WORLDPOST
Desperate decisions on
the road to refuge left a young Afghan mother disabled, bereaved and
stranded. Her story illustrates the appalling risks Afghan refugees are
taking in the face of rising European asylum rejections and
deportations.
When Fatima Bakhshi awoke, her first
thought was for her children. She did not know where she was, where her
two boys were, or what had happened to her mother. Then she realized she
could not feel her legs.
It would be days before she
could emerge from the haze of painkillers to recall the final frantic
moments before the crash, which occurred in Serbia. The 29-year-old from
Kabul had been crammed with another 14 people into a Volkswagen Passat
with its back seat ripped out. Fatima had been crouching with her mother
Nadia behind her, and her boys were on their grandmother’s lap.
In broken English, Fatima
had pleaded with the driver to slow down as the vehicle began to veer
between lanes at high speed. She remembered panicked shouting inside the
car, and then nothing.
When she regained
consciousness, Fatima found herself in a hospital bed in the Serbian
city of Niš. An English-speaking doctor told her that after
complications and an infection following an initial surgery, her legs
had to be amputated above the knee.
For now, Fatima’s desperate
attempt to get herself and her family away from Afghanistan has come to a
brutal halt in Niš, the city closest to the fatal crash that occurred
when the smuggler, fearing interception by the police, veered off the
road into a barrier.
The collision occurred on
December 28, and Fatima spent days without news of her children and
mother, as the authorities initially had no way of establishing the
identity of the survivors. Two adults and one child had died, but the
driver from the smuggling gang was nowhere to be found.
After an agonizing wait, she
discovered that her two sons, Ahmed, 4, and Shohaib, 9, had survived
the wreck with broken bones, cuts and bruises, and were being treated in
a different facility. Her 59-year-old mother, Nadia, had not survived.
Known to friends as Naji,
Fatima did not take the decision to leave Kabul and travel to Europe
lightly. It was done with the support of her mother, who had watched
Fatima suffer at the hands of both her father and an abusive husband.
Fatima’s father, Nadia’s husband, was an “oppressive and violent man,”
she would later confide to friends in Greece. Of Fatima’s two sisters,
one migrated to Germany while the other committed suicide in Afghanistan
some years ago by pouring gasoline over herself and setting herself
alight.
Fatima’s husband proved to
be violent, and the pair eventually divorced in 2015 after he began to
use heroin. Even after the separation, the man’s family continued to
harass and threaten her, prompting their decision to flee the Afghan
capital.
After an ordeal experienced
by hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants, the four members of
the Bakhshi family reached Europe via a rubber dinghy, landing on the
Greek island of Lesbos in March 2016.
Their arrival came after the
closure of Greece’s northern borders. Fatima and her family found
themselves in limbo in the Athens refugee camp of Elaionas.
It was in Athens that the
Bakhshis became involved with the Melissa Network, which supports
refugee and migrant women. “Fatima taught herself English during her
journey, over the period of the past nine months, something she takes
great pride in,” said Nadina Christopoulou, the head of Melissa, who is
marshaling efforts to help Fatima in Serbia. “This was appreciated by
all our members, who saw the resilience and determination of these women
to create a better life for themselves and the little children.”
Their late arrival in
Greece, after more than 1 million refugees and migrants transited the
country in 2015, left the Bakhshi family facing an asylum lottery in
which Afghans are increasingly the losers. Throughout Europe the rate of
recognition for asylum claims for Afghans has been plunging faster than for any other nationality.
Where Germany recognized 72 percent of asylum claims from Afghans in
2015, a year later that rate dropped to 56 percent. In Norway, the rate
plummeted over the same time period from 82 percent to 30 percent. In
Greece, where Fatima applied, recognition dropped from 61 percent to 49
percent last year. The family had strong reasons to fear rejection and
deportation.
It was with this in mind
that Fatima and Nadia took the fateful decision to skip Elaionas after
their neighbors at the camp told them they had decided to use smugglers
to continue their journey. The mother and daughter quickly packed the
essential items, giving the rest to friends in the camp. For the cost of
a little over $3,000, they were told they would be smuggled out of
Greece and driven across FYROM and Serbia into Hungary. Their eventual destination was in Ireland with Nadia’s two brothers, Farooq and Zakhrie Bakhshi.
Farooq heard reports of Afghans being killed in a crash in Serbia,
but had no idea his relatives had left Greece. When he got a call from a
doctor in Serbia, he began to look for his loved ones and some answers
there.
Farooq, an engineer, arrived
in Niš at midnight on January 3, after boarding a bus from Belgrade.
With no idea where Fatima was and finding no English speakers, Farooq
was forced to speak the little Russian he still knew from the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan to try and communicate.
By the time he found Fatima’s doctor, Zoran Radovanovic, at the Niš Clinical Center, another half day had passed.
“I asked her what had
happened but it took two or three days for her to be able to explain,”
said Farooq. “I told her not to worry about anything, now with
technology we can make anything. We can make legs.”
Farooq, who has since
returned to Ireland, also tracked down Ahmed and Shohaib. They had only
been able to speak to their mother by phone and were in deep shock.
Ahmed had a broken arm and leg and was still in considerable pain.
“They told me that everything went dark and they didn’t know what happened. They thought they had gone to another world.”
The two uncles are now determined to reunite the family in Ireland. It is unlikely to be simple.
Afghan refugees from
Germany, Sweden and elsewhere in Europe are facing deportation in
increasing numbers, while those in Pakistan and Iran are being coerced by the hundreds of thousands
to return to a country still at war. Last year was the deadliest in
Afghanistan since 2001. Some 620,000 people were forced to flee their
homes inside its borders.
The Bakhshi brothers are only too familiar with war. Zekhrie was threatened by the Taliban following his work as a fixer with the BBCjournalist John Simpson. Dr. Zak, as he is known, worked as a translator on a number of high-profile stories including the Afghan girl photo by Steve McCurry.
After being given refuge in Ireland, he completed his medical studies
at Trinity College Dublin. He now practices medicine and is ready and
willing to sponsor his niece and grandnephews if Irish authorities will
let him.
“My heart is
crying now that we didn’t do enough to prevent this,” said Zekhrie. “We
knew what was happening, they were running away from brutality and war.
We wanted them to get here and be with us, and had faith that they were
safe under U.N. protection in Greece, and that through them we would eventually reunite.”
This article originally appeared on Refugees Deeply. For weekly updates and analysis about refugee issues, you can sign up to the Refugees Deeply email list.
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