by Nick Thorpe
‘When I saw the pictures from Munich, of all the welcome banners and crowds on the railways station in September 2015, I thought: this is all very well, but this is where the hard work begins,’ he tells me. It’s a pattern which has been repeated all over Germany, which has proven central to the integration process – local citizens of all ages, but especially those with time on their hands, stepping forward to adopt, mentor or guide the immigrants. While the local authorities can organise a certain amount, through the Job Centres, in terms of funding, studying and finding a flat, it is these personal relationships which really help the refugees most.
Ludwig and I sip fruit juice in the living room, which Marah insists that we drink in the hot evening, though we weakly protest that we ought, like her, to keep the fast for another hour. Ludwig tells me about a new citizens’ initiative in the town, against the refugees. A friend of his came to ask if he would like to be involved in a rival citizens’ initiative, made up of people who actively support the refugees, but Ludwig said no. He doesn’t want to get mixed up in the politics, he says. It’s enough for him to help a family like Marah’s on a daily basis. That’s what he would like his contribution to be. He would take part in such a group, however, ‘if it comes to that.’ And will it? I ask. It could go either way, he concludes.
The food arrives, dispelling all fears, real or imagined. Little pastries like Indian samosas, but with spinach and soft cheese in them. A great spaghetti bake, in a tomato sauce with cheese on the top, and all kinds of European and Middle Eastern salads.
Mulhouse, France
The train from Freiburg to Mulhouse crosses the Rhine. There are slim German cyclists, like spiders in their tight rubber cycling gear, nursing their expensive, lightweight machines and brilliant fluorescent helmets. Two elderly couples, also German, loudly lament the attitudes of modern youth.
The journey into France only takes twenty minutes. Mujeeb is waiting for me at the station, wearing what looks like the same black waiter’s shirt he wore for his job in the Afghan restaurant in Istanbul in July 2016. He helped translate for the Afghan refugees living in the park on the shore of the Sea of Marmara, or in their cheap rooms in the Zeytinburnu district, sloping down steeply to the water’s edge.
A few months after I left Istanbul, the Taliban rang him. He saw on his phone that it was an Afghan number, and answered it thinking that it must be a friend or relative. ‘We know where you live,’ said the voice. The voice told him his own address, where he was living peacefully with his wife and two small children, after fleeing the Taliban in 2015. In Turkey, unlike most other refugees, Mujeeb had money in his pocket, a Turkish visa and residency papers, and a steady job. With his father-in-law, he set up the restaurant in a district where many Afghans live, and it soon became a successful business and a focal point for the local Afghan as well as the Turkish community. That proved to be a mistake. He was too visible, and soon the Taliban tracked him down.
The root of all his and his family’s problems was his brother Hasib’s work as a journalist for French NATO troops at the Kapisa airbase in western Afghanistan from 2009 to 2012. Radio Omid FM was no ordinary radio station. It was a controversial propaganda tool in the war NATO was fighting against the Taliban. The public were encouraged to contact the station to inform on fellow Afghans working for the insurgents. The French soldiers in Task Force La Fayette, with their fleet of attack helicopters, killed many Taliban commanders and foot-soldiers.8 As a presenter, Hasib’s voice became well known on the airwaves, and the threats against his life and those of the other staff at the radio multiplied. When the French forces pulled out in 2012, they took Hasib with them, and gave him refugee status in France. But they left his father, mother, two brothers and sister behind. They became the subject of almost daily threats. The message was always the same: persuade Hasib to return to face Taliban ‘justice’ for collaborating with the enemy, or face Taliban revenge themselves, in his place.
At first the family hoped they were bluffing. Then in September 2014 Mujeeb was just arriving home to his flat when four armed and masked men seized him, and bundled him into a waiting car. His head was forced down between his knees, so he couldn’t see where they were taking him. One of his captors hit him on the back of the head with the butt of his gun. He was saved by a police checkpoint. He was suddenly pushed out of the car, and his captors fled.
The incident shocked the family. Mujeeb, his wife and their baby daughter were sent to Istanbul. The other family members moved house again. Everything appeared to be going well, till that phone call. ‘Your brother’s actions resulted in the deaths of many of our men. You must persuade him to return to Afghanistan. Tell him his father is sick.’ Mujeeb refused. The calls continued. ‘Do not think we cannot harm you in Istanbul. We have our people there too. If you do not send your brother home, we will kill you.’
Mujeeb consulted with his family, and they agreed that he should follow his brother to France and seek asylum there. In the meantime, his wife and children should change their address and follow Mujeeb as soon as possible.
As a legal resident in Turkey, it was not difficult to get a forty-five-day visa for the Schengen group of countries. He flew to Germany then took the train to the town in France where his brother lives. His brother’s daughter is seriously ill and the family is often with her in hospital. That particular town was full of refugees. Mujeeb decided to try Mulhouse, thinking that his chances would be greater. He could not have known that, after clearing the ‘jungle’ camp in Calais of several thousand asylum seekers in late 2016 and early 2017, the French authorities sent many of the refugees from Calais to Mulhouse.
‘The first interview, at the regional capital in Colmar, was awful,’ Mujeeb explains. ‘They didn’t believe my story, shouted at me, accused me of lying, of withholding information that they had not even asked for. The man told me he was fed up with ‘lying immigrants’. But what I told him was simply the truth.’
Mujeeb and I sit in a cybernet café and try to find more about Radio Omid to strengthen his case. There’s an article in the daily Libération about the French military’s war of attrition against the Taliban. Unconfirmed sources told the reporter that the French troops based at Kapisa killed around 150 Taliban insurgents over the twelve months leading to October 2009, including nearly half in the valley of Alassaï. ‘Such results allowed the French military contingent to reestablish their credibility with the US commanders,’ concluded the reporter.
Most importantly for Mujeeb, there’s an interview with a French journalist, Raphael Krafft, who visited the base at Kapisa and witnessed the operation of the radio station first-hand. We write to the journalist on Facebook, and within minutes he replies. We start printing out documents to strengthen Mujeeb’s case.9
His immediate concern was shelter. Apart from staying at his brother’s place, he has rented a cheap room above a restaurant. His room is at the end of a long, gloomy corridor, and the doors are padded, like in a brothel or a Communist-era ministry in Eastern Europe. But there are gashes in the padding, as though someone has attacked the doors with a knife. Mujeeb’s room has the musty smell of unwashed laundry, and a view of the street. He’s got about €500 left of the €2,000 he came to Europe with. He’s trying to save every penny.
We sit at a café in the square in front of the cathedral. He is fasting, so I can’t even buy him a sandwich. A choir of Frenchmen suddenly assemble and start singing patriotic songs. Tourists start photographing them. The bells of the cathedral chime every fifteen minutes.
I always try to be optimistic. Coming to France now is my last and only opportunity to escape from the Taliban. I must just do my best and hope I can get refugee status for myself and my family.
You cannot live with something very bad in your mind, that maybe you will be killed tomorrow or the next day, you cannot plan your life in this way.
To make matters worse, he has lost his passport. He took a late-night bus from his brother’s town back to Mulhouse, w
hich involved changing buses. He thinks he left the passport in a café while he was waiting for the next bus, but he’s not sure. A stranger in a strange land, he asked his brother’s advice. ‘Forget the passport,’ he told him, ‘you won’t need it now anyway.’ I disagree. After meeting so many people who destroyed or threw away their papers, I know how hard it is for them that they simply cannot prove who they really are. I suggest he contacts the café, and then the police. He has nothing to lose. He will think about it, he says.
He spends a lot of time, worrying about his wife and children. What will he do if France rejects his asylum request? I ask.
‘I have no other plan. If I get rejected its really the start of another big disaster in my life.’ His children don’t understand where he is, and why he never comes home. ‘It’s so hard when they always ask me, when are you coming home?’
It’s very hard, when you had a very lovely life in your own country, and then you have to leave everything, your family, your friends, all your material things, your furniture, your car. But you leave everything behind and move to another country, and work so hard to make another life. And then you have to leave that too.
We make a plan to meet some other asylum seekers to go to the mosque together. Each evening during Ramadan, the Turkish Al Aksa mosque in Mulhouse provides free food – a godsend for poor refugees like Mujeeb. It’s a long walk through the town, but they never waste money on public transport.
Omar Farhad from Laghman province in Afghanistan is one of our small group, winding our way through the French streets to the long-awaited meal. There’s no point in hurrying though, as food will not be served until after the sun goes down. So we talk.
‘I was hoping to go to England, but I got stuck in the Jungle at Calais for six months,’ Omar explains. Thanks to all the publicity about it, when it was closed down in December 2016, the French interior minister promised that all those moved from there would be treated well.10 And he kept his promise. Omar was given a place in a pleasant, shared flat in Mulhouse, with a shower, kitchen, a TV, a fridge, ‘everything’, he says happily. And pocket money. Unlike in Germany, asylum seekers in France have to pay their own rent from the €330 they receive a month. That leaves Omar with €220 to live on a month. The office in charge of immigration in France is called the OFII.11 After the initial interview, it can take six months to a year to get the second, decisive interview. If your application is turned down at that point, you can appeal – which takes another six months to a year. In the meantime, you are living in limbo.
‘It’s hard to make a long-term plan, all we can hope for is to live in security and good conditions. I have made friends here, who came here long ago. I just hope one day I can live like them,’ says Omar.
Two weeks after I left Mulhouse, I get a cheerful message from Mujeeb. The OFII have recognised that he is a genuine asylum seeker, and have given him a room of his own and some money to live on in another town. He sends photographs. A bed with clean white sheets. A peaceful, rural scene outside his window.
Luzern, Switzerland
The train from Mulhouse takes me south to Basel, where I change for Zurich, then again for Luzern. Switzerland seems even more affluent, more picture perfect than Germany, a soap opera landscape where everyone has perfect teeth and appears to be wearing new clothes.
I first met Saboor, a journalist from Afghanistan, at the camp at Horgoš on the Serbian border, in June 2016. He lived there for four months. Several weeks after we met he cut through the fence into Hungary. He was caught, beaten and pepper-sprayed by the police, then put in prison for a month. Then he was sent to the open camp at Vámosszabadi, near Györ. A man there gave him a number for a smuggler. Which country would you like to go to? The man asked. ‘Any country where I will be safe,’ he answered. They settled on Switzerland.
He was put in the back of a lorry – alone. Three days later he climbed out, in Basel, and went in search of the nearest police station. It was 30 August 2016. ‘For the first eight days I was imprisoned in a basement in the Klausenberg camp in Sarnen canton. It was a crazy place – everyone there complained. The food was not good, the behaviour of the staff was not good, there were no facilities and the governor told us she hated refugees.’ Klausenberg is one of six ‘reception and processing’ centres, run by SEM, the State Secretariat for Migration.12 It was on a mountainside, far from everywhere – a frequent complaint of asylum seekers in Switzerland. ‘I felt like I was a criminal. I came to Europe and found myself in a prison for refugees! When I was in Afghanistan I was in danger from the Taliban and IS and other groups who searched for me to kill me. But here in Europe life is not good. I feel like I’m being killed every day.’
After three months he was transferred to another camp called Sonnenhof, in Luzern canton. Under Swiss asylum law, the cantons (there are twenty-six in Switzerland) take over responsibility for the care of each applicant. Luzern has a particular problem at the moment, as a tax-break for companies failed to provide the expected level of new investment. Tax incomes for the canton fell sharply, and asylum seekers were among the first to suffer from a fall in the available budget.
Asylum rules have also become more draconian in the country in recent years, under pressure from the governing right-wing Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party), the SVP. It became the strongest political party in Switzerland at the 2015 elections, with 29 per cent of the vote and 65 seats in the 199 seat Parliament.13 The cold shoulder Saboor felt was largely due to the rise of the SVP and its anti-immigrant stance. What he didn’t know was that at least as an Afghan he had a chance of getting status. Applicants from Balkan countries were usually rejected within forty-eight hours, and from certain African countries within two weeks, under the ‘accelerated expulsion procedure’ pushed through by the SVP and approved at a referendum in June 2016.
Conditions at the Sonnenhof camp were somewhat better, Saboor told me. It was an open camp, he could come and go, there was even a shop nearby where could buy small things like biscuits. In each camp there was a system of minor punishments which he found unnecessarily oppressive. When you left the camp you had to check out and in again on your return with the chip-card you were given. If you forgot, money was taken off your monthly allowance. And there was a string of other slight breaches of camp rules which he said were interpreted over-zealously by the camp authorities. However hard anyone tried, each ended up losing 20 to 30 francs of their precious 280 francs allowance each month. And the sanctions regime put each inmate in a permanent state of tension with the authorities, Saboor explained. They were treated as naughty children, not adult asylum seekers with wounded self-esteem. Certain inmates also received preferential treatment on the basis of skin colour or language, he suggested. In due course he was transferred from there to his current home, half an hour by train from Luzern. I had no opportunity to put his views to the SEM, but according to an overview of asylum practices in each country, published by the pro-immigration European Council for Refugees and Exiles: ‘The interests of the asylum seekers are hardly taken into account in the allocation system . . . This system is problematic, as it fails to seize opportunities that would facilitate integration, such as language or further family ties.’
It would have been easier to bear the little indignities if time was not passing so slowly, Saboor told me. He had already spent nine months in the new camp, and there was no news about his asylum request. According to SEM statistics, Saboor was one of 3,229 Afghans who applied for asylum in 2016, while 7,479 applications from Afghans were still under consideration from the previous year. According to the decisions of first instance, 13.8 per cent were granted asylum, 75.6 per cent were granted temporary protection, and 10.6 per cent were rejected.14
I try to cheer Saboor up, but he is glum and frustrated and homesick. We sit at a table overlooking the lake. Swans sail by like East European monarchs in exile, ducklings follow their mothers, tourists take selfies of themselves on the famous wooden Chapel Bridge, and th
e Swiss clocks in the church towers of the city chime each fifteen minutes, their bells made crisper by the strange sharpening effect that water has sound. In the distance, the Pilatus mountain peaks, once famed for their dragons, and the Rigi mountains stood aloof, quietly contributing their waters to the River Reuss, which flows into the lake. The Rigi was the subject of several beautiful watercolour paintings by the British landscape artist J.M.W. Turner, and was also visited by the American author Mark Twain.
Later we take the train to his accommodation, about half an hour from Luzern. It’s like a hostel, close to the railway station, with a reception office downstairs, run by a smiley young woman who’s not only polite, but also very friendly. Upstairs on the first floor, a man is playing a mournful guitar in the living room. Saboor’s room is on the top floor, right under the attic. It’s clean and tidy, with three bunkbeds and a common table. One of his fellow Afghans is working with a set of tools to try to repair his bed, which creaks at every movement, waking his room-mates up in the night. We sit at the table in the middle. It’s still Ramadan, so there’s no comfort food available for Saboor. He insists I eat from his packet of dried figs, nonetheless. What will he do if his asylum request is rejected? I ask.
‘Maybe I’ll go back to Afghanistan and join the Taliban,’ he says. ‘I could be their spokesman!’ He’s joking, of course, but there’s a bitterness in his voice he cannot hide. Europe, so far, has fallen far short of his expectations.
AFTERWORD
SEVEN LEVELS OF DESPAIR
There are seven levels of despair – one for each day of the week . . . Any strategy planned by political leaders to whom such despair is unimaginable will fail, and will recruit more and more enemies.