Dream of European refuge turns to nightmare on Greek island
Khalid chuckles with a hollow laugh, his red hands fumbling in the cold water as he washes clothes in a bucket.
“I didn’t think we would be doing this in Europe,” Mr Khalid mutters.
Standing alongside his brother Abu Amar, the Palestinian refugee who fled from Damascus’ Yarmouk camp in January tells of his relief after escaping the five-year siege.
“It was ISIL on one side of the street, and Al Qaeda on the other,” Abu Amar says.
Despite an EU deal with Turkey to intercept those fleeing west, the Greek islands are still receiving refugees.
Last week more than 300 arrived on boats from Turkey to the island of Lesbos.
Yet for many, Europe is no longer a refuge, but a festering trap.
In Lesbos’s Moria holding camp there is a putrid stench in the air and residents say drug use is rife. Outside the camp’s main gate, a young Afghan child plays with a syringe.
People are often packed 20 or more into a tent. So great is the fear of sexual violence among some of the women that they chose to wear nappies at night to avoid leaving their tent in search of a toilet.
Seven years after the start of the war, some refugees are considering the agonising prospect of returning to the conflict zone they fled, while others have become suicidal.
Last week Qusay, 26, received a black stamp on his papers – for the second time. The young Syrian had been barred from
joining the rest of his family as they left Moria and moved on to the Greek mainland as they continued to search for a new home in Europe.
The rejection and prospect of separation from his family was too much. Qusay took himself to the front of the camp’s European Asylum Support Office and set himself on fire. For a few moments he burnt in agony before others extinguished the flames on his back.
It was a symbolic act. In December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian fruit seller set himself alight in an act widely regarded as the event that started the Arab uprisings.
Revolutions of varying success ensued in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria – all because of one man’s desperate act. Now a similar level of despair is becoming the norm among those who have fled the region’s wars in search of the European dream.
Just weeks ago Muhanad, 23, also from Yarmouk, climbed an electricity poles and grabbed the live wires.
The shock jolted him to the ground and a video of him being rushed into hospital shows him writhing in pain, with the left side of his body charred.
“It was the stress. Getting to Europe is more stressful than leaving Yarmouk,” Muhanad tells The National.
He had been trying to see a psychiatrist for weeks before but said he had been placed low on the waiting list.
In January, Medecins Sans Frontieres’ psychiatric clinic in the camp had a backlog of 500 people. The clinic is the only facility to try to meet the psychiatric needs of the island’s refugee population.
So stretched are resources on the island that merely admitting to suicidal thoughts does not warrant immediate psychiatric treatment.
“We can usually see them after a couple of suicide attempts,” says Luca Fontana, the man co-ordinating the medical charity’s response.
Tattooed with the scars of an air strike in Damascus, Khalid, 32, has also started to become disillusioned.
“I had dreams to get to Europe but now I’d go back if they wouldn’t arrest me,” Khalid says. “They don’t want us here. Bashar [Al Assad, the Syrian President] was better than this. That is not something Europe should be proud of.”
But turning back is fraught with danger. Many who fled Syria are wanted by the regime for escaping mandatory military service, which now demands five years.
Short of paying bribes, they will almost certainly be jailed on their return.
Last month a list of about 1.5 million names of those wanted by the Syrian regime for opposing Mr Al Assad was leaked, many for the most marginal of infractions. “The regime does not forget. It will never forget,” Khalid says.
Despite the dangers, Europe is so hostile that some are returning anyway.
“My brother-in-law went back to Damascus last week from Athens,” Muhanad says. “He borrowed thousands of dollars to get to Europe. Now he just hopes the regime won’t find him. We don’t want to go back to Syria, it’s not safe, but we can’t stay in this camp.”
Increasingly, Syrians are choosing to return rather than wait things out in the squalor of Europe’s refugee camps.
Two years after the EU and Turkey struck their deal to stem the amount of migrants travelling to Europe, the number of is down from more than 1.2 million in 2015 to just more than 13,000 so far this year.
But Marios Andriotis, a senior advisor to the Mayor of Lesbos, questions the human cost.
“Some provisions of the EU-Turkey statement have created other issues in Lesbos,” Mr Andriotis says.
“The imposition of geographical restrictions to the asylum seekers – it blockades asylum seekers on the island until they conclude their asylum procedures. Some have been here for nine to 10 months, even a year.”
There have also been problems with promised EU support not materialising.
Since the peak of the crisis in 2015, when the island took in more than 500,000 arrivals despite having a population of only 80,000, the municipality of Lesvos has received only €750,000 (Dh3.4 million) in financial support.
“The island isn’t asking for funding to reimburse their humanity,” Mr Andriotis says. “Everyone knows what happened in Lesbos. We are very proud of our humanitarian response.
“But if the European Commission and central government don’t take action to improve Moria, it ruins the response of the local community.”
Today’s refugee crisis is being fuelled by a complete loss of hope, Mr Fontana says.
“These people have been through torture, war and sexual violence but now this island is a prison. They have no control over their own future,” he says.
Mr Fontana lays the blame for Moria’s especially bad conditions on the EU-Turkey deal.
“I have been working in some of the worst war zones in the world but we’ve never seen such a high level of suffering as on the island, and what’s really hard is that it’s done on purpose. The price is paid here, inside Moria.”
Meanwhile, the Italian foreign ministry summoned the French ambassador yesterday after five armed French agents entered a migrant clinic in Bardonecchia, west of Turin, and forced a Nigerian man to undergo a urine test.