much less merciful. If the little money they had was not taken from them by the officials, it was taken by the Mafia who controlled the taxi and bus systems. In Croatia, this would not happen as there was more of a streamlined process, where refugees were taken to camps, given their papers and taken to Slovenia on buses. Like elsewhere, how refugees are treated in Slovenia depended on where they were from. There, it was easier to separate them by skin color, before nationality, to determine who in fact was from Syria, and who was more undesirable. Of course, a mass of paperless migrants would usually try and say they were from Syria.
I met a smuggler who assumed I was a refugee. After inquiring about the price of getting across the water, he replied, “well that depends on how safe you want it to be;” This is usually the attitude of all the various players who are profiting from the misery of others. Some of these people threatened lives by through a seemingly small act of selling fake life jackets. Others would threaten lives more directly, like smugglers who may take you in the opposite direction because either they were either secretly nationalistic, wanting you to go back wherever you came from, or because he is a part of a con group just passing you off to his friend who will also make money taking you back again. It is likely that those with the biggest return on their investments are those who have the connections to collude with right-wing state officials and gain contracts to build and frugally maintain their prison-like camps. Generally, there seems to be an alliance between xenophobic ideals and profit incentives that work together to justify the treatment of people who are just trying to escape the geopolitical power struggles that have produced such unbearable living conditions in their respective countries.
There are those who are more motivated by nationalism and hate, then by profit. A friend of mine, a volunteer from Spain, was attacked by a group of nationalists because he was mistaken for a refugee while he was taking a nap on a street corner. On the Serbian border, I met a lone Afghan survivor, who escaped the wrath of volunteer Bulgarian border brigades who caught every other person in their group of 22; he was a witness to the murder of two little girls killed by Iranian border officials.
A skeptical observer once asked if I suspected any of the stories to be exaggerations or lies that could be useful for their asylum claims. Plainly put, my opinion on the matter was that most were far too innocent and under educated to play such Machiavellian games. Many were illiterate. Being the first person one could speak to, and by offering some tea and blankets, and showing the tiniest amount of kindness, meant that I was the first person that that they would invest the last remaining ounce of trust in the world onto; which resulted in me drowning in an endless stream divulging information. Between the stories we would drink tea in silence, get into debates about god, or even wrestle. But similar stories would repeat over and over; they were far too outrageous, for them to be made up. Many times they would come to us freezing after having fallen into a river, either because it was a prudent thing to do to escape the border police, or by accident. On various occasions I heard some people say how Iran was easier to cross than Bulgaria; and being from Iran, this is something I thought was unbelievable at first, but it makes sense on second thought.
On one occasion, the gate to a playground that was right beside a camp situated inside a police station, remained open and for a glorious 15 minutes, it was so obvious that these were boys with pubescent stubbles on their faces, not bearded men. The moment was cut short, when the biggest mafia guy, the presumed leader of the local gang who would always be on his phone talking to the higher ups, and a couple of his lackeys came and kicked us out. Like the rest of the world, he told us to act like men not boys, and that the playground was for the local children, as if any of the local parents would send their children to play in a park next to a refugee camp. Meanwhile, the local media would portray the refugees as hordes of men coming across borders; and skew the conversation by asking, “why do they leave their wives behind? we do not want people who would leave their families behind;” The point was not information, the point of course is to spread their idea of how politics should be run; thus, distinctions between different types of refugees would only be made when they wanted to make the point that they should only help Syrians and everyone else was an economic migrant.
In reality, one reason the majority of refugees from Afghanistan were boys was that there was a very real possibility that the Taliban would knock on the door of their homes, and steal able bodied men to take up arms for them. A similar fate would bound them if they were caught on the border in Iran as they would marched to fight on behalf of Iranian interests in the war in Syria. I heard this story on three separate occasions from family members who were luckier than their counterparts, and able to escape Iran. Brothers would be sent to war to die as cannon fodder. I will always remember how one group of Afghans that was nice to me until they found out I was Iranian, and their mood changed; I did not want to probe.
In these lands, someone in my skin without the right papers could easily be sent to some camp. Particularly in Macedonia and Bulgaria, my passport would constantly be checked if I was walking through the cities. In Farsi, racism literally translates to something like ‘lineage worship’ which, when taken alone, seems like a valid form of prayer from the perspective of both an evolutionary-theory- driven secular modernity as well as from the overly idealized spiritual naturalism found in western understandings of native American cultures; but when some people decide to cut off this shared human lineage, based on arbitrarily ascribed attributes of group membership, like whiteness or nation states, for socio-political reasons, or in order to administer rule and power through ideological domination, they turn something potentially beautiful into something that would invoke fear, hatred and something which threatens life; like how the message of well being and good fortune symbolized by the sacred Svastika, out of a corruption of historical unity, was transformed to favor a poisonous notion of an invented “Aryan” membership under the symbolic frame of the Hakenkreuz. As we continue to send more of our cousins into camps that were once reserved for the wretched of the Third Reich, we are continually faced with the question of whether we will ever actually learn from history without continually reproducing the nightmares of our collective traumas.
