by Nick Thorpe
Erdoğan accepted that advice. On the flight to Istanbul, an F16 fighter from the plotters’ airbase at Akinci, north-west of Ankara locked onto Erdoğan’s plane. Whoever on the plane was supposed to pull the trigger, changed his mind, and Erdoğan survived. The Turkish president then went live on CNN-Turk, via the FaceTime app on the stunned reporter’s phone, to tell the nation he was still in charge. Erdoğan also appealed to loyal Muslims to gather at their local mosques to defend the legally elected government. Troops hesitated, then sided with the regime, against the plotters. By three in the morning, Erdoğan was back in full control, and mass retribution began against those who had been so bold as to try to overthrow him.
The airports of Istanbul and Ankara were closed from Friday evening to early Sunday morning. I reached Sofia on Saturday evening, then flew in with a small BBC team on one of the first flights. President Erdoğan had survived assassination and the overthrow of his thirteen-year-old government by a whisker. Even liberal friends of mine in Turkey, sworn opponents of Erdoğan, were relieved. If the coup had succeeded, they told me, ‘there would have been a civil war here’.
A week later, a forty-page, de-encrypted translation of the discussions between the coup plotters on their own WhatsApp group showed just how close they had come to toppling the government, and how ruthlessly. I stayed for two weeks in Turkey, partly in Ankara, mostly in Istanbul, reporting on the daily outpouring of joy and indignation by supporters of Erdoğan’s AK Party (Justice and Development party). Governments around Europe and in North America were a little slow to congratulate Erdoğan on his remarkable survival. And quick to condemn him for the crackdown which followed.
One of the key questions on many minds was: how would the failed putsch and its aftermath affect the conflict in Syria and Iraq? How would it affect Turkey’s conflict with the Kurds, and their aspirations to finally carve out an independent Kurdistan, including segments of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran? And above all, for the purposes of this book, how would it affect the EU–Turkey deal on slowing the flow of refugees to Europe?
Milat was twenty, from Afghanistan. He had been in Istanbul for nearly six months, trapped by the EU–Turkey agreement. Like most other Afghans in Turkey who reach Istanbul, he had gravitated to the Zeytinburnu district. Zeytinburnu, which means ‘the cape of olive trees’, slopes steeply down towards the sea, its main street decorated with shops and banks and restaurants, tailing off at the bottom in a sprawl of new building around the unfinished motorway out to the airport. Beyond that was the park, with its tall poplar trees and weekend crowds. When Milat’s money ran out he moved down the hill to live in the park. As military jets screamed overhead on the fateful Friday night, he and his friends huddled under the flyover. The town was rife with rumours that a curfew was coming into force, and all foreigners would be caught and deported. One of his friends, sitting on the grass nearby, listening to our conversation, said he was afraid that the war they had escaped in Afghanistan was now following them here. All expressed relief that the coup had failed. They also spoke of their gratitude to Turkey, and to Erdoğan personally, for ‘tolerating’ their presence in the country. But also of their frustration that they remained invisible and illegal here, with no official recognition of their plight. Syrians were the ‘first-class’ refugees, they said. Afghans came a poor second on the refugee ladder.
Mohammed, nineteen, from Panshir province agreed. ‘There are lots of problems in Afghanistan, that’s why we are here. Neither the government nor the UN care about us.’ ‘There was a family living here under the bridge, and one of them was very ill. No one could help. Without a residence card, the doctors will not treat you. Finally another Afghan took him to hospital.’ Most likely the stranger paid for the treatment from his own pocket. Likewise, without a residence card, they were not allowed to work.
Why don’t they just carry on to Europe? I asked, hearing Viktor Orbán curse me over my shoulder as I spoke.
The sea route is closed. We can get to the Bulgarian border easily. The Turkish police let us go. But we know we will be caught three, four, five times by the Bulgarian police, and thrown back. And each time we will be beaten. Maybe the fifth time we will get through. We will pay all our money to the smugglers, who will also abuse us. Then we will be caught and beaten many more times by the police in other countries. Only the bravest young men attempt this. Instead we will wait here, hoping that Europe will open its borders again.
Mustafa from Kabul had already reached Bulgaria twice. ‘We crossed the border and spent five days hiding in the jungle. Then the police caught us. They were very rough with us. They hit us, then put us in prison for a month. Some days there was no food at all.’ He had decided not to try again through Bulgaria. ‘I might die on the way.’ He too had decided to stay in Istanbul and ‘wait for Europe to open the gates again’. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Europe never would.
A small boy, perhaps ten years old, in a pale grey tunic, was weaving his way through the weekend crowds in the park beside the Marmara Sea. Freight ships lay lazily at anchor offshore, waiting for their place in the long line of marine traffic down the Bosphorus to the Black Sea. Bold young men swam off the rocks, perhaps toughening themselves up for the long hard trek ahead through the Balkans. Local Turks and Afghans, to my untrained eye almost indistinguishable from each other, fanned little fires into life, to cook their food. There was the smell of meat cooking, and smoke drifting across the afternoon. On one side of the park a ring of onlookers formed around two men wrestling. A little girl on a tricycle rode past, flying a cluster of pink balloons above her, like candy-floss.
The boy was called Yunus, and had the sweetest, most innocent smile. His tunic was clean and ironed, and he carried in his hands a green plastic basket covered with a cloth. He could recognise the Afghans in the park easily, he said. He wove from one cluster to the next, selling the flatbreads for one Turkish lira apiece, which his mother made every night. Would he take me to her? Yes, but only when his entire pile of breads was sold, and he had only just begun.
We walked up into Zeytinburnu. Mohammed Zaman was living in a two-room apartment with his daughter-in-law, her two sons, and Mohammed’s four nephews. He was separated at the Iranian-Turkish border from his wife and four other sons when the Iranian police opened fire on them. Half the family made it across the border and got as far as Munich, while he and the others were forced back. Initially they went back all the way to Afghanistan. Now they were trying to reach Germany again – but the EU–Turkish deal had blocked their way. He had run out of money, and the landlord was threatening to evict them. He was turning to one relative after another – in Afghanistan – to ask if they could send him money. He was a plain-clothes policeman at home, and was threatened by the Taliban for that reason, he said.
‘My wife is sick in Germany in hospital. The children have been given a flat to live in, but she is sick with worry. We feel as if a kind of Berlin Wall separates us from the rest of our family.’
I asked about attacks in Germany in which fellow Afghans had been implicated. How did he feel towards the perpetrators?
‘There are good and bad people everywhere. People who carry out such attacks have no sense of humanity, of compassion. And they create such a big problem for people like us. For the refugees.’
Perhaps they were not really Afghans, he added. Some of the Pakistanis and Iranians who have gone to Germany registered as Afghans, because they thought that would increase their chances of getting asylum. ‘You can buy fake documents very cheaply in Afghanistan, and unfortunately the Germans don’t check these as well as they should . . . Long ago when I was young, British, German and American tourists came to our country. They cherished our hospitality. We are not bad people. But politics destroyed all this.’
Mujeeb was twenty-six, recently married, and working in an Afghan restaurant in Zeytinburnu. He came here not as a refugee, but to work. The restaurant was run by his wife’s uncle. His plan was to stay in Turkey
and raise his family. I asked him about the Afghan flags waved at rallies in support of the president, since the failed coup.
President Erdoğan is very famous in Afghanistan for two reasons. First, we are actually the same race and speak similar languages, Uzbek and Turkmen. Second, some support him because they regard him as a very good Muslim, because of the solidarity he expresses for his fellow Muslims. They say he is the best, or even the only good Muslim leader in the world.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE WOMEN OF ADAŠEVCI
People who have just economic problems don’t want to come any more, but those who have political or security problems are moving, they have no other choice. No one wants to leave their own homeland without any reason.
Ali Sadat, Afghan refugee
This crisis is a test of our common humanity – whether we give in to suspicion and fear and build walls, or whether we see ourselves in one another.
Barack Obama, UN Summit on Refugees, September 20161
The Adaševci refugee camp sits awkwardly in a motorway service station on the Belgrade to Zagreb highway, just before the Croatian border. On the far side of the motorway, underneath a MOL petrol sign, a board reads: Preševo 480 kilometres. Most refugees in Serbia crossed from Macedonia near Preševo. The refugee camp in Preševo, on the site of a former tobacco factory, is where they first claim asylum in Serbia. The sign is a reminder of how far they have come and how far they still have to go. For now, they are stuck in Serbia, up to ten thousand of them in thirteen camps or sleeping rough, stopped or delayed in their tracks by the Hungarian fence.2
Men and women asylum seekers milled around in front of the former motel, now the central building of the camp, under a sky of dark grey clouds, threatening rain. Only a hundred metres away, long-distance motorists filled up their fuel tanks, and dawdled over a coffee and a pastry, a punctuation mark on their own, easier journeys. Few refugees had the money to buy anything there.
Katan, a middle-aged Yazidi woman from Iraq, sat with her three children on a bunk bed in a giant white UNHCR tent, just behind the main building. She was ill, with asthma and high blood pressure. They were on their way to Germany, she explained, to join up with her husband who went ahead of them. Other Yazidi women helped them get this far. I imagined how hard it was for this woman, who could only walk slowly and painfully, to make the long trek across the Turkish-Bulgarian border, dodging Turkish and Bulgarian police, and Bulgarian vigilantes. I asked if I could take her photograph – she refused, shyly, ashamed of her appearance, of the lines of worry etched onto her face, of her charity clothes. ‘Please, photograph my children, but not me.’ So her children sat on the triple bunk bed, with green metal frames and grey blankets, to gaze into my camera. Neither of the boys smiled. They looked with big brown eyes full of hope deep into my lens. The boy on the right clutched a toy jeep. The little girl wore a grey stripy sweatshirt with the number 32 in stars, and a white skirt with pink blobs over her red trousers. They posed again for me in the doorway of the tent, as the rain started to fall heavily again. More children joined them, and the visit of this stranger started to get more fun, so they began to smile. In the background, their mothers or older sisters appeared, clutching mineral water bottles or mobile phones.
In the dining room in the main building there was a great hubbub of Arabic, Persian and other languages. The main subject of conversation was the suicide of a young Afghan man the day before. Only twenty-one, he hanged himself in the woods on the far side of the motorway, because he couldn’t bear the months of waiting for the chance to enter Hungary legally, through the transit zones.
On the walls of the dining room were twenty sheets of names, followed by nationality, language and the number of children travelling with them, if any. Twenty-five names on each, 500 adults, plus children – the current population of Adaševci. This was also my first glimpse of the lists of people waiting to enter the Hungarian transit zones. Single men had to wait longest, many months. The most vulnerable women and children should wait the shortest time. But this was not an exact science. The lists were torn, and barely legible in places. Sometimes a nationality or a language was crossed out, or replaced by another. The lists gave the impression of a long queue of people, all jostling to move forwards, some overtaking others, others getting left behind. A young Somali man let me take his photograph in front of the lists. Then he ran his finger up and down the rows in vain. He could not find his own name.
I had heard that many women and children were travelling the Balkan route alone, and I wanted to know why. Zahra Husainy was in her late twenties, a handsome, dignified, determined woman from the Hazara tribe in Afghanistan. She was born in exile in Iran and married a fellow Afghan there. Her husband then ran away with another woman to Europe, in 2015. His family demanded that she and the children move in with them. She refused, borrowed money from her own parents, and set out to Europe with the children, a girl aged thirteen and a boy aged four. As she talked, in a relatively comfortable room upstairs in the ex-motel, her son and I rolled a ball to and fro across the floor.
‘When we started the journey we were alone, but on the route good people accompanied us. In the boat from Turkey to Greece we fell into the sea, but were rescued from the water. The second time we tried to cross, we succeeded.’ The family spent four months in Greece, received more money from her parents, then carried on north.
The worst part of the journey was crossing from Greece to Macedonia, she said. They had to walk and run through the woods for sixteen hours, as the Afghan smugglers acting as their guides threatened to hit them if they did not go faster. ‘We will beat you all the way to Serbia,’ they told her. Her daughter was ill and she herself was fainting with hunger. They lost their last possessions, the few things they had managed to keep with them all the way from Iran, on the railway track in Macedonia. They came the rest of the way with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
She did not want to talk about sexual violence. Two single men had travelled the last part of the way with her to Serbia. Originally they seemed kind and helpful, she said, but now they were threatening her. They wanted her to tell the Hungarian authorities that they were her relatives. She refused, but they had somehow managed to get their names on the list next to hers. She told the Serbian authorities. They told her that they could do nothing, but she should tell the Hungarian authorities when she reached the transit zone. If she did, the men threatened to harm her and her children. They had already beaten her, and pulled her hair, she said. She was desperate. There were many similar stories. The Hungarian fence was turning northern Serbia into a pressure cooker, where the refugees fought each other for a place in the queue. Refugees also tried to bribe the Serbian authorities to move their names up the list. I heard many allegations that the bribes were both solicited and accepted.
Because single men had to wait so long to get a place in the Hungarian transit zone, they tried to persuade, or force women and children to pretend they were family members, in order to get into Hungary quicker. What were her plans when she reached Germany, I asked. Would she try to find her ex-husband, the father of her children? ‘I don’t know anybody in Germany,’ she said. ‘I have no more contact with him because he had bad relations with another lady.’
Ali Sadat, an Afghan refugee confirmed her story. Why didn’t people travel with smugglers through Croatia, as the camp was so close to the Croatian, rather than the Hungarian border? I asked. Some did, he confirmed, but ‘every day the borders are getting harder to cross. The fences are not the problem, the problem is the dogs and the police who turn their dogs on you.’ In his experience, the Bulgarian and the Hungarian police were the worst.
Ali spoke Arabic, English, Urdu, Hindi, Pashtu, Farsi and Russian – some of which he had learnt on the journey – ‘the refugee trail is a great university!’ He laughed. Because of his language skills, he was much in demand by the Serbian Refugee Secretariat, and the NGOs and charities in the camp. With his cheerful manner and boundl
ess energy, he was also popular with the other refugees. Using UN blankets, he built a rough volleyball court to help fill the empty hours in the camp.
Ali was travelling with his four sisters, and had come from Greece through Albania and Kosovo – the first refugee I had met who used that route. The mountains of Albania were the only place on the route where he regretted ever starting his journey. They walked in a group of fifteen people, without a guide, following the maps on his mobile phone. Others who tried to cross Albania were not so lucky, he said; some ended up in prison for six months.
Why were so many women on the journey pregnant? I asked. ‘Many get pregnant before they set out, because they think that if their children are born in Europe, the family will have more chance to stay,’ he said. But the long delays at country after country and the hardships of the journey meant many women gave birth on the way, often in poor conditions. ‘It’s not fair that some countries opened the route then closed it again, because many people were encouraged to set out.’
The message of just how hard the route had become was getting back. ‘People who have just economic problems don’t want to come any more, but those who have political or security problems are moving, they have no other choice. No one wants to leave their own homeland without any reason.’ On the screen above his head in the crowded dining area, Arsenal were leading Hull one-nil.
Outside, I met Fasal Amin, a young Afghan who had already reached Germany successfully once. There, he found out that his wife, parents, and three children had all been killed by a roadside bomb near Kabul. The German authorities gave him the €700 he needed for the flight back. He spent a month there, buried his loved ones, then set out for Germany again, distraught and deeply traumatised. There was nothing, and no one left for him in his own country. He spoke sometimes loudly, waving his hands around, then suddenly quietly, almost a whisper against the buzz of trucks, passing on the highway. Could such a man ever be happy again, after all he had been through? Only adrenalin kept him going, and the constant roar of his own grief.