Upheaval

The Refugee Trek through Europe

Navid Kermani, Tony Crawford

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509518715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

By foot, in buses, prison vans and trains, a steady stream of refugees traveled from the Greek island of Lesbos into Europe. In the autumn of 2015, award-winning writer Navid Kermani decided to accompany them on the "Balkan route." In this perceptive account from the front line of the "refugee crisis, " Kermani shows how a seemingly distant world in which war and conflict rage has suddenly collided with our own. Kermani describes the situation on the Turkish west coast where thousands of refugees live in the most desperate conditions, waiting to take the perilous journey across the Mediterranean. Then, on Lesbos, he observes the culture shock amongst those who have survived the ordeal by sea. He speaks to aid workers and politicians, but most importantly of all to the refugees themselves, asking those who have come from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere what has driven them to risk everything and embark on the long and treacherous journey to Europe.

With great sensitivity Kermani reveals, often through small details, the cultural and political upheaval that has caused people to uproot their lives, and at the same time shining a light on Europe's inadequate and at times openly hostile response to the refugees. Interspersed with powerful images by the acclaimed photographer Moises Saman, Upheaval is a much-needed human account of a crisis we cannot ignore.

A Strangely Softer Germany

It was a strangely softer Germany that I left in late September 2015. In the railway stations of the big cities, between the travellers hurrying to their trains or their exits, strangers lay on green foam mats. No one chased them away or caused a fuss about the public disorder; on the contrary, local residents in yellow safety vests knelt beside the strangers to offer them tea and sandwiches or to play with their children. Outside the stations were tents and people going into them, carrying box after box – food, clothing, toys, medicines – donations from the populace. When other countries stopped the strangers and bullied them so badly that they tried to escape on foot along the motorways, Germany sent special trains to fetch them, and, wherever they arrived, crowds of citizens and even mayors were on the platforms to applaud them. Local newspapers and national TV networks alike told their audiences what every single German could do to help, and overnight even the most xenophobic of the German papers began recounting the strangers’ life stories, telling so compellingly of war, of oppression, and of the travails and dangers of their flight that it was impossible, even in the pubs, to think rescuing them a bad idea. In the towns and villages, citizens’ committees formed – not against the new neighbours, but for them. The football clubs in the national league – the Bundesliga – sewed patches on their jerseys saying refugees were welcome, and the most popular actors and singers inveighed against all Germans who did not show solidarity.

Yes, there was also animosity against the strangers, there were attacks, but now the politicians leapt to the defence of the threatened refugees and visited their shelters. The chancellor herself, the hard-headed German chancellor who, just a few weeks before, had been helpless to comfort a weeping girl from Palestine, amazed everyone by an outburst of emotion as she defended the right to political asylum. Her whole government, for that matter: was this the same government that, a few months earlier, had been the loudest critic of Italy’s Mare Nostrum project to save boat refugees from drowning? And the state, the German administration: to provide for hundreds of thousands of new refugees within a few weeks exceeded any foreseeable contingency, and yet it was managed surprisingly well. At most there was discreet grumbling about schools being unable to use their sports halls, about furtive estimates of the costs, which might entail new debt. And what if another million refugees were to come next year, and still more the year after?

It was a strangely softer Germany I left behind, as if its greyness, usually so stiff and forbidding, was covered with powdered sugar. Just as I was leaving, I couldn’t help thinking, or perhaps I already felt, how easily powdered sugar can be blown away.

A Great Migration

From the veranda of my hotel on Lesbos, I can see the Turkish coast a few kilometres away across the Mediterranean Sea. It is half past eight in the morning, and right now, as I write this sentence, the first group of refugees is coming round the bend in the lane below – all of them Afghans, from their appearance and the snatches I can hear of their talk, and all men; their inflatable boat has apparently landed in Europe without major difficulties. They do not look drenched or frozen, as many other refugees do who land, for fear of the police, below cliffs or steep, overgrown slopes, or who make the crossing in boats that are desperately overcrowded. Now that they have survived the most dangerous part of their long journey, they are cheerful, positively chipper; they’re talking and joking, looking like a group of young daytrippers, carrying nothing but hand luggage at most. They don’t know yet, though, that they have a steeply climbing march of several kilometres ahead of them to get to one of the buses that the United Nations refugee agency has chartered to take new arrivals to the port of Mytilene; nor have they any inkling that, because the United Nations doesn’t have enough buses, most of the refugees have to walk the fifty-five kilometres to the port, with no food, no sleeping bags, no warm clothes – and the sun is still glaring during the day, while the nights have grown chilly.

There are aircraft that fly faster than sound and ships like floating holiday resorts; there are trains as comfortable as living rooms and coaches with kitchens, baths and reclining armchairs; there are taxis with wireless Internet access and soon there will be self-driving cars – but the refugees, in the year 2015, are marching through Europe like the people of Israel fleeing from Egypt. In films and paintings of biblical scenes, you always see a great throng of people with their prophet leading the way. As we drove from Mytilene to the north coast, I saw the shape great migrations really take: a long, seemingly endless string of small and tiny groups, at different intervals and in varying formations, now in single file, now three or four abreast. The groups seem to be united by nothing except their destination. Even those who come from the same country are usually from different cities and regions. And within the small groups, too, the people are often strangers, chance acquaintances now sharing a common destiny. At first the whole group of forty or fifty who sat together in one boat stay together, but on the first uphill stretch, not a hundred yards past my hotel, the young, single men take the lead and the families fall behind.

These are Europe’s bogeymen: the single men bound for Europe, ominously referred to as ‘young Muslim men!’ in talk shows and letters to the editor. Their appearance does not betray whether they are actually religious: hardly any of them wears a beard; no one is wearing traditional garb; nowhere do they stop for communal prayer. In fact, considering their situation – when was the last time they were able to shower, when did they last sleep in a bed? – the men are remarkably clean-shaven. That alone would be a sign of defiance in the Islamic dictatorships, and maybe that’s what it is: after all, many of the Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans have fled from a situation in which shaving is punishable by death. But it’s true that men make up the vast majority of the refugees, and most of them are young – eighteen, twenty, twenty-five. Perhaps there’s a simple reason for that, though – one that is immediately obvious on Lesbos: young men are best suited to endure the difficulties, the dangers, the sheer physical exertion that is required to apply for asylum in Europe. By forcing all the refugees to board the inflatable boats and then march for days on foot, European asylum laws unintentionally select the physically strong, and also the spartan, in other words the poor, who are not accustomed to middle-class comforts to begin with. Fifty-five kilometres is a long way, especially if you are already exhausted or famished on setting out and have no decent shoes, no warm clothes, no provisions – then fifty-five kilometres goes on forever. And every car that passes by the refugees with its back seat empty, I assume, must become an object of hatred. But a simple bottle of water handed out of the window, I discovered on my way to the north coast, becomes a gift from Heaven.

Do We Want Europe or Don’t We?

When I arrived in Budapest, the capital of the European country known for its xenophobia, I was surprised not to see any foreigners at all. Of course the city centre was populated by the same tourists who overrun Prague, London or Berlin; by foreigners I mean people who had immigrated or fled to Hungary. And as I rode the metro outwards from the city centre, the faces in the trains remained white and I heard no other language besides the indigenous one. There is not a single refugee in sight even in John Paul II Park, where in August the thousands whose flight along the motorway inspired the German chancellor to open the border had been stranded. The homogeneity is even odder when you consider the fact that, up until the Second World War, Budapest was a – if not the – multicultural metropolis of Europe, and until 300 years ago the seat of an Ottoman vizier. The Turkish baths are still an obligatory stop on any tourist visit to the city.

I had an appointment to meet Júlia, Eva and Stefan, three of the many volunteers who had cared for the refugees in the park. It was odd: one of them told me her real name only when we met face to face; another didn’t answer the telephone at all but texted me first to ask who was calling. Purely a precaution, they said, and were surprised that I was surprised: after all, they were aiding illegal aliens. As recently as July they had been leading ordinary lives as a translator, a psychologist, a financial advisor, couldn’t have imagined that they would one day become activists, weren’t even particularly political. But then, in early August, they were confronted with the misery on their very doorstep and talked to the refugees, who were neither freeloaders nor terrorists, the allegations on television notwithstanding, but ordinary people like themselves, among them translators, psychologists and financial advisors. Through Facebook they joined together in activist groups that formed within hours. Except for the very sporadic deliveries of the Red Cross and other organizations, the sustenance of thousands of refugees depended for many weeks on the work and donations of the inhabitants of Budapest.

The state did not merely fail to help: through its media it heaped contempt on the volunteers, claiming they were being paid by George Soros, thus pandering to the old anti-Semitic resentment while at the same time spreading propaganda against Muslims. Along the streets, government billboards showed a blonde beauty proclaiming she objected to illegal aliens – after the government had practically declared that all refugees who did not enter the country legally were criminals. Other posters explained to foreigners that they must respect Hungarian culture, once in Hungary they must speak Hungarian – explained it to them in Hungarian, in fact, so that the posters can hardly have been intended for the foreigners; their audience was the government’s own voters. There are racists everywhere, but racism in Hungary is drilled into people by the state itself. That a camerawoman trips a Syrian carrying his child – no: that she does so shamelessly, in front of other cameras – is a result of the constant, systematic defamation of the refugees, and everything foreign, in the discourse of Hungarian politics and media.

The government’s campaign against refugees forged strong bonds between the volunteers, who continued to meet even though there were no more refugees in Budapest. Once a person has been deeply moved, touched by real encounters with human beings, they can’t forget the issue, explained Eva, the psychologist, a blonde-haired forty-something in an elegant red dress. Whatever she might have done, the refugees had repaid her with their gratitude and with the insights they offered into unknown worlds. By now, Eva laughed, she’s a regular Middle East expert. Instead of Hungarian television she now watches CNN and the English-language Al Jazeera channel. But Eva also talked about how isolated she feels: she can no longer talk to some of her acquaintances at all; even the more common remarks about refugees now sound too offensive to her. ‘When someone gets nasty with me on Facebook, I just block them.’

Eva knows she belongs to a minority in Hungary, a minority that is large in Budapest, and growing, but in the countryside, she said, hardly anyone thinks as she does. The government intentionally left the refugees in the parks and the railway stations, with no way to take care of themselves, to make them look degenerate, she says, to make them stink, so that people would be afraid of them, especially of the young men at night. When she took a Syrian family into her home, a family who had walked for three days, even her own sixteen-year-old son grumbled; he checked whether they had stolen anything.

Györgi Dragomán, who in his early forties is already one of the country’s most renowned writers, joined us in the café. ‘Yes, that’s true,’ he concurred with Eva, who was telling me more about her alienation from her own society, ‘I’m living in a bubble too.’ The surveys claim that seventy per cent of Hungarians supported the g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• A Strangely Softer Germany
• Map
• End User License Agreement