Europe refugee crisis: Reality confronts the bored, brutalised and disillusioned

HANNAH LUCINDS SMITH.THE TIMES.JANUARY 7, 2016 12:26PM

Just before Christmas, I got a message from a Syrian I had met in Macedonia in May. Ahmed was bored and lonely. His plan — to make the dangerous illegal journey to Germany alone and to bring his wife and son after him — had stalled. Seven months on, he was still kicking his heels in a refugee camp in Munich, with no sign of his residency papers, let alone his family’s visas, being processed.

“I am thinking of coming back to Turkey,” he said. “At least there I can work and bring my wife out of Syria.”

When I met Ahmed, he was on a train packed with young migrant men travelling north through the Balkans. I counted only a handful of families and even fewer single women. Many of the men had left wives and children in Syria or neighbouring countries. Others had defected from one of Syria’s armed factions, or had escaped before they were forced to sign up.

In three years of covering the Syrian war, it was the first time I had seen men who had fought with the regime, the opposition and the Kurds sitting together and laughing. It was also the first time that I had written refugee stories where the main protagonists were men.

Elsewhere — in the squalor of Jordan’s sprawling Zaatari camp, or half-finished apartment buildings on the outskirts of Aleppo, or the neat rows of white tents in Turkey’s borderlands — I found families where the men were absent. Some were fighting, others were dead. It was the women and children who ended up in these places of last resort.

As I covered Europe’s refugee crisis, I did not meet one person who came straight from the camps. In order to bear living in those places, you must have no other options — no one who is so destitute could afford smugglers’ fees.

The refugees who reach Europe are generally educated, resourceful and canny. Some have sold all their possessions, others have worked in low-paid jobs until they have saved enough money. I have also met teenage boys who have been sent by parents, knowing that they will get asylum quickly because they are children.

Recently, the proportion of young men among the refugees has fallen as more family groups attempt the journey. Word of lengthy waits like Ahmed’s are filtering back, and men do not want to be separated from their families for months. One consequence is that children now drown daily in the sea.

However, the overwhelming majority of refugees who made their way to Europe over the past year have been men. That is the dynamic of war, especially in cultures as traditional in their gender roles as those these refugees come from: men are active, women and children are passive.

Most are not bad people, but what they know of the west has been learnt from the tirades of their leaders, or from Hollywood.

Countries such as Germany must work out what do to with a demographic that is bored, often brutalised and overwhelmingly male.

They travelled to Europe thinking that it could offer them something better than Syria’s neighbours. Many are realising that their dreams do not match reality.

Macedonia 馬其頓

stalled 停滯

residency papers 居住證明

Balkans 巴爾幹

armed factions 武裝派別

regime 政權

protagonists 領導者

squalor 骯髒

borderlands  無主之地、邊疆

destitute 貧困

smugglers’ fees 走私費

resourceful 足智多謀的

canny 謹慎的

possessions 財產、所有權

demographic 人口統計學

brutalised 摧殘