Background information
(Reading time: 8 min.)
What is ‘the labyrinth’?
Since 2014, around three million people forced to flee (out of 110 million worldwide) have tried to reach the European Union illegally. So far, EU member states have still failed to reach a unified asylum policy. Meanwhile, border patrols on Europe's southern and eastern borders are using increasingly brutal tools to stop people, with the knowledge of that same EU.
Steel walls, barbed wire, cameras, sensors, criminal human traffickers, sound cannons with the sound of a fighter jet, violent thugs and thousands of ‘pushbacks’ have created a life-threatening labyrinth. Almost 29.000 people are currently missing on the Mediterranean sea. But people keep coming, and a large number of them are parents with their children. Who are these parents?
What drove them to make this hellish journey? And why are they taking such dangerous routes when there are also just planes flying between all the countries? Logical questions, but with a complicated answer because people forced to flee in fact find themselves in a parallel world with different regulations: like a labyrinth with untraceable doors. Here is an explanation in 14 questions.
1. Why do people flee with their children?
“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark” is a sentence from a poem by the Kenyan poet Warsan Shire, a sentence that all parents in this project agree with. They all indicated that they would prefer to be at home, in their homeland. Because there they had their house, their family and friends, their network, language, culture and their favorite supermarket on the corner.
The reasons why the parents decided to leave are all very different: war, violent regimes, disenfranchisement and exclusion. Often the most important reason is that they want their child to have a safe future, just like every parent would grant their own child too.
2. Is it a difficult journey?
Yes, a very difficult one. In the last 7 years, Europe has built as many as 2,000 kilometers of walls. Also, high walls hundreds of kilometers long have been built on the Iran-Turkey border (243 km, left), just like the Syria-Turkey (556 km, right) and Turkey-Greece (60 km, center) borders. People can only cross them illegally by giving all their savings to people smugglers.
As invisible as possible to the armed and often aggressive border police, they have to walk huge distances with their children through mountainous areas with wild animals and little water and food, in often extreme weather conditions. Most are on the road for months and sometimes years.
The parents in this project were also not left unharmed; everyone describes terrifying moments. Gita was beaten black and blue at the Iran-Turkey border and lost her son Navid for three days. Nazir-Ahmad lost his wife Asma for two days. And Anwar tried to protect his children - wrapped in plastic bags - from the cold under a bed of leaves.
3. Why don’t people book a plane ticket?
Few people seem to be aware of this, but your passport determines how many rights you have. And that is often a very unequal match. Europeans and Americans can travel visa-free to more than 185 countries. But people with a passport from countries such as Syria, Iraq, Iran or African countries do not get a visa for almost any country. Afghanistan is at the very bottom of the ranking.
It is impossible to fly without a visa. Explicitly, the law states that airlines may only allow people on board with the correct visa papers. If they fail to do this, they are then responsible for returning the people to where they came from, including all associated costs. This also applies to other transport services such as international ferry services or train connections.
People on the flight are therefore not admitted to international travel. The door is also closed to them at land border crossings.
4. Where do people flee to?
More than 110 million people are currently displaced worldwide. 59 million of them are internally displaced (within their own country). 83% of everyone else roams around in a neighboring country, often because they have no money or opportunities to move on. Many live in tent camps in the border areas.
It is often suggested that Western countries take in by far the most refugees. This is not the case. The number of asylum seekers who manage to seek asylum in Europe, the US, Canada or Australia is around 5% of all refugees worldwide.
There are a few countries that take in very many refugees. For example, Lebanon, 3x smaller than the Netherlands and Syria's neighbor, receives no less than 19.5% refugees in relation to its own population, and Jordan 10.5%. Turkey is at 5%.
By comparison, the EU (including Switzerland and the United Kingdom) has provided protection to three million refugees in the past ten years (calculated before the war in Ukraine) which corresponds to 0.57% of the population.
There are also countries that do not receive refugees at all, such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Japan. It is the richest countries that simply pretend that refugees do not exist. Japan has only allowed 841 displaced people in since 1982.
5. Iran also takes in a lot of Afghans, doesn’t it?
That's right, only in their own way. As a result of all the conflicts in Afghanistan in the last decades, no fewer than 3.6 million Afghans moved to their neighboring country Iran in the past 35 years.
They hoped for opportunities, but most of them never got an unlimited residence permit. It is still decided every year whether their annual ID card will be renewed or revoked, and revoked means deportation back to Afghanistan. The practice of that policy is disastrous: no studying after 18 years old, no own bank account, no own company, no own house, no driver's license and not even a SIM card. They are left without any rights.
Several parents from this project belong to this group. Nazir-Ahmad and Zahra fled as small children from Afghanistan to Iran 30 years ago on the arm of their parents, the Afghan Fatima was even born there 25 years. However, that did not entitle them to receive any papers. The birth of their children meant that they no longer could tolerate this exclusion: they grant their children another life, one wíth opportunities.
6. And how many refugees has Turkey?
Turkey is 5 times smaller than the EU, but hosts almost 4 million Syrians and 400,000 Afghans. With the 'EU - Turkey deal' in 2016, the EU has effectively outsourced the holding back and reception of refugees to Turkey. In this way, Europe can keep the door closed, and Ankara will receive billions of euros in financial support in return.
For years it went okay - Turkish society welcomed the newcomers without too many problems - but now that the numbers of refugees have become so enormous, the Turks are revolting. The discrimination is enormous, and Syrian shops have been attacked. Someone said: "The West should not think that it can turn our country into an open-air prison with its money."
Incidentally, the Turkey deal only concerns the reception of Syrians, and is not intended for the Afghans. They have no rights at all in Turkey.
Almost all people in our project describe their time in Turkey as difficult, hopeless and very stressful, especially the Afghans. They can just be picked off the street to be deported to Iran. Latifa has worked in the clothing industry 6 days a week for a year, 12 hours a day. As well as Gita. The children were not allowed to go to school.
7. Can people request asylum for Europe from a country outside Europe?
No. And that is the twist of European logic: people who have fled can only apply for official asylum when they are literally ín the relevant European country. But precisely that is impossible because of the visa story above. The only way to apply for asylum is to try to enter Europe illegally, which can take years without being allowed to participate in international travel. People lose all their money to human traffickers.
8. How is the trip by sea?
That could go well, because a modern ferry sails once a day between the Turkish Ayvalik and the Greek Mytilini, for 20 euros pp (photo left). But this boat is only accessible if you have the right passport and visa, and the parents in this project don't have that.
The only way for them to reach Europe is to buy a seat on an inflatable boat from a human trafficker. The costs are between 600 and 1200 dollars per person, amounts that people often have to work for a long time to earn in the illegal circuit in Turkey. There is so much money to be made in this human smuggling that serious organized crime runs the business here.
Once in negotiations with a smuggler, the people themselves have no influence on when they can leave, or how many people will get on the boat. Many say they first have to wait for weeks in crowded apartments in Izmir or Istanbul, after which they are taken to a Turkish beach to leave. Here they sometimes have to wait a few nights in the bushes, often without any food or water. There are stories that people having to take a seat in the boat on rough seas, forced to go by having a gun put to their head. The smuggler himself does not sail; he only pushes the boat off. The sea between Turkey and the Greek islands is only 10 kilometers wide in places, but very dangerous due to currents and treacherous weather. And there are the so called ‘pushbacks’.
Latifa, Nasim, Fatima, Nazi-Ahmad, Iman, Zahra, Asma, Azim, Marziye, Aisha, Anwar, Prisca and Gita, all had to take this route with their children. It often appears in the letters.
9. What is a pushback?
In addition to the unpredictable sea, there has been a new danger for the past two years: the Greek coastguard is playing a dubious role - on behalf of the Greek government. In the middle of the high seas, they force the boats to dock with them, then tow them back to Turkish waters and remove the engine. Floating and rudderless, they leave people and families in mortal danger. The people then have to hope that the Turkish coastguard rescues them and tows them back to the Turkish coast.
Even people who manage to set foot on Greek soil (and thus have the right to apply for asylum) are outlawed. There are many stories of ‘men in black balaclavas’ imprisoning them in buildings and mistreating them. A few hours later, these people are ‘mysteriously’ found in inflatable life rafts in the middle of the sea.
Despite piles of evidence, the Greek government continues to deny that there are any pushbacks, and the EU turns a blind eye. But it's not merely an isolated incident. Aegean Boat Report counted no fewer than 2900 pushbacks at sea between 2020 and January 2024. On these life rafts were around 80.000 men, women and children.
The parents and kids in this project also experienced this: Aisha got a broken engine and was also towed back 3 times, Anwar 4 times. Fabiola faced a violent pushback. They all describe it as a life-threatening traumatic experience.
10. How does an asylum procedure work in Greece?
The parents from this project eventually all made it to Greece, and they were allowed to start an asylum procedure. With that, they entered a new part of the labyrinth: the noose of the Greek bureaucracy.
A procedure can go quickly, but it can also take two, three or four years. Sometimes people have to wait six months for an answer to a simple question. A rejection means starting an entirely new procedure, even if the reason for rejection is not always clear. And then suddenly, a third or fourth or fifth asylum application can be granted.
All parents in the project describe this continuous insecurity as being mentally extremely difficult. The elusive part of the process feels like a strong signal to any refugee in Turkey who is thinking about making the crossing to Europe: “Europe is a labyrinth and we are not going to give you the key.”
It often happens that part of a family is assigned and part is rejected. In their fifth asylum case (almost 4 years in the camp), Latifa received an adjudication, along with her husband and youngest child. But her other two daughters Mozhda (8) and Mozhgan (6) were rejected. This also happened to Prisca and Gita before.
11. What is life like in a camp?
Greece currently has 28 camps spread across the islands and on the mainland. For this project we visited parents in camp Moria (Lesbos) and in camp Diavata (Thessaloniki).
The parents who now live in the new camp Moria (photo on the right) have all also camped in the old camp Moria (photo on the left). In their letters they write about the degrading situation in which they had to survive. Instead of 3,000 people, 20,000 people stayed. When that camp burned down completely in August 2020, a new camp was built at a different location. That also started terribly with single-walled tents that were filled with rain for a winter in the icy sea breeze (picture in the middle). Now there are more facilities such as ISO boxes, a drainage system and showers and toilets.
However, that does not take away from the stress surrounding the asylum applications. Because as long as there is no assignment, there is the fear of being sent back to Turkey, that in turn then deports people to Iran. Also, people are not allowed to work, the children are not allowed to go to regular schools, and they are not even allowed to leave the island. That means that life comes to a virtual standstill and is void of every future perspective.
Hannah Arendt, a famous German philosopher who fled to the United States during the Second World War, describes it this way: “The lives of ‘asylum seekers' are determined by the political community of which they themselves are not allowed to be a part. In addition to being stateless, it also makes them disenfranchised. There is no protection.”
12. What rights does a Greek residence permit give?
People who receive a residency permit often have to wait a few months in the camp before their ID papers are ready. After receiving them, their definition change from ‘refugee’ into 'status holder'. They have to leave their tent in the camp within a month, and their cash card (about 75 euros per month per person for living expenses) will be discontinued. Because once you are a status holder, you have to find your own way.
With this passport, valid for a stay of three years in Greece, people can live and work anywhere in Greece and the children can attend regular schools. They are also allowed to travel and fly throughout the EU. However, they are not allowed to stay in another European country for more than 90 days, nor are they allowed to live or work there. So it is not a European passport.
You would hope that this would end the labyrinth, but it does not. Status holders start at the very bottom of Greek society, a society that is already struggling with an unemployment rate of 11.4%. Their diplomas from the past are not valid and they have no network. For these reasons, the circle of finding a job and thus being able to rent a house is not achieved by many status holders, despite integration programs from organizations such as the IOM. This once again causes many families to live on the streets, but now wíth a residence permit, completely dependent on local NGOs. It is estimated that over 25% of the status holders in Greece are without housing.
13. Can status holders apply for asylum in another country?
Because of the poor prospects in Greece, many status holders take the risk of traveling to a better-functioning EU country in the hope that they will be allowed to reapply for asylum there, despite the ‘Dublin Regulation’.
This regulation was adopted in 1990 (far before this migratory flow existed). It states that people can only apply for asylum in the first European country of arrival, which geographically is always a country on the southern or eastern borders of Europe. If they do (re-)try in another country, this country can send them back to that 'first' country.
But the bad situation in Greece means that almost all status holders see few other options than traveling on to another European country to try to make a new asylum application upon arrival there. It is uncertain whether this will work.
14. Where does the labyrinth end?
Theoretically, the ‘labyrinth’ stops at the moment the families receive an indefinite residence permit in a safe country where they can start to rebuild a future. Most of the parents in this project are currently at the stage on a temporary (3 or 5 years) residence permit (mostly in Germany). With this residence permit, it is possible for them to participate in society, such as starting a study, taking a job, renting a house, and sending the children to school. (Follow updates on the parents via the Instagram page children.of.the.labyrinth or check the question 'how are the parents doing now').
All in all, that sounds very positive and it is. The parents write us that they feel fortunate to see that their children do pick up the rhythm, learn the language and make new friends at their school. All the children are doing well. But we also hear the parents. For them, after surviving for years in life-threatening situations, they experience it’s not easy to end up in a new country with no network, a foreign language and a different culture. In the calm that prevails, the past resurfaces. The realization that life will be forever different without their homeland, family and friends, then sets in.