Out of Syria: I am being relocated to France

The last few weeks have been strange. In a different way. I've had good news but it's unsettled me. I am being relocated to France. As I understand it, I will move there within a week and, all going well, after six months my family will be allowed to join me. We would then have 10 years residency to prove ourselves worthy citizens of France and Europe.

A few weeks ago I was called for an interview by the French embassy. France was recruiting candidates and I was called, along with a number of my friends in the camp. The selection appeared to have been random. Under the overall relocation scheme being managed by the Greeks, each migrant is asked to list eight countries where they would like to be relocated and to do so in order of preference. I had included France but it was my sixth choice. Ireland was my first. When I went to the embassy for the meeting I had not expected to be successful.

The interview was detailed but straightforward. They understood my family situation. They said the process would be speedy. It was. Last week I was called for a second interview and informed that, assuming I passed a medical, I would be offered residency for 10 years. After six months I would be granted a passport, my wife and children could join me and, another year later, I could seek employment.

I was told that for the first period I’d share a house, receive food and a monthly allowance. Shortly, I will learn where in France I will live.

At first I felt numb. Unlike many of my friends in the camps, I have lived outside Syria. I was not concerned about living in a different country. I think it was the shock of having the prospect of a secure future set out in front of me. It is almost nine months since we left home and from then, first with my family and then alone, I have been on the road and I've had to live a life I could never have imagined – as a migrant, a refugee, a displaced person. Now I was being offered the future that was the fresh start for which we had left Syria. It was in front of me. It was my new reality. It was, nonetheless, a shock.

Angry with me

My wife was happy but, in the days since, she has started to question why we would go to France. I know that I can learn the language but she is less sure and worries about that as we both speak English. Her mother is even more angry with me now. She’d never wanted us to leave Syria and says we would have been better dying there than living in the West.

It seems the longer I have been on my own the more unstable my personal situation has become. I miss my wife and child so much. I am worried about the, now overdue, birth of our second. I miss my mother in Syria, who I’m particularly close to and who is my link to home.

I know that moving to France closes not just the migrant chapter of the last ten months but the previous 30-plus years of my life. The excitement is tempered by that reality. I’m a Syrian who is being given the opportunity to become, in time, a citizen of France. My wife and family will also have the chance of creating a new identity. My children could grow up as young French people of Syrian origin.

These are the thoughts that dominate every moment. It is for just this chance that I left my pregnant wife and child behind in Turkey. It is for just this chance that I paid smugglers for passage on a small dinghy to the Greek islands. It is for just this chance of a new life that tens of thousands of Syrians – including family and friends – have risked their lives and those of their loved ones and yet, now that it's here, being offered to me, I am consumed by anxiety.

What I’ve tried to communicate in these diaries is what it feels like to have been forced, by war, to leave a comfortable and secure life where we had wanted for nothing. I had a good job and my wife and I had started our family. A few years ago our challenges were the standard ones: starting a family; earning enough to allow us live well; relationships within our wider families; where and how to live. The catastrophe that befell our country and the utter devastation of our city meant that, at the very point where we were becoming a family, we were faced with a decision no one in civilised society should have to address. We knew that whether we fled Syria or we stayed, we were risking our lives.

Incredible opportunity

I realise our immense good fortune. I understand my wife’s concerns, the birth of our second child is imminent and it’ll be six months before we can be together. Strangely, it is as though the welcome of the French government brings us closer to the end but the necessary wait keeps me further from them. The opportunity we are being given is incredible. There is uncertainty but, compared to that which has been our way of life for few years it is nothing. I know France has a powerful right wing but I know too it has a large migrant population and I’m confident that we can fully integrate into French life.

We must because it is for just such an opportunity that my wife and I risked everything. We must because that is what all migrants must do.

Mustafa is a pseudonym adopted to protect the the identity of the author, who is in the refugee camp in Piraeus, Greece. He was in conversation with Fintan Drury