Ordeal sharpens Balkan camp refugees’ longing for Europe

It is late on a dank and foggy night in a transit camp for refugees in southern Macedonia, and the next train north won't leave for several hours.

Mohammed Hadi Raji and his family have let one train come and go, deciding to rest and warm up a little in a large heated tent, rather than join a desperate crush to board the dirty and dilapidated carriages that clank away towards Serbia.

There is plenty here to make the Afghan despondent, from the uncertainty of what lies ahead to a local cigarette peddler's determination to sell him a pack for three times the going rate through the wire fence that surrounds the Gevgelija camp.

But on a thoroughly miserable night at this remote spot on Macedonia's border with Greece, Mohammed is anything but gloomy, as he haggles with the hawker using the Russian he learned during nine years of study in the Soviet Union.

"The family is all together, still alive, and surely the worst is behind us," said Mohammed, who studied mechanical engineering in Minsk before returning to his home town, close to Kabul.

"Crossing from Iran to Turkey was the worst part. It was terribly dangerous, and I feared we would not make it. We walked through the mountains for 11 hours. But we survived – and now we are getting closer and closer to Sweden. "

Mohammed (51) and his family hope to settle with his sister, who is already in Sweden, and start new lives far from the threats and violence of the Taliban.

“I studied English at a college with American teachers, and the Taliban knew that and didn’t like it,” said Rohullah (16), Mohammed’s grandnephew.

Taliban treatment

“We went on a school trip to Turkey, and when I came back the Taliban sent a letter to us, saying ‘Now we are sure you are working for the Americans’,” Rohullah explained in fluent English.

“The Taliban took my father away, and we don’t know if he is dead or alive. The rest of us had to leave. We had visas to Iran, so we flew there from Kabul, and then we went illegally the rest of the way, all the way to here.”

Like Mohammed, Rohullah also recalls the terror of the mountain crossing from Iran to Turkey, and the perils of the boat ride from Turkey to Greece.

“In Turkey, we walked through a freezing-cold stream up to our waist. My brother is only four years old, and I saw him dying in front of my eyes,” Rohullah said.

Fear of dying

“I said to the Turkish police: ‘Just give us a place to get warm, even send us back to

Afghanistan

, just don’t let him die.’

“Then on that boat to Greece – it was just plastic and air! – I thought when I got in: ‘If this boat stops we will die’. But we made it.”

After their ordeals, the Afghan family seemed content to wait a while at Gevgelija, where local and international aid groups offer food, clothes, medical help and other crucial services – like phone charging and wifi – to hundreds and often thousands of refugees each day.

Another train was due to set off from Gevgelija for Macedonia’s border with Serbia in the early hours.

The carriages are aged and grimy, lack toilets and heating, and the three-hour journey costs €25 for each refugee over 10 years of age – more than four times what locals pay to travel the same route – but there is desperation to board every service.

The very young and very old are carried aboard, in parents’ arms, prams and wheelchairs and, though refugees help each other while trying to keep their own groups together, families inevitably get split up, children and adults cry, and tempers fray.

Local NGO workers, with members of the Legis group at the forefront, keep the system running, by giving out food, distributing hats, scarves and blankets to shivering refugees, and persuading train staff to let penniless people travel for free.

As a Legis worker helps a pregnant refugee off the train and leads her into the gloom to find a makeshift toilet, from the woods around the camp a ragged group of people appears and tries to sneak aboard without alerting the watchmen.

Ragged group

They are spotted and chased away – a handful of many thousands of migrants who, since mid-November, have been banned from moving north through the Balkans because they are not from the war zones of

Syria

,

Iraq

and Afghanistan.

People from as far apart as Morocco, Pakistan, Iran and Nepal are still arriving in Europe, but now they try to sneak across tighter Balkan borders in deteriorating weather, or pay large sums to traffickers to smuggle them through.

Migrants are again a common sight on roads near the border, just as they were until last June, when Macedonia allowed them to enter the country and use public transport after a train struck and killed 14 people walking along the tracks.

"We're going to see more criminals and smugglers involved again, and more migrants put in jail. Again we'll have hundreds of people walking on the roads. We are going backwards, and it's unjust," said Jasmin Redzepi, the president of Legis.

Discord inside and among EU states is rising, along with security fears, over the impact of Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since the second World War.

But, on a freezing Balkan night, one Afghan family dismissed talk of Europe’s failure, and thanked it for saving so many refugees’ lives – including theirs.

“I never wanted to leave my country, I had a future there, but then we had this problem that we couldn’t solve. We have not come here to take money – I’d be ready to do anything in Sweden, even voluntary work,” said Rohullah.

“As soon as we reached the land in Greece, Europeans helped us. They gave us clothes and said ‘Welcome’,” the teenager recalled, grinning at the memory.

“And I said: ‘Thank you, world. Now, what can I do for you?’”