generalspeaking

Flight of Refugees, Plight of Refugees

"Bulgarian border police. They are watching us now. When the refugees try to cross, they are stopping them and pushing them back, sometimes beating them, robbing them, even unleashing dogs on them."
Hasan Bulgur, 73, Sukrupasa, Turkey

"They hit me and took my money I ran away from hell at home, trying to find paradise in Europe. Instead, I found another hell."
Alan Murad, 17, Iraqi asylum seeker, Sofia, Bulgaria

"I think these charges are wildly exaggerated. Our policy has always been to investigate such cases, if there is a complaint. Yet out of 30,000 people who have passed through the border, we've had only two complaints that resulted in prosecution."
Philip Gounev, deputy interior minister, Bulgaria

"The migrants usually cross over at night, directed by the smugglers. And then we see them straggling back in the morning."
Osman Aran, 81, resident of Sukrupasa, Turkey

"The traffickers tell them that if they complain about abuse by Bulgarian police and then continue on to Germany, they stand a better chance of not being returned to Bulgaria."
"They have an incentive to lie."
Krassimir Kanev, chairman, Bulgarian Helsinki committee

Mr. Kanev has no problem believing the migrants' claims of having suffered abuse at the hands of the Bulgarian border police. And though he feels that this is a widespread problem, it cannot be certified. The Belgrade Center for Human Rights along with Oxram interviewed 110 refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan whose passage took them through Bulgaria. Everyone  who had experienced contact with the Bulgarian police reported they had been abused.

The abuse takes many forms, according to the migrants' testimony, and they include shootings, beatings and pistol-whippings. Dogs are being used to force the migrants to return back over the border with Turkey, according to the investigation results. The only migrants not reporting abuse to the Belgrade Center for Human Rights were those refugees who had walked for days through the mountains who had no contact with the police.

The smugglers commonly urge the migrants to complain about abuse, irrespective of whether they've suffered any, commented Mr. Kanev as a complicating fact. Asylum seekers under European immigration law are meant to register and be fingerprinted in the first country they come to. And then expected to remain there while their case for haven is determined. Bypassing the ritual of registration and fingerprinting to continue the journey can lead to arrest and deportation.

Sukrupasa is one of a number of Turkish villages that overlook the border between Turkey and
 Bulgaria. The residents have become accustomed to seeing migrants trudging into Bulgaria after fording a river where there is no barbed wire fence. Some of them arrive back at their starting point in Turkey bruised and bashed. These are the refugees who choose to cross the land border into southern Bulgaria rather than risk the sea crossing to Greece.

The land crossing has proven to be a more arduous obstacle course and most particularly in winter where swift-running rivers, thick woods and jagged hills must be negotiated. Not to speak of the razor fences and high-tech monitoring devices, all of which make it more difficult to make those surreptitious journeys to an imagined utopia and a new life.


The refugees, through experience with the feared Bulgarian border police understand full well that they will be victimized in Bulgaria by violent behaviour at the hands of the border guards even while they are being registered and fingerprinted. The Bulgarian government denies any such allegations.
There is no fence near Sukrupasa, but there are outposts for the Bulgarian police, stationed every 50 to 100 metres, once the fast-flowing and icy Rezovo River has been crossed.

Of a group of refugees resting near the village of Sukrupasa's mosque, several claimed to have been beaten and robbed. One man had a broken nose. Another had been bitten by police dogs. "Police took our phones and our money", Ahmad Safi, an Afghan, said.

Labels: Bulgaria, Middle East, Refugees, Turkey

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, January 14, 2016