Kindness amid chaos
HORGOS, SERBIA— Footsteps shuffling on gravel gave away the refugees, caught in the beam of a conductor’s flashlight as they emerged from behind rail cars early Sunday morning in Gevgelija, metres inside Macedonia’s southern border.
For hours, refugees who had dodged the official crossing materialized from the night: a shivering Kurdish boy in a Tshirt, a handful of French-speaking Africans and a group of bleeding Syrians who had run straight into a mass of thorn bushes as they crossed the border.
Several times a day, government-chartered trains — red-and-yellow steel Soviet hulks — run refugees to the Serbian border after they receive Macedonian transit papers.
“Syrian express!” a train conductor shouted from the door of the moving train, hopping off to check the undercarriage with a flashlight, looking for stowaways.
Police caught most of the stragglers and sent them back to a processing centre near the Greek border.
At the processing centre — a few tents at a railway crossing in the middle of a field, dark except for dim, orange streetlights — refugees wait for papers allowing travel through Macedonia. Police slouched off to the side of the tents, marking the border.
The late arrivals joined hundreds of people waiting for papers, just a few of thousands who for months have been streaming north and west into Europe fleeing wartorn countries.
“Since three months, it’s been a humanitarian catastrophe,” said Davor Stojmirov, a Macedonian from a nearby town who was waiting at the Gevgelija bus station.
Now empty, the station had been packed with refugees until a few days before, when police moved them outside town, he said.
Refugees who lined up at 8 p.m. were on a northbound train by 7 a.m. the next day — quicker than the first weeks of the ongoing crisis, when refugees desperate for a train or bus would wait for days, or pay hundreds of euros to take a taxi north.
Balkan borders and refugee travel restrictions have created dozens of little Casablancas across southeastern Europe, where people wait, and wait, and wait for permission to leave, or for the moment to chance an illegal crossing.
One of those towns is Presevo, Serbia — unremarkable but for its geography, stretching almost to Macedonia’s northern border.
Hundreds of refugees have for weeks lined the road through Presevo after travelling through Macedonia, waiting in the endlessly refilling queue for travel documents.
Many of the town’s12,000 residents have taken well to their temporary neighbours. On Sunday, Serbians driving cars loaded with food and supplies arrived about every half hour outside the refugee processing centre at the town’s main intersection.
“These people, Serbian people, they are good people,” one man shouted across the street, holding a donated sandwich and can of Pepsi.
Off the street, amid garbage and parked tour buses, Mohammed Shaltoh knelt on a sleeping bag to pray, taking a brief quiet moment in the shade.
“We leave because the country is finished. There’s nothing left for us,” the 23-year-old from Aleppo, Syria, said after he met his friends in the line for papers.
He hoped to go to Norway to finish his degree in marine engineering, interrupted by the war. But his three travelling companions agreed their first choice would have been Canada.
“We love Canada, but it is very difficult to go there,” said Abdul Wahid. Asked where he was from, he smiled, rubbed his closely shaved chin and said “Raqqa” — the capital of the Islamic State, where Islamic State religious police reportedly lash men without long beards.
The group settled in to wait. Maybe a few hours, maybe another day, Shaltoh said.
Six hours up the road, as the sun set on an almost moonless Monday in Horgos, northern Serbia, taxis, vans and city and charter buses arrived to move migrants to the crossing where they would roll the dice on their ability to outrun Hungarian police, who have been detaining crossing refugees.
A group of Syrians later recounted hopping the fence and immediately seeing flashlights and armed men in the distance. They escaped only by doubling back over the border, into a cornfield, where they fumbled in the dark before finding a group of Iraqis armed with a GPS and a pair of bolt cutters to clip the fence.
At the processing centre, police watched as migrants boarded buses, occasionally shouting in English and Serbian at refugees mobbing the doors, dispatching two particularly large officers to separate people when jostling turned to blows.
An Iraqi who grabbed a spot aboard a van packed to the aisles with refugees pointed excitedly to his friend: “Iraq army! This man killed many Daesh!” — a reference to the Islamic State.
Flying toward the Hungarian border in the dark at 130 kilometres per hour, Ali Alkadri, of Baghdad, replayed on his phone scenes of the horror show he’d left in Iraq: dying ISIS fighters shredded by airstrikes, tracer bullets lighting the desert night, then a video selfie showing him wearing the red beret and badge of the Iraqi special forces in a heavy firefight in Baiji.
Out of the bus, he gathered his bags and headed into the trees, aiming for Hungary and a 2,000-kilometre trip to Finland.