In Europe, many face the truculence of the authorities and the xenophobia of part of the population and the political class

 20.08.2017

A few months ago, I happily received a phone call from the daughter of a Syrian refugee, the first client of the project I have been coordinating for over a year in Thessaloniki, Greece's second largest city. The project prepares asylum seekers for their interviews with the Greek authorities free of charge.

She told me that her family had just been granted refugee status in a northern European country, where they had been relocated under the quota scheme set up by the European Union. The system aims to relieve migratory pressure in Greece and Italy - the main entry points for refugees on the continent.

It was a great relief.

The family had to flee Syria because they had become targets of the regime. The young woman's father agreed to keep in his apartment some belongings of a neighbor who would be away from the region for a while. A few days later, soldiers from Bashar Al-Assad's troops raided their home and found a tape recorder and microphones among the belongings.

The neighbor was probably a spy who suspected he was about to be discovered. However, he didn't hesitate to endanger the lives of a family made up of only civilians, who had to flee to avoid being killed by the government.

Escape

They reached Europe on a perilous journey by boat across the Mediterranean Sea. In the most tense moments of the journey, they thought they would die. According to the International Organization for Migration, 5,143 people lost their lives or disappeared trying to reach the continent in 2016.

Since 2015, more than a million have taken the same route to flee conflict and persecution. For some of them, dying on the high seas was a better option than staying in their home countries.

Among the beneficiaries of the project I coordinate are Syrian victims of the civil war and many Iraqis fleeing persecution by the Shiite militias that dominate a large part of the country. There are also many who have escaped from areas controlled by the Islamic State, where brutal executions and mutilations as a form of punishment are constant. I often hear shocking testimonies about the reasons that led refugees to leave their countries.

Even with valid reasons for seeking international protection, many of these refugees do not escape the xenophobia of far-right groups who define them as "economic migrants", an "invasion of Muslims" or "a threat to European civilization", as Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, put it. In that country, refugees are exposed to inhumane conditions, including the possibility of being held in containers at the border until their cases are examined.

Orbán is not alone in his nationalist crusade. Even though Europe has received only a fraction of the number of refugees that Lebanon (where one in six inhabitants was a refugee in 2016) and Turkey (with 2.9 million) have received, the rhetoric of the external threat is spreading.

Robert Fico, premier of Slovakia, has refused to welcome Muslim refugees into his country because they would "change the characteristics and culture" there. Poland and the Czech Republic also don't want to accept the quotas imposed by the European Commission. The EU has taken legal action against these four countries, all led by conservative governments.

In Greece, there are mafias grooming refugee minors for prostitution, thousands of people still live in inadequate camps and many people who have been granted refugee status by the government have no official support from the authorities - some don't even have a place to live.

On islands such as Chios and Lesbos, hotspots have been set up to examine the asylum applications of those arriving via the Aegean Sea and to prevent these people from reaching mainland Greece. The wait for the process to be completed takes months, during which time asylum seekers live in shelters with inadequate conditions.

Impacts

The psychological impact is great: cases of attempted suicide and self-mutilation are common. Protests are repressed with intense violence and police abuse. In several cases, the asylum process and interviews have followed illegal and abusive procedures. However, there is little discussion of this in the media.

A climate has been created in which the rhetoric that refugees are "fakes" is propagated, even though many of those who spread this "argument" have never even spoken to an asylum seeker. This discourse has real consequences for people's lives, as it infiltrates the institutions responsible for examining asylum applications. That's why refugees need to be well prepared for their interviews.

In international refugee law, which deals with cases of individuals who are often forced to flee with only their clothes on and no identification documents, it is often said that the most important piece of evidence is the asylum seeker's story. Therefore, it needs to be presented in the clearest, most objective and organized way possible to convince the authorities. They will often question you.

The refugees from Idomeni

Fighting this harmful rhetoric towards people seeking international protection is important. This is one of the reasons why I wrote the book Idomeni Refugees - the Portrait of a World in Conflict, which tells how the refugee crisis affected a small village in northern Greece, on the border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Idomeni gained international fame when it became a squalid shelter for around 14,000 people who were trapped for months after the northern European borders were closed to refugees from Greece in March 2016.

Thousands of people were living in tents in the rain, mud, wind and freezing temperatures in the hope that the borders would open again. That informal camp became the epicenter of a global emergency. The site was compared to Nazi concentration camps by the Greek Interior Minister himself, Panagiotis Kouroublis.

Between October 2015 and May 2016, I stayed between Thessaloniki and Idomeni, a place defined by a refugee as "hell". I conducted field research on the mobilization of civilians to help refugees in the region. Part of that research gave rise to the book, which tells a piece of the migration crisis that has hit Europe through the eyes of refugees, humanitarian actors and residents of affected areas.

Source:huffpostbrasil.com