WARNING: This may be the longest and most convoluted blog post you will ever encounter. It talks about a particular family’s journey from Syria to Europe, but it also lays out the complex and opaque rules and procedures that govern their lives after they land on European soil. Because of its length, I’ve decided to try to bring some order by using sub headings from time to time.

INTRO

In Rovies last week we met Manar. Meeting her, we discovered that being well-educated, multi-lingual and cosmopolitan is no guarantee of success when you’re a refugee knocking on Europe’s doors. Manar, her husband and her three children are from Syria. I’m going to leave out many personal details because of their fears for family members still in Syria. What I can talk about is what they faced when they arrived in Greece and how the clumsy system that has been put in place and tasked with integrating the refugees into Europe has enormous consequences for thousands of lives. What happened to Manar’s family after they fell within the purview of that system is just one example.

Manar teaching the morning English class at Hotel Rovies

Manar and her husband are both university-educated professionals. Their life in Syria was comfortable and quiet, until they ran afoul of the Assad government. I can’t go into details, but I can say that the reasons behind this were both principled and courageous. Any country, learning their story, should have seen in them ideal candidates to become future citizens.

When things turned dangerous for them, it happened very quickly, and they had to pack up their children and flee immediately with what they could carry. To avoid detection, they split up on their journey out of Syria. Until they met again in Turkey, they had no news of each other’s fate.

In the months after their departure they learned that their house had been destroyed by government shelling, after which everything of any value had been pillaged by rival militia groups. They literally have nothing left to return to in the country that was their home.

They arrived in Greece after a difficult and dangerous journey and discovered, as have so many refugees, that the northern border had been closed with barbed wire and that leaving Greece was now, in practical terms, impossible. They now had three options available to them.

ASYLUM, RE-UNIFICATION AND RELOCATION

Under the current regulations adopted by the EU as a result of a continuing and rancorous debate over how to deal with the refugees, all refugees must apply for asylum in the first EU country they arrive in. Of course, even now many don’t. Refugees arriving in Greece, in particular, quickly discover – if they didn’t already know – that the austerity regime imposed on Greece by the EU has plunged the country into a 7-year economic depression by many measures worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment is at record levels, economic activity has been decimated, pensions have been cut, and old people are reduced to begging while the young flee the country – economic refugees themselves. Many refugees, particularly young men, find ways to leave Greece illegally, over the northern hills or clinging to the undersides of trucks leaving the port of Patras for Italy.

The EU has established two programs under which refugees can apply to move elsewhere from their country of arrival: relocation and family reunification. One of us will be discussing family reunification in another post. Since Manar and her family didn’t have close family members in Europe, their only option to leave Greece became the relocation program.

Under this program, refugees can apply to emigrate from their country of arrival to another EU country. In practice, this process is completely opaque to the applicants. First, a refugee – or family – must apply to enter the relocation program. If accepted, their file will be forwarded to one of the participating EU countries, generally without the applicants being informed of which country has been chosen for them. The chosen country then vets the application and makes a decision, with little or no input from the applicants. If the country refuses, grounds for refusal are not disclosed to the applicants, and they have no opportunity to address any deficiencies or concerns that may have led to their refusal. Finally, and most importantly, there is no provision to allow them to apply to other countries; a refusal by any country is considered a refusal by all.

ENCOUNTER WITH THE SYSTEM

This sequence of events played out almost exactly in Manar and her family’s case. First, the family had to apply for relocation via Skype. This involved waiting for days with the whole family in front of a cellphone in their tent until someone was available at the other end. They were then photographed remotely and told their file would be forwarded to a participating country. (Not all members of the EU participate. Most of the former Soviet bloc countries, in fact, are currently refusing to accept refugees.)

Some time later, Manar’s family received a notice to travel to the French embassy for an interview. The family took a 6-hour bus ride from northern Greece to Athens, where they waited several more hours due to a scheduling mistake at the embassy. The interview finally took place and they were told to expect a reply within a month. A month and a half later they were contacted and told to report to the Greek asylum authorities to hear the decision. There, they were told that France had refused them, that the grounds for refusal were secret and that – to their bewilderment – they had no option to apply to another country. Here’s Manar reflecting on the moment when they received the decision.

Manar on relocation rejection from Bill Megalos on Vimeo.

When I first heard Manar’s account I was sure that something was wrong – that they’d been given incorrect information, that someone had taken a dislike to them, or that they’d misunderstood the options available to them. In fact, Manar’s experience sounded so Kafkaesque that we decided to do more research before blogging about it. Since then, we’ve verified Manar’s description with a variety of sources, including people doing legal support for refugees, the office of the Greek Ombudsman for Children, and even the head of UNHCR in Greece. This completely opaque and top-down system is being encountered by thousands of refugees every year; people who have already lost their former lives, their possessions and their loved ones arrive in Europe to be confronted with a bureaucracy that disempowers them and determines their future at the stroke of a pen.

Ironically, this system, largely designed for security, seems to fail even at that task: numerous refugees have recounted to us watching North Africans with fake Syrian passports and even self-declared IS members pass through the system and leave for other countries.

At the end of our interview we asked Manar to reflect upon her family’s journey, upon the upheaval and danger they have been through, and upon the disappointments that have accompanied their arrival in Europe. I listened to her words with mounting respect for her ability to accept and surmount adversity.

Manar on acceptance from Bill Megalos on Vimeo.