Over the past 20 years, the Mediterranean Sea has become a graveyard as the EU’s brutal “Fortress Europe” policies unleash brutal hostility against migrants and refugees. While mainstream media has often sensationalized the problem as a “migrant crisis” or “refugee crisis,” little scrutiny has been placed on the role of Europe and other countries of the Global North in producing this crisis of mass displacement through the War on Terror or the historic underdevelopment of the former colonial world. Authors Helen Benedict and Eyan Awwadawnan join The Chris Hedges Report to discuss their book, Map of Hope and Sorrow: Stories of Refugees in Greece.
Helen Benedict is a novelist and journalist. Her previous books include The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, and Wolf Season.
Eyad Awwadawnan, formerly a law student from Damascus, Syria, is a writer and poet currently living as an asylum-seeker in Reykjavik, Iceland. During his four years in Greece, he worked as a cultural mediator, translator and interpreter for various NGOs.
Studio: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Chris Hedges:
There are some 84 million forcibly displaced people in the world, more than at any time since World War 2. They are fleeing a combination of war, civil unrest, religious conflict, poverty, persecution, local violence, and the climate crisis. As conditions worsen, authoritarian governments are on the rise that denounce immigrants and refugees as contaminants and imposed draconian policies to turn them back, including its sea where whole boats of refugees are drowned. Pope Francis calls the Mediterranean the largest cemetery in Europe. The persecution and abuse of refugees is becoming policy, including in Europe, Australia, and the United States. It does not matter that the US bears a direct responsibility for the more than 37 million people who have fled the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan since 2001. Not to mention the US backed wars in Central America. The US proxy war in Ukraine has only exacerbated the crisis. The EU is providing money to Greece and Turkey to detain and prevent refugees from seeking asylum in other European countries.
The EU is also testing sound cannons to blast at asylum seekers trying to cross into Greece from Turkey. The coast guards of Greece and the EU push refugees including children back out into sea, causing many to drown. Greece, which imprisons seven out of 10 asylum seekers denies new arrivals, including Afghans, the right to request asylum unless these arrivals are Ukrainians.
The increased hostility to refugees in the United States, great Britain, Italy, Belarus, Poland, Croatia, Greece, Spain and Hungary are the building blocks of a new and heartless world order. One where the wealthy industrialized nations of the earth wall off the destitute to suffer and die. Joining me to discuss the crisis is Helen Benedict, who with Eyad Awwadawnan, wrote Map of Hope and Sorrow, Stories of Refugees in Greece. So you open the book, the preface, you write, Eyad, about your own experience and which is an experience that’s mirrored in many of the people you’ve gone to interview in the book. But perhaps you can just explain how you ended up in Turkey and your flight or your entry into Greece and just lay out what happened. Of course you lose family members, but just tell us briefly that trajectory.
Eyad Awwadawnan:
First of all, thank you for having us and I would like to start with the first reason that made me escape my country. No one wants to leave his homeland. No one wants to leave any of his memory, his friends. But I would say that when you have no life and when you are afraid for your life and the one you love, you will try so hard to protect them and protect yourself. So the first reason to leave was the war and was the conditions of life that you cannot handle. Even though I just want to make sure that for few years we tried to move from an area to another, from city to a city in Syria, just like to find peace, but in the end you cannot. So we had to have a decision and to leave.
So we left to Turkey. Also, it is not an easy journey because when you leave from, for example, the area controlled by the government to the area controlled by the oposition, it is not something easy. You have to pay a lot of money and there is a big chance that you will be cut, you will be imprisoned, and maybe you will lose your life. A lot of people, and I know they have lost their life.
Chris Hedges:
Yeah. Can I just stop you there because I want to go back to Syria because there’s a lot of pressure at which you felt within your own family to join one or side or the other in the conflict.
Eyad Awwadawnan:
So I would say that a lot of people, they try so hard to keep studying, but for small reason, you have to be in one side either with the government or with the oposition. So it is not easy. For example, for me and for a lot of people, they don’t want to be part of this because we are just killing ourselves. My uncle, my cousin, my friend, because it is a civil war, this is the thing. So I don’t want to be in any side. So it is a real pressure and stressful for us. The situation there. I have lost many friends. I have lost also two cousins and many others.
So I think the easy way was for me to leave. But at the same time, it is not easy emotionally because you are forced to leave your country. To leave everything behind you. And even though you are thinking whether you are going to make it or not, because I crossed the border alone from Syria to Turkey, and the only thought was in my head whether I’m going to receive the bullet or not, because a lot of Syrian who tried to escape, they have been killed at the border.
So we left from Syria, we stayed in Turkey for a year and a half. The situation was really hard there.
Chris Hedges:
Well, you say you live, we live like animals. This is talking about Turkey.
Eyad Awwadawnan:
Yes, yes. I would say just saying that the life is hard there is not enough because sometimes, okay, the life is hard everywhere. But what do you mean by hard? I would say when you just walk all the day from seven to 12, sometimes till midnight, and for just almost no money, no paid. If you cut your finger at the work, there is no security, there is no health insurance because in this case you lost your job and you lost your finger and no one will care about this. So you just like animals, you work, you eat, you drink, and that’s it. I lived there for a year and a half and I only went to a cafe one time.
Chris Hedges:
You worked repairing trucks, you worked in a shoe factory, but you write, employers would often refuse to pay our wages, and if we asked for them, we were fired. We were insulted by the people, the police and the army, they said, you are traders, you fled from your country and come here to hide like women behind us.
Eyad Awwadawnan:
Yes, we hear this a lot of times, but even I tried to explain many times I try to explain and explain, but in the end you will say, okay, if no one is hearing me, why to say anything? Just keep silent. They think that we are there to just steal their jobs, and this is not the truth. We had lives in Syria, we had future there, but the war forced us to leave our country and to find a safe place to live in. The treatment was really bad. I’m not going to say that all of them, no, I cannot generalize this because a lot of people also, they are good. In any place in this earth, you will find the good people and bad people. Yeah, I remember when I was working in a shoe factory, I just less than $1, but for me it makes something, it’ll provide me with something. I told him just I have 10 Turkish lera and he kicked me from the vehicle.
Chris Hedges:
Let’s talk about Greece. So you pay a smuggler, $500, that’s a ton of money.
Eyad Awwadawnan:
Yes.
Chris Hedges:
For passage to Greece on a rubber boat, you’re paying, you think you’re getting on a boat with no more than 33 passengers for a crossing that’s no longer than an hour. That doesn’t turn out to be the case. Well talk about that passage of out of Turkish, off the Turkish coast, towards Greece.
Eyad Awwadawnan:
As I said in the book, the smuggler will make the sea honey for you. You will just go there with a few, with maximum 30 people on the boat and you will just spend less than one hour. Okay, and when you get inside the vehicle, the bus, it is a mining bus. Okay. You find yourself surrounded by 45. In my boat there was 67 people. If [inaudible 00:10:31] 67 people, including old people, young children, women, pregnant, everything, you will see the screaming. A lot of people, they start vomiting. It was not easy. And one of the scene and the memories of the boat still, when we saw the frontex boat, we start carrying our children, holding them up. High to the sky. Because we heard a lot of stories that if you don’t have children in the boat, they will send you back. And this is how it’s going now.
Chris Hedges:
You land in Greece. I’m just going to have you just fill that part in. And within the book you described the conditions, but just talk about what happens after you land in Greece.
Eyad Awwadawnan:
I just want to tell something. I remember the moment when I get on the frontex boat, when we saw the beautiful yellow buildings of Salamis, it was really beautiful. So when we landed at the port, they brought us, they put us all together, the 67 people, they hold us piece of paper and they wrote numbers on our hands. So after that, they brought small mini buses and took us to the camp. Just seeing the entrance of the camp covered by the garbage and the fence, seeing the people looking, lying in a long line, waiting for their food, shouting the police all around the place. It was like a shock for me. And after that, they put us in area where I would say an animal cannot live there or stay because there is no clean toilets even there is no water at that time. So it was disaster. It was disaster.
Chris Hedges:
So Helen, in the book you talk about the change in attitude, especially after 2015 towards refugees coming into Europe. Can you talk about that process and where we’ve, and I didn’t know until I read the book, there were such an aggressive effort by the EU to essentially trap people in Greece or push them back.
Helen Benedict:
Yes. So we often see these initial waves of sympathy when refugees are first fleeing a war. And even though the war started in Syria in 2011, the biggest rush out was in 2015. And at first there was some sympathy and there were, even on the islands, a lot of people were being welcoming, making sandwiches, opening their homes. Not everybody, but a lot of people. And then in 2016, the EU made this deal with Turkey called the EU Turkey deal. They put, the fed, 3 billion euros into Greece and Turkey to basically make sure that all the procedures that any refugee would have to go through, any the asylum seeker would have to go through, would be slowed down, slowed down, slowed down. And these temporary camps that were supposed to just be processing centers suddenly became holding pens. And people got stuck there for year, after year ,after year with no schooling. One doctor for the entire camp.
And the horrible sanitary conditions and filth and overcrowding that Eyad describes. And then the islanders, as more people came us, the islanders, began to get more and more fed up with it and more and more distressed, even though I might say are also making money off it. And this was fed by the new government that came into Greece in 2019, which was overtly right wing, anti-immigrant, anti-refugee government. Using that platform of so many authoritarian governments are using today and began to feed all these lies to the people of Greece, that these are not real refugees fleeing for their lives. These are economic migrants coming to try and make money off us and take our jobs. And so with of course work, especially with the help of social media to foster more and more and more antagonism. And that’s what I saw each time I went back, I would talk to Greeks and I would talk to the people living in the camp and they were having more and more hostile encounters with locals and especially with the local police who became very brutal.
Chris Hedges:
So, Eyad, one of the themes in the book is this, all those people who prey on the vulnerable for profit, not just the smugglers, but everywhere because you’re defenseless, because you have no legal rights even though you’re poor, you are just fleeced at every turn. Can you talk about all the ways that these refugees are preyed upon often through scams even?
Eyad Awwadawnan:
Yes. I would say, for example, let’s start when I was in Salamis, a lot of asylum seekers has been rejected. So they try their best to find smugglers to get them out of the island of Salamis to the mainland, either with the smuggler will make a deal with truck driver or just to put them in the back of truck. And there is a dangers on this. The other thing also, let’s say that you are not asylum seeker anymore. You have been recognized as a refugee. But here you are going through a nightmare of the long procedures. For example, I have been waiting when I was there for my just ID card for six months.
So when you just want to leave this country because you say, I want to study and here I cannot. So I’m thinking to go to another country just to follow my dream. Sometimes if I don’t have airplane attacking me, that doesn’t mean I am life because life has many more than just being safe and having food on table. So you are trying to get your documents as fast as you can. So you will just go to a lawyer asking him and he will take advantage. A lot of people, they paid a lot of money. One of them, me, and there is a lady also who is in the book. I guess a lot of people they will hear and know more about this through reading through the book. I would say everyone will take advantage because they know that you want to leave as soon as you can. So the police, the lawyers, I’m not saying all of them, but I would say a lot of them.
Chris Hedges:
Helen, I want to talk about women. Rape is of course, unfortunately common among women and girls who flee. And then I wondered if you can also, I didn’t know until I read the book, but once you’re granted asylum, oftentimes you’re bereft of any financial support. But can you begin with the situation for girls and women?
Helen Benedict:
Yes. Well, in the camps for example, they are vastly outnumbered. It’s about five to one, men to women. And it’s especially dangerous of course for women who’ve come alone or for young unaccompanied minors, girls, because they’re seen as prey by everybody. The smugglers, they come across during the journey and once they get there, so it’s not just the smugglers, it’s also police, soldiers, anybody with power. And sometimes also the men in the camp. So an awful lot of women that arrive in Greece having already endured terrible assaults and violence through the wars at home. So they’re already traumatized and then they get there and there’s no special place to live that there’s no protected housing. There are, as I said, one doctor, one psychiatrist, one psychologist. There’s nobody to help except for a handful of very tiny NGOs.
So a lot of women have no help. And then if they’re targeted again and they’re repeatedly assaulted or raped, they might be targeted by a particular man who just knows that the woman has no protection, it can just go on. This nightmare goes on and on with no recourse. And it’s a very distressing story really. If it weren’t for the NGOs, there’d be no help at all.
Chris Hedges:
Although I wanted, it’s in the book the, there’s all this effort to remove the NGOs. So there’s a lot of-
Helen Benedict:
Most of them have been, yeah. Yes. The Greek gov. So two of the things that the Greek government that now Democrat or the new democracy government did was one is once you get refugee status, you get kicked off of every kind of help that you are entitled to. So in a way, it’s the opposite of being protected. Your money’s taken away, subsidized housing is taken away. You’re often, you are evicted. You’re not allowed free medical care anymore, let alone any kind of care for sexual assault and rape and war trauma. And the other thing is that most of the NGOs were closed down and taken away the very places that were the only ones that were offering at any kind of help.
Eyad Awwadawnan:
And sometimes I would say it is the only place where you can get away from the camp.
Chris Hedges:
So Eyad, I want to ask you about trauma. In the book, you write about a man named Hassan and his twin brother Hussein is killed. He says he was my twin, my brother, part of me. I sat alone in my room with the blinds down and the curtains lowered the lights off. I wanted to stay away from everybody. The summer humidity filled the ceiling, the walls, the floor, until the smell of mold was everywhere. On most days, I stayed awake until dawn and only ate one meal, always the same milk mixed with olive oil and salt, a piece of bread, a cup of tea. After several months of this, I was having health problems. So you carry, I mean probably most of these refugees carry tremendous trauma, and I wondered if you could address the effects of that trauma and what it does to you.
Eyad Awwadawnan:
A lot of time when I was in the camp, as I have written, the only thing you can do is I was saying that lighting a cigarette after a cigarette and going back to your memories, to the people who was living with you to your memories with them. And the only thing, sometimes listening to music as well, take you back to the time when you were together, but one day you just have a picture of them where there is a bullet, for example, in their neck. Like one friend, his name Mohamed, he was sitting with us many times playing cards together and one day we just woke up hearing the story that he is dead. And just so a picture of him, the last picture of him was his neck was open because of a bullet. So I don’t think that war can give you anything.
Chris Hedges:
And there’s very little opportunity for any kind of treatment for this trauma. Is there?
Eyad Awwadawnan:
I don’t, personally, I would say that I think this will be permanent. This feeling like something has been changed. For example, today I am safe. I am in a place where there is everything like a nice country and the people are really nice. But still because of what happened, because of what I have experienced, I would say that there is something has been changed inside me and worries, I guess.
Helen Benedict:
Yeah,
Eyad Awwadawnan:
I would say being afraid of tomorrow, you will stay afraid of tomorrow. And being a refugee is this hard topic.
Helen Benedict:
I would add that the people I talk to, sleep is very hard. Getting to sleep, staying asleep. When your defenses are down, all the memories and the images haunt you and haunt you. Never feeling safe no matter where you are, never knowing whether you’ll have a future and what it will be. I mean, I think one of the hardest things that happens when you have to flee your country is that all control over your life is taken away. You’re shipped around by the authorities like a packet of socks. You don’t get to choose where to go or which camp you’re going to be sent to or whether you’re going to be kicked out on the street or not. The only place I’ve heard of that’s really managed to help people is MSF, Médecins Sans Frontières, The Doctors Without Borders, where if for those who are lucky enough to get access to it there, but yes, it lasts a long time and it erodes people in all kinds of both obvious and subtle ways.
Chris Hedges:
I want begin with you, Helen, but I want to address racism because the influx of refugees has fed this white nationalist movement in the United States and Europe. But can you deal with that issue of race and then, Eyad, I’ll have you also speak to that.
Helen Benedict:
Yes, sure. Two of the people in the book are African, one from Nigeria and one from Cameroon. And there’s plenty of racism against Arabs in Greece. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, but it’s even more extreme with Africans. And you could see it. I mean, I walked around with Evans, who’s one of the people in the book, just trying to help him open a bank account. We were kicked out of one bank. They said, come back in three months. I said, but don’t you want his money just to see what they would say. Whoever heard of it, bank turning someone away like that. We were kicked out of phone shops. He was trying to get a battery for his phone and then they’d let white people in. It was very, very overt. There were certain restaurants you just didn’t go to and cafes you didn’t go to because the people were so hostile.
It became known. And then landlords won’t rent to refugees often. And a lot of that is racism. Some of it is, a lot of it is also his Islamophobia. In the case of the two Africans in the book, they’re both Christian. But I interviewed others who were Muslim. But what mattered most to people was that they were black. So it’s very extreme. And of course it’s being used as you said, Chris, everywhere to drum up xenophobia and hatred and suspicion, and this myth that refugees are dangerous, whereas all the statistics show that they actually commit less crimes than civilians do in any given country.
Chris Hedges:
Eyad, can you speak about that? The racism and Islamophobia?
Eyad Awwadawnan:
A story has happened with me when I was working with an organization called Solidarity Now. So I was living in far area from the camp, so I tried to move close to the camp anyway. I asked some of my colleague to find a house for me, and there was many houses. And every time they know that this man or this woman who wants to rent this place is Syrian or is refugee, they will say, no, we just want to rent this place for someone European, if not a Greek, then someone from Europe. This happened with me, I would say I have seen and heard a lot of stories about racism, but I’m not going to say that all of the people there are racism. No, as I mentioned in the book, you will find good people.
Like an old lady who treat us with a smile. Sometimes smile is more than enough. So I would say yes, I have seen a lot of racism, but at the same time I have seen some kindness from normal people. If we want to talk about police, I would say no. None of them I have a nice experience with. Some of them on the beach they will try to just kick us. I remember my brother has been taken from the beach with a large group of refugees and what is their crime that they were walking next to the harbor front of everyone as cows.
Helen Benedict:
Yeah. One thing I saw one of the times I was going there to Greece was right in the middle of the Black Lives Matter movement here, and we were talking a lot about racial profiling in the US and I saw the police stop refugees randomly all the time and search them, make them take off their backpacks and search and pat them down. They’re just walking along minding their own business. So it was very raw. But I of course, Eyad’s right in reminding us to say that we can’t overgeneralize about a whole country of people. There are plenty of very kind and generous Greeks who really care about this situation as there are people like that everywhere. Thank goodness.
Chris Hedges:
Great. I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Duane Gladden, and Kayla Rivera. You can find me at chrishedges.substat.com
Speaker 5:
And the Chris Hedges report. Get some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material with Chris and co-authors Helen Benedict and Eyad Awwadawnan.
Chris Hedges:
Where do you see this going, Helen? I mean, the rise of authoritarian governments. It’s a 41% Marie Lappen in France, Sweden, of course there does seem to be this kind of tidal wave of, and so much of the engine of that is anti-immigrant.
Helen Benedict:
It’s very bleak. And I think it’s going to get worse as climate, as more and more people are fleeing because of climate. So what can we do? Vote them out. Vote them out. Work really hard. I mean, as I just wrote in a piece, I published, the answer lies in our hearts and in our voting booths because the only way to stop this is, well, we are fighting in everywhere we can, but in the end, it’s rejecting politicians who rest their platforms on anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Chris Hedges:
Although Biden’s been as bad as Trump, I mean he hasn’t reversed the policy of locking Central Americans in Mexico. The rhetoric is better.
Helen Benedict:
Well, I think it’s debatable whether he’s as bad.
Chris Hedges:
Well, I don’t know if he’s, he’s not much better.
Helen Benedict:
He’s been disappointing.
Chris Hedges:
Well, he’s not much better.
Helen Benedict:
But he’s undone some of the things not enough. But he has undone some of them. But what was it, Trump put in something like a hundred little laws that made life harder for people coming here. Some of Biden’s managed to undo some of them, but it’s slow.
Chris Hedges:
Do you see the, I mean the, that’s in the book, the sound cannons and stuff, are they ramping up the measures by which they’re keeping people out? Is that accelerating?
Helen Benedict:
Yes, it is. They’re the push backs. Sound cannons are nothing compared to the coast guards of Greece and the EU going out there and actually shoving people back out to sea, causing them to drown or even capturing them once they’ve landed and putting them on rafts and shoving them back out again. I mean, that’s just murder.
Chris Hedges:
Yeah.
Helen Benedict:
It’s just outright murder. So that’s happening a lot. And then there’s the closed detention camps, the new thing, which we didn’t get to, but which I describe in the book, and I just read their opening. Well, I knew they were going to have five of them and two more are opening next year. So this is Greece’s new policy, which is to build what amounts to prisons in the middle of nowhere and put asylum seekers who have not broken any law, because it is their legal right to seek asylum and enter even illegally if they’re seeking asylum.
And lock them up in there for months and months on end where they can’t even leave or access doctors or psychologists or a town or a cafe or anything. So that’s the new approach. And some of the candidates, I just read that some of the candidates who were running from the French elections lauded Greece as the way we should in model for how we should be treating refugees. But we can’t actually imprison them all in the world, especially once the climate causes more and more. We’d be, we’d end up all imprisoning each other. It’s not feasible, but it’s being embraced.
Chris Hedges:
Is the idea of these camps that you lock them up and hold them until you send them back? Where’s the end game?
Helen Benedict:
The end game is to deport as many as possible, keep them out of sight of the locals so the locals can stop complaining. And then there’s the old Trumpian idea that, oh, if you make life miserable for them, they’ll all stop coming, which is of course absurd because nobody’s paying a pension to why people have to leave at all, which is what Eyad was describing so passionately and well. So as that famous poet, Washington Shire said, nobody puts their child on a boat unless the water is safer than the land. Sort of says it all.
Chris Hedges:
What’s the hardest thing about leaving your country, leaving your home? There must be, I mean, I lived overseas for 20 years. There must be kind of, you cope with a kind of permanent alienation. What is it that’s most difficult about traveling to another country and attempting to reintegrate or integrate into it?
Eyad Awwadawnan:
I would say it is just being forced to leave your homeland. This is the hardest part. Knowing that you are not able to go as much as you want. And being a refugee, this is something that none of us have ever wished to be.
Chris Hedges:
And explain what you’re doing now, what your life is like.
Eyad Awwadawnan:
The life. I’m living now in Iceland. It’s a beautiful country. And I would say that everything is much better than before. I’m working and I am learning to study to do many things for my future. But as I told you, one thing that I cannot change for now, being away from my homeland because something not easy.
Chris Hedges:
And Helen, what is it that motivated you to put all these stories together and write the book?
Helen Benedict:
It really started back in the Iraq war because I was writing a lot about Iraq, the absurd and unjust war that we waged over there. And first I started off by writing about women, American women soldiers serving there. And one of the reasons I was attracted to that is because they were more willing to speak out against the war than a lot of men were earlier on. But then I wanted to pay attention to the Iraqis themselves. So I began talking to Iraqi refugees here in the US and I realized around 2018 that an awful lot of Iraqis had been displaced twice because a lot of them had fled to Damascus and other places in Syria, and now they were fleeing again. And I thought that would be very interesting to find some Iraqis who had to go through that and see what it felt like to have to be a double refugee, if you like.
So that’s what brought me to Salamis. It’s an area I already knew had already written about in a novel years before. And then I fell in, I met, Eyad had the second day there by chance in a stationery shop, and we just completely hit it off and he began to bring me people to interview and be my translator. And so I sort fell in with Syrians instead of Iraqis, although I did meet one or two and we just started working together. And initially I was researching a novel, which is coming out soon, but the stories were so arresting and so urgent that I knew I had to do this as a journalist too.
And so we were going to travel around together doing it, and then Covid hit. So I said to Eyad, why don’t you, you’re there in Greece and you are a great interviewer and a really good writer, so why don’t you just be my co-author and you do, you interview Arabic speakers there and I’ll interview French and English speakers on WhatsApp until I can get back. And that’s how the book began. But in a sense, we’d always been working together from the minute we met.
Chris Hedges:
Well, it’s important because we don’t hear those voices and we should, so we, they’re caricatured refugees and demonized. And so yeah, I really appreciate both of you doing it. That was Helen Benedict and Eyad Awwadawnan on their book Map of Hope and Sorrow.