Tuesday May 12, 2020
Until last week, Walid and Mustafa had never met. Owing to their disparate backgrounds, they might not have had anything in common, bar their age: both turned 18 this year.
But the fresh-faced, bright-eyed teenagers have been brought together by a common desire to escape danger in their respective homelands – Syria and Somalia – and rebuild lives shattered by war.
newsninsideNow, after five nights sleeping on bunkbeds in a tiny hotel room in the Greek port city of Piraeus, their lives are about to change.
It has taken seven months in the case of Walid, and almost three times that for Mustafa, but on Monday both will reach the end of an odyssey no child should have to make. A week after being transferred from Aegean islands on the frontline of the refugee crisis, the teenagers are among a group of 52 vulnerable migrants, including several minors, who will fly out of Athens to be reunited with relatives in the UK.
How will they feel when they board the plane? “I think I will say: ‘Finally, at last,’” says Walid, who tells of how he crawled across the border from Syria into Turkey before making his way to Izmir, where he was smuggled by boat to the Greek isle of Samos – a journey that cost his family $4,000 (£3,235).
“In Syria, there are bombs and guns, a lot of people die every day. In England there is Baker Street and Sherlock Holmes. It’s a very beautiful place. And my brother Ahmed is there. The first thing I want to see is Big Ben. I know I will be happy.”
It will be a different world to Samos, where his home – a camp 11 times overcapacity – was overrun with rats “as big as cats” and was “dirty, dirty, dirty,” he says.
Mustafa is far more reticent. He says his mother encouraged him to leave Burco, the Somali city where he grew up, when he was 15. Getting to Greece took seven months, after he flew out of Somalia to Kenya and from there on to Turkey. For almost two years he has languished on Lesbos. Part of that time was spent in the appalling conditions of Moria, Europe’s biggest refugee camp, where lone children live in designated areas.
“I’ve learned to live alone. I’ve learned to be alone, but all the time I think about my family,” he says. “I had to leave because I was afraid for my life. I haven’t seen my family for two years.
“I want to speak with my mother and brothers and sisters. I don’t know where they are but I hope my uncle can help. He lives in London. I don’t know what he does but I am hoping. I need my family, I want to see them.”
The teenagers’ resettlement comes in the wake of a joint action plan between Greece and the UK on migration.
“It’s a very comprehensive agreement,” says Giorgos Koumoutsakos, Athens’ alternate minister for migration policy. “It touches upon all the dimensions of the migration phenomenon including unaccompanied children, the most vulnerable migrants in this country.”
Thousands of lone children reach Europe each year, and an estimated 5,600 are in Greece. Of those, about 300 are kept in police cells and detention centres in what authorities call “protective custody” but which Human Rights Watch has slammed as an “abusive practice” that exposes minors to brutal treatment in unsanitary and degrading conditions.
Between 30-40% of the minors have family members in EU states, according to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR). Most are in their mid-teens when they arrive in Europe. Many became separated from their parents in the chaos of war.
“I’ve missed out on a lot of school,” says Mustafa, who as a young boy dreamed of becoming a pilot. “I like computers, too. Maybe like him [Walid] I will go into IT,” adds the Somali, who speaks with his Syrian roommate in Arabic picked up watching films.
With Greece hosting almost 100,000 migrants and refugees in facilities nationwide, and facing intense criticism over vastly congested camps, the centre-right government has been pushing for relocation of the minors to other European countries.
Initial pleas fell on deaf ears, says the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who has spoken of “scars of the soul [that] are not easy to heal”. From March, 10 EU countries have agreed to take 1,600 children and teenagers under a scheme to help relieve reception centres, with the first leaving for Luxembourg last month.
“Our [EU] partners were not ready to give their assistance or their solidarity on this matter, but we insisted and did a lot of back-channel work explaining why it was so necessary,” Koumoutsakos said. “It’s a very sensitive issue, politically and socially.”
All agree that speed is of the essence. Hostels, shelters and foster family care are in short supply. The longer the children remain in the camps, the greater the risks, such as sexual abuse or falling into the hands of criminals.
“Family reunification procedures are cumbersome, they take too much time and are often implemented in a restrictive way,” says Philippe Leclerc, the UNHCR’s representative in Greece.
“It’s very important that these procedures are accelerated. On average it take nine months for a positive decision to be reached. Children who might not be traumatised when they arrive here can become very traumatised living in overcrowded camps, in such appalling conditions, for so long.”
The coronavirus pandemic has added a layer of complexity that nobody was prepared for. Plans to move up to 2,000 men, women and children from squalid facilities in the Aegean have been substantially delayed, with the migrants having to be checked for Covid-19 in addition to other tests.
On Monday, Koumoutsakos will be at the airport with the British ambassador to Greece, Kate Smith, to see off the child migrants. And just as in April, when 12 boys and girls departed for Luxembourg, he will give each one a small bag of gifts, including a notebook with a handwritten message wishing them “happiness and good fortune”.