The Full Catastrophe (24 page)

The Greek government denied any wrongdoing and argued before the court that the Afghan had provided no evidence to support the allegations of degrading treatment. In a 2011 decision, however, the court deemed the Afghan’s testimony credible, citing two dozen reports from human rights organizations documenting repeated allegations of police abuse, pushbacks, the systematic detention of migrants in filthy conditions, and an asylum system whose primary purpose seemed to be to deny asylum. A glance through the reports revealed a dreadful picture. In one case, on the island of Lesbos, the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, found more than 850 migrants, including 200 unaccompanied
children—most of them Afghans—detained in an old warehouse, and one of the rooms filled with 150 women and 50 babies, many of them sick from the unsanitary conditions and overcrowding. In another case, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture visited the holding center next to the Athens airport—the place where the Afghan was twice kept—and recorded alleged “cases of ill-treatment at the hands of police officers” and instances in which migrants were “obliged to drink water from the toilets.”

The court found that both Greece and Belgium had violated the European Convention on Human Rights’ prohibition of torture and inhumane or degrading treatment. Greece, in essence, was the torturer, but Belgium was implicated too, for sending the Afghan there. The court acknowledged that Greece faced a greater migration burden than other European Union countries, but said this did not absolve it of its responsibility to uphold the law. The decision compelled EU nations to suspend the routine practice of sending asylum seekers back to Greece. Still, most migrants had to find a way to illegally sneak out of Greece to another European country in order to benefit from the ruling, and as the Afghan’s story made clear, that wasn’t always easy. At the same time, European politicians were exerting additional pressure on Greece to control its borders and make sure migrants didn’t make their way north. Many asylum seekers—particularly those without the financial resources to pay a smuggler—found themselves trapped by the geographic barriers that separated Greece from the desirable countries of the European Union—the Ionian Sea to the west, and the mountain ranges of the Balkans to the north. As one Afghan living in Athens around this time told me, Greece was like “a big cage.”

About fifteen miles north of Tychero, the Evros River bends past Soufli, a hillside town of red-tiled roofs and old brick
warehouses. The town, once home to a thriving silk industry, has the rust-belt feel of a bygone heyday, though silk-related tourism allows a faint economic pulse to persist. Soufli’s main street is about a third of a mile away from the Evros, and as a result, migrants who had just crossed the river frequently wandered past its bakeries and cafés. During my visit, locals used words like “dramatic” and “tragic” to describe the situation, though sometimes they seemed to be speaking as much for their own experience as for that of the migrants. The mayor, Evangelos Poulios, a man with a plump face who sat at his office desk in front of a large painting of the Last Supper, told me the town hadn’t experienced any crime as a result of the migrant influx. Still, he said, “at night, when the residents see someone, they get scared.” Also, he would have preferred his town’s reputation pertain more to its silk legacy than to its use as a migrant crossing point. “It makes a bad impression on visitors,” he said.

One morning, near the town’s train station, I met Ahmed Takia, a forty-year-old Algerian who was looking for food in trash cans. He was also harvesting whatever significant amounts of unburned tobacco he could find in discarded cigarette butts, with the goal of accumulating enough to roll a cigarette. Takia was tall and skinny, had a wrinkled, worn face, and wore a hooded knit sweater with a wolf’s head image on the front and back. During his travels he had turned his ankle, and was walking with a bad limp. The night before, he had slept on a bench outside the station house, which was locked up and out of use.

Takia didn’t speak much English, but we communicated in Spanish, which he had learned while working as a mechanic in Spain, and I had learned, at least rudimentarily, in an American high school. He told me he came from Oran, on Algeria’s Mediterranean coast, and had been hoping to get to Germany, where he had a brother living in Leipzig. He had planned to make it to Greece and find a job in order to raise more money to finance the
rest of the journey. Things hadn’t gone according to plan, though. After entering through the Tychero border station nearly a month earlier, he’d traveled around Greece, hopping on trains in search of work along with a twenty-three-year-old Algerian named Abdullah Takoi, who, as we were talking, was taking a nap on a train station bench underneath a European Union flag. The two couldn’t find any work, and had come back to the border broke and much thinner than when they started. Outside the station house was a luggage scale Takia could use to illustrate this. He got on and pointed to the seventy kilos indicated on the scale. He had left Algeria weighing nearly ninety. “I didn’t know,” Takia said. “My plan was to work and find my way. I didn’t know. I was thinking Europe. In the end, nothing.”

A bit later, I took a walk into town and bought a bag of
tiropites,
triangular cheese pies, then came back to the station. Takoi, the younger traveler, had woken up, and the three of us ate lunch. They told me they were waiting for a late-afternoon passenger train that would take them about thirty miles north along the Evros River Valley to the town of Orestiada. From there, they would make one last-ditch effort to find work, and then, if that failed, try to go back to Turkey. Takia told me that his traveling companion was a cook. “Mwa,” Takia said, kissing the tips of his fingers to indicate the quality of his friend’s work. The cook, who was still waking up, didn’t talk much, though. This changed when Takia began mentioning the Greek words they’d learned during their travels.
“Skoupidia,”
Takia said, or “garbage.” The cook added,
“Malaka,”
the ubiquitous Greek word of disparagement.
“Fige,”
he added, or “leave.” The cook then put them together in the order he was accustomed to hearing them.
“Fige, malaka,”
he said, grinning. I asked Takia if they knew any other words. Takia shook his head. “ ‘Hello?’ ” I said. “Can you say ‘hello’?” Takia shook his head again.

Another young man appeared in front of the station in a
jacket covered with Union Jacks and the words
FASHION & JEANS
. Blond-dyed locks hung from under his winter cap, giving him the appearance of a misplaced surfer. His name was Mohammad Soltani, and when he saw the cook, he gave him a big hug. I asked Soltani, who spoke English, if they were longtime friends. “No,” he said. “I just met him last night. But I’m happy to be alive.” Soltani explained that he had tried to cross the river back into Turkey early in the morning. He had wrapped his clothes in blue plastic bags and, wearing only a T-shirt and clenching his backpack in his teeth, waded into the Evros. Before reaching the halfway point, he was up to his chest in water and too tired to go farther, he said, so he turned back. He pulled down his pants to show us the red scratches from the bushes over his thighs and shins, and then sat down on a bench.

Soltani told me he was Afghan, but had been raised in Iran and was a convert to Bahaism. He was hoping his religious conviction would qualify him for asylum, but he hadn’t had any luck. Three years earlier he moved to Turkey, and he had recently decided to try to make it to Italy. In the Greek port city of Patras, he had twice hidden underneath a cargo truck that was to board an Italy-bound ship, but police found him both times.
“Malaka, malaka, malaka,”
they said while kicking him, he recalled. The hand with which he’d protected his face still didn’t work quite right, he said. He showed me a lump on his left wrist, and the last two fingers were slightly bent out of shape. He wasn’t the first migrant I’d met who claimed to have suffered a beating in Patras, and according to a joint report written by German and Greek human rights groups, migrants there were victims of systematic police violence. “Too much bad,” Soltani said. “This country not good. I think positive, but I have bad luck.”

A taxi driver then pulled up. A day earlier, I’d seen him among a group of eight local taxi drivers waiting outside the nearby Soufli police station for the daily release of detained migrants. The
drivers offered migrants the forty-five-minute ride to the nearest city, Alexandroupoli, on the Aegean coast, for a fee of eighty euros, and were not exactly forthright about the more affordable public transportation options that were available. This taxi driver didn’t want to tell me his name, but introduced himself as the president of the local taxi association. He was a pudgy man in sunglasses, and some of his bottom teeth were missing. “There’s no train today,” he said in Greek, expecting me to translate for him. I told him that the Algerians had been informed of a northbound train arriving around 4:00 p.m., which they intended to catch. “If they have no papers, they can’t get on the train,” the driver said. I told him they had papers. The taxi driver didn’t want to leave, however. At one point, he stepped onto the luggage scale. He weighed 100 kilos. He had lost a few kilos on account of a cold, he said; it was good to shed some weight.

A graffiti-covered train appeared down the tracks. The three migrants began to gather their bags and water bottles. The taxi driver tried to pantomime to them that they couldn’t get on it. I stood behind the taxi driver and shook my head to indicate to them that they shouldn’t listen to him. The Algerians rushed toward the train, Takia limping pathetically. They approached a train car with a large thumbs-up spray-painted on it. Before he boarded, Takia stopped to wave good-bye to me. I waved back. The conductor then disembarked from the train and looked down the platform. “Where are they going?” he asked me. I shrugged. He shrugged too, got back inside, and shut the doors. As the train pulled away, the Algerians waved to me from behind the windows. I waved back again. For a moment, it felt like there was cause to celebrate.

The train had let out a small, fashionably dressed Afghan man with a mop haircut. He looked around as if disoriented and asked me in English if I knew how he could get to Turkey. “I’m so tired,” he said. The taxi driver, using me as an interpreter, haggled with
him on a price to take him to the border, though they couldn’t come to an agreement. “Tell him if he goes back there, the Turks are going to beat him,” the driver told me before driving off. “They are not like us over here.” I was surprised that the driver showed interest in the welfare of the Afghan, though I suspected the comment was inspired by injured pride over the fact that the Afghan was choosing Turkey over Greece.

The Afghan, who didn’t want to tell me his name, asked me if I could show him where the police station was. I pointed down the railroad line, and he asked me if I could walk him over to it. On the way, he told me he had reached as far north as Belgrade, Serbia, where he had hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take him to a neighborhood where migrants lived. Instead, the driver called the police, who then kicked him out of the country. The Afghan ended up in Athens trying to figure out what to do. “Too many refugees,” he said. “Very bad living. No money. Sleeping in parks. I’m tired. Now I just go back. I’m finished.” We arrived at the police station, a yellow, cube-shaped building with a fenced-in plot in the back where migrants slept outside on dirty foam mattresses. At this point, I said good-bye, but the Afghan asked me if I could come inside with him and help translate. Before I could consider whether or not that was a good idea, an officer walked out of the station and motioned for us to come closer. He was a large man in boots and a blue uniform, though the official nature of his appearance was diminished by the
kombolói
he casually tossed with one hand. He asked what we wanted, and I told him that the Afghan wanted to know how he could go to Turkey. “If he wants to go back, he has to go the same way he came in,” the officer said. He then glanced in the direction of the river. Another officer popped his head out of the door and told us to come inside. We entered, and they closed the door behind us.

It was a small room surrounded by security monitors. The officer who had invited us in sat behind a desk. The look on his face
indicated boredom more than severity. If the Afghan wanted to turn himself in, the officer said, he could spend the night outside in a sleeping bag on one of the mattresses. In the morning, he would receive a form ordering him to leave the country within thirty days. He could then present this paper to Greek authorities at the border crossing, and they would let him return to Turkey, according to the officer. What the Turks would do with him, he had no control over. The Afghan stood there in silence and contemplated. “Don’t be afraid,” the officer with the
kombolói
said to the Afghan. The Afghan agreed—though I wondered if they would have just let him go if he hadn’t. They unlocked a door leading to the rest of the police station, and an officer met him on the other side. “Thank you,” the Afghan said as the door shut with a snap.

“Who are you?” the police officer behind the desk then asked me. I told him I was writing about the situation on the border, and he asked to see my identification card. He wrote down the information on a piece of paper. When he was done, he handed my card back. “Is it the Jews?” he said. “Is it the Americans? I don’t know. But someone is behind this,” he said of the migration phenomenon the country was experiencing. The officer with the
kombolói
then added: “We’ve become the basement of Europe.” I asked them if Frontex, the European Union border agency, which was increasingly involving itself in operations in Greece, had been at all helpful. “That hasn’t helped at all,” said the one behind the desk.

He then pointed to a little white trailer house outside the police station. “They just sit in there. They come in in the morning, they take down their information, and then they leave. And they get paid twice as much and more.” The Frontex official in the trailer, I inferred, was trained to determine the nationality of the migrants, an important step in determining who was potentially eligible for asylum. “I’m not the one who knows about these things, but someone is behind this,” the officer behind the desk
went on. “Is it a Muslim jihadist plan?” he said. The one with the
kombolói
added: “They will call for a jihad one day, and then they will stab you. Not with a knife, but with a fork.”