Budapest. Sept. 25, 2015
The reigning theory seems to be that it started in Turkey.
There are an estimated 1.9 million refugees in Turkey; a million of which are from Syria. The majority of the remainder are from Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.
The United Nations’ refugee agency stated last year that Turkey’s camps were well run.
But they were also overrun.
So, the reigning theory seems to be that something happened at the camps. Possibly something as simple as people got fed up of waiting and decided to strike out on their own. That was the first wave of refugees; some trying the water crossing to Greece, others a land route, also through Greece.
Those were the earliest stories reported of overladen boats travelling to Greece or to Italy.
I have been with Hungarian Interchurch Aid, an ecumenical NGO. Hungary began to receive refugees in the tens of thousands in May. By August there were over 50,000.
With the tragedies on water the routes changed to mostly land based. Also reports of smugglers charging exorbitant rates, and occasionally cheating the asylum seekers, forced a change of direction.
The refugees I have met this week came by land, through Turkey, Greece, Macedonia.
Then a report that Germany was open to refugees spread during the summer.
A later wave of refugees started. These had never been in one of Turkey’s 22 camps. They were people who felt the need to get out of their situation, mostly in Syria, and make their way to Europe.
So, the ‘Why Now’ question may well be answered by a series of circumstances.
I spoke to a school teacher from Syria. Her son was killed. She has no body; only a document confirming his death. A while earlier her brother-in-law was also shot in the street. Not a rash woman, still she decided to pack her husband and daughter, along with her sister and nephew, taking what they could carry, and strike out on the road to Germany.
I spoke to a 24-year-old man from Afghanistan who has been living in Iran. There is no work, and no opportunity for education. He has no real skills, only a secondary school diploma. He taught himself English and even taught it in Iran for a while. He too decided to leave his sister and parents in Iran and strike out to find his future.
I spoke to a man from Lahore, with children and a seamstress wife. He said there was no work in Pakistan for him. He’d been a retail salesman for three decades. He certainly had the easy charm of a salesman. He left his family behind, with meagre savings, hoping to settle in Italy where he thinks he has a chance of getting his papers.
I met a man at a registration centre outside of Budapest. Also from Pakistan, he’s been at the camp for three months. He wanted to make it to Germany, but now he’s hoping Hungary will accept him. He said he was tired of running.
None of these people used smugglers, nor did they subscribe to any program. They sensed the news, sensed the West was open to them, sensed they had a window now, and only now, and decided to take their chances.
There has been debate in the Western media whether to call these people refugees or migrants. There is truth in either title; but the debate masks the greater truth: None of these people feel they have a future in their birth country. They have abandoned everything—family, culture, history, property, nationalism (all the Syrians say the same thing, “Syria was a great country, now it is dead.”)—to take a chance. Just a chance. Is the English teacher who lost her son and her brother-in-law in imminent danger of her own life? That is impossible to speculate. But one feels she has lost something dear to her soul. Only then could she leave her history behind her.
There have been reports that these refugees have been using smartphones and are directed by Facebook pages and websites. Firstly, the whole world uses smartphones and free accessible wifi. Second, there is no confirmation that there is any organized centralized website or forum that is directing people. Instead, there are myriad Facebook pages and websites, the majority of them personal, a handful of them by concerned groups, and a variety of websites, mostly by concerned groups, that keep abreast of the news (which country’s border is open, which is closed, etc.) and report it along. There is no one Facebook or website hundreds of thousands are turning to for their sole direction. Again, it seems a matter of circumstance.
One man told me he had downloaded maps of all the countries he thought he’d be travelling through. (He hadn’t counted on Hungary; as it turns out by the time he got here, the authorities had picked him up at one border and sent him by train to another.)
What all this suggests, and perhaps that is what is challenging many in the West, is that in the best of circumstances these people would be middle class. They certainly are sophisticated and smart. If not formally educated, they are intelligent and have access to ready news and information.
These are not peasant refugees and perhaps that is why they are being painted in some Western media as opportunistic. That may not be inaccurate, but it should also not be used as a critique. Somehow a wave started. Why now? Why not now?
Why not now because in many countries millions of people have felt their lives have reached a dead end.
The first Christian response is to make certain they are clothed and fed. That is the Good Samaritan response. The subsequent response is more complicated. Germany has committed six billion Euro to house, feed, educate a million people. Not every Western country is ready or desiring of that commitment. And while the debate continues as to where these people will end up, one thing is certain, there are many more of them in Syria, across parts of Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran and Iraq, plus the ones still interned in Turkey, and they want their future.
A joke that one of the administrators at this Hungarian ecumenical NGO has repeated to me twice states, “Why not Canada. You have a big empty country.” To which I respond, yes we do. We could take millions and nobody would notice. Of course, many Canadians don’t want to live in those empty spaces so maybe these refugees and migrants won’t either.
Andrew Faiz is writing from Eastern Europe where he is visiting refugees and travelling with Rev. Karen Horst, Moderator of the 2015 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.
