Rain, mud, cold weather, hunger and misery for those
stranded in Idomeni [John Psaropoulos/Al Jazeera]Idomeni camp overcome by despair as numbers continue to grow after Macedonian border closure.
John Psaropoulos | 17 Mar 2016 10:49 GMT | al jazeera
Idomeni, Greece – If refugees encamped at Idomeni are hoping for the current European summit to resolve their plight, they are likely to be disappointed. The summit is focused on stopping new arrivals in Turkey, rather than in the relocation of those already in Europe.
Yet it is on this summit that many here are pinning their last hopes. “If they don’t open the border after the [summit] meeting I will return to Syria. I will pay smugglers to take me back,” says Mohammed Hasan, a 26-year-old business graduate from Aleppo.
A bomb demolished his house, killing his parents and two brothers, while he was minding the family clothing store. Two months ago, he paid smugglers $800 to get to Turkey, and another $900 to jump on a boat to Lesbos. He hopes to be reunited with one surviving brother in Germany.
In doing so he has skipped his army duty. “Now the army – they want me,” he says. “If they catch me maybe they [will] kill me – or give me a gun.”
Hasan has been in Idomeni, on the Greek border with former Yugoslav Macedonia, for 17 days, but that is enough to make him contemplate the dangers of returning.
“You see these people,” he says with a glance at hundreds of refugees in the tents surrounding Eidomeni train platform, which no longer functions as a passenger station. “Animals cannot live here. If you want [you can] stand for three or four hours in line to get a sandwich.”
More than 12,000 people are believed to be stranded at
Idomeni camp [John Psaropoulos/Al Jazeera]Crestfallen at the tent city
Some refugees still arrive here. Three newly arrived Syrian mothers look crestfallen at the tent city around them. They tap messages into their mobile phones despondently.
An enterprising driver parks his bus on the main road through the muddy camp: “Bus to Athens”, reads a handwritten note in the window – though he says he has few takers at the moment.
Many are hoping against hope. “I think the [summit] won’t change the [situation with] the border but I hope it will because we have to go to Germany,” says Iman, an Arabic language teacher from Idlib in Syria. “We cannot go back to Syria – impossible.”
In front of her family tent, her husband and children tend a small fire made from logs handed out by charities.
An elderly couple use a tin can to warm up water for tea [John Psaropoulos/Al Jazeera]
The Idomeni camp stretches out for hundreds of yards along the railway track that crosses the border, and for hundreds of yards on either side. Authorities estimate that 12,000 people are here, but only a minority sleep in the large marquee tents the UN has set on dry concrete slab and filled with more than 100 bunk-beds each.
The vast majority sleeps in camping tents set directly on to muddy fields, or the coarse gravel of the railway tracks. Their mornings are spent queuing for healthcare or food handouts, and buying eggs, potato chips, rice, bread, tomatoes, cucumbers, oranges and bananas from the back of pick-up trucks run by Roma.
By afternoon, they light individual fires from foraged wood, old railway sleepers and rubbish, on which to cook their lunch or warm tinned milk.
Roma merchants have been supplying fresh produce for those
able to purchase food [John Psaropoulos/Al Jazeera]Children are constantly coughing, and sickness runs high.
“We have many cases of respiratory disease, pneumonia, because the living conditions are not OK,” says Marie-Elizabeth Ingres from Doctors Without Borders. The Paris-based NGO has brought 140 doctors to Idomeni and the surrounding area.
Doctors of the World are here, too, and a German medical charity, Search and Rescue, plans to bring two fully staffed mobile clinics.
“Despite our efforts … it’s not the NGOs who can manage the situation. It’s too big,” says Ingres.
Volunteers step up
Just as NGOs supplement inadequate state aid, volunteers are supplementing the NGOs, but demand greatly outstrips supply. The clamour for clothes is such that volunteers distribute them at night.
Another nocturnal duty is the allocation of tents. “At about 11pm we do a tent patrol, see who the new families are,” says Christine, a Canadian volunteer who preferred not to use her real name. “They’re the ones sitting in the fields.”
A woman washes clothes outside her tent
[John Psaropoulos/Al Jazeera]Shortages impose tough choices. Ted, a volunteer from the UK, remembers a woman who stood for hours in the rain with her baby, waiting to be relocated to a dry tent, holding up the outspread fingers of one hand and shouting, “Five!”
“She took me to this tiny little tent in a puddle where she opened the door and there were four further children shivering, one of them in nothing but boxer shorts and a T-shirt, physically shaking. She passed me her baby and picked up one of the other children and passed it to me, and then another – I had three of the children and I became overcome with emotion. It took all my might to bite my tongue and hold back my tears.”
Volunteers have been arriving from all over the world – 150 in the past few weeks alone, as Idomeni camp has mushroomed. The construction of the border fence by the former Yugoslav Macedonia, and the gradual tightening of border controls, which culminated in a complete border closure earlier this month, mean that refugees have now spilled outside the official camps.
A small hotel in the nearby town of Polykastro serves as a 24-hour base of volunteer operations. By 10am, a dozen of them are chopping vegetables to put into three vast, 40-litre pots, where they are gradually turned into soup over gas fires. Others cut sandwiches. The entire payload is delivered to Idomeni in the afternoon.
The barbed wire border fence, put up by former Yugoslav
Macedonian authorities stretches for 20km
[John Psaropoulos/Al Jazeera]Hope is all that’s left
Refugees put up with their lot in the hope of moving on, and even false hope acts like a flint to tinder. On March 13, refugees were handed a flyer with a map of the border fence that purported to show a way through it.
The flyer’s origins remain unknown, but the following day hundreds of people set out to find this secret passage.
“Morale was very high [because of the flyer],” says Ted. “I can sympathise that they wanted to believe it.”
Christine and Ted say they tried to stop the march. “Of course it didn’t work,” says Christine. “[Refugees] said, ‘Nothing that’s ahead of us can be worse than what’s behind us.'”
A line of Greek police prevent refugees from approaching
the border fence [John Psaropoulos/Al Jazeera]“There was a man in a wheelchair and three of his sons were trying to push him up the hill through mud,” says Christine.
“They asked, ‘Is this the way to the border?'” Eight kilometres into the trek, she says, “I saw this young guy with a club foot and one arm slung over each of his friends limping slowly along through a muddy field… I saw a young boy leading his blind father by a scarf.”
Children were passed arm-to-arm over a torrent, quick and cold with fresh rain. An elderly woman fainted in the middle of the torrent and it took three volunteers to carry her across. People dropped their blankets, tents and bags as their strength drained. A heavily pregnant woman and her husband pressed on with their first-born infant, refusing rest.
The expedition ended in disaster. The refugees managed to end-run the border fence, but were arrested as they entered former Yugoslav Macedonia, along with the volunteers and journalists who accompanied them.
PHOTO GALLERY: Refugees attempt Greece-Macedonia crossing
“For sure, Germany don’t want us,” says Hasan. “European countries don’t want us. Lebanon is a small country, but there are more than three million Syrians there. Here [in Europe] there are many large countries and they have one million and say it is difficult.”
When the rain began, morale was shattered, says Christine.
“I had a father clutching my arm, with red eyes, saying, ‘I spent 3,000 dollars. It was all I had – to come here. Europe was my big dream, this safety was my big dream.’ He was standing in a puddle crying, ‘I am here! I am here! What is this?'”
A woman cooks potatoes on a fire [John Psaropoulos/Al Jazeera]Source: Al Jazeera
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Makombo
You know, I shouldn’t say this, but I will nevertheless.
If you look at the entrepreneurial nature of the sand- and other n*ggers smuggling (governments and corporations are involved), some call it “human” trafficking, then the latest measures taken by the EU should be a source of concern to these businesses.
I am afraid though, that they have already found a solution for that! Since the EU doesn’t import and buy their “products”, they are now recycling their bid.
“I’ll smuggle you back to Turkey, and once you are there you can try immigrating legally. At least you won’t have to build shanty towns in Europe and moreover you will be enjoying a climate more suitable for your ethnicity. How is that for an offer?”
Look, and don’t blame me for this, but I can’t help it, I am roling on the floor laughing!
Makombo
itself in dates back to the sixties. Like I have written here many times before: the
r@gheads just don’t get it when an opportunity of a life time is offered to them and
indiscriminately destroy all that is beneficiary to them by one single shot of military
weaponary. I drew the conclusion that death and destruction is in their blood and that it
will take centuries for turning that around.
Anyway, it was not a pleasant exercise seeing it all through. A lot of gutteral cawing
(arabic) came by, and I had difficulty following the undertitling of which I doubt that
they were a true rendition of that what was actually being said. Well, middle easterners
aren’t exactly known for their integrity, so yes, there was a sound portion of scepticism
there. Sorry about that.
Either way, as the babbling went on, it gradually emerged that their darling “religion” is
much to blame for the whole shebang. The aboriginals started acting up as soon as their
nefarious cult risked some undermining from the healthy ideas policiticians implemented,
and that in turn triggered the only reaction that works in that region: a forceful one.
As the hour went by, some light was shed on the nature of Assad’s relationship with Russia.
As it turns out Assad Sr had all the makings of a communist dictator “a la Putin”. Anyone
that opposed him somehow disappeared (sounds familiar?), was eliminated or incarcerated
like in one instance for 25 years till death followed.
Nice guys I’d say. Nevertheless, there is a positive side to all this: the Assad regime’s
relentless efforts to rid Syria of its despicable islamic cultist mentality and replace it
by healthy secularism. See now how Saudi Arbia hates Bashar Assad’s guts?
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