đ days 114-187: breathing border violence day in and day out
When I set off from Amsterdam, the goal was understanding borders. As I cycled over mountains, next to cliffs and through the inevitably sad industry complexes on city outskirts, I have read books, consumed podcasts and watched documentaries exploring borders (all written about here). Slowly but surely, my theoretical understanding of âthe borderâ was assembling itself in my mind. For example, how âthe borderâ is more than the wall: itâs all sorts of controls scattered everywhere in society, like needing a passport for a SIM card! Or how borders make that some groups of people can be exploited for much cheaper hourly salaries than others, like Moroccans who canât get asylum so are forced to sell their illegalized labour for half the price!
And then there was seeing the border up close. Not just any border. No, this was, in many ways, the border. Impressively deadly. Unimaginably expensive. The outer edge of Fortress Europe. This is my attempt to bring you into that world.
welcome to Harmanli, South Bulgaria.
Allow me to situate you. Youâre in Harmanli, a town in Southern Bulgaria. The main square is being renovated, though you donât see many signs of work being done. Thereâs about 18.000 people living here, people who seem preoccupied with daily life, their attitude distant and brief with nothing more than basic politeness.
There are no foreigners in Harmanli except 2 types: those who busy themselves with the refugee camp (like me), and those living in the refugee camp (the ârefugeesâ). No tourists come here because, to put it frank, why would they? That isnât to say that Harmanli is unpleasant, just that Harmanli is, to its essence, deeply unremarkable.
No Name Kitchen, one of the 2 organisations we are fundraising money for, is scattered across 7 locations in Europe. These locations arenât random: theyâre on routes that people take to get into Europe (check out their map here). Itâs No Name Kitchenâs mission to âhelp people on the moveâ. As such, No Name Kitchen set up a base in Harmanli, too. Harmanli specifically was chosen (I think) because:
thereâs a big refugee camp in Harmanli;
Harmanli is close to the border to TĂŒrkiye where people cross (and thus sometimes needing assistance).
Quick refresher. Anyone has the right to ask for asylum, it seemed like a good idea after World War II. But, in most cases, when asking that asylum, you have to do that physically. As in, if you seek asylum in Bulgaria, you have to physically be in Bulgaria. Canât do it remotely over Zoom. But getting to Bulgaria to ask for that asylum is a tricky thing. Suppose youâre a Syrian. You canât take an airplane, because that requires a Schengen visa (basically impossible to get for you). With a ferry you run into the same issue. Train too. Bus as well, though you see on the internet it would cost you âŹ21,- for a 420km trip by Flixbus from Istanbul to Plovdiv (big city deep into Bulgaria). But, the bus is stopped at the border, passports checked, and if you donât have that Schengen visa stamped, youâre out. So, youâre left one option: cross illegally. How that looks like, weâll get into later. But for now, say you made the journey, youâre in Bulgaria and youâre starting your asylum process. Where do you stay? Well, most likely in:
Harmanli refugee camp
Harmanli refugee camp
very briefly about that camp
The camp, a former army terrain, is not much more than a bunch of dilapidated barracks packed together. It can officially host 1500 people, but has often hosted many more. A lot of the campâs inhabitants are Syrian and Kurdish, but thereâs also smaller numbers of Egyptians, Moroccans, Afghans, Palestinians and plenty other nationalities. Harmanli is the biggest refugee camp in South Bulgaria. There are others dotted around the region, but theyâre much smaller. From time to time, Harmanli attracts Bulgarian nationalists chanting scary xenophobic chants, wanting to get rid of the campâs inhabitants.
From the main road, there is a high wall with barbed wire around the camp with purportedly lighthearted, fun and inspiring graffiti on it. One of the graffiti drawings displays a woman with hijab riding a train with destination of Brussels and Paris. Yikes. To me, the outside is trying to signal 2 opposite things:
the intimidating high walls with barbed wire tell nationalist protestors: donât worry, we are âkeeping you safeâ from them.
the uplifting graffiti sprayed on those walls tells humanitarians across Europe: donât worry, we are keeping these refugees in good conditions (with art!)
Walking to the side of the camp, the barbed wire wall suddenly stops, and looking through reveals the old barracks packed together. Watch the video above to get a glimpse of Harmanli and the camp.
âïž forming friendships over tea & biscuits
Alright, weâve set the stage. Thereâs Harmanli and its dilapidated camp. How does NNK get involved here? Well, first and foremost: by hanging out. Yeah, literally. We hung out and drank tea. Sounds simple, but in my eyes itâs so effective and revolutionary. Iâll explain. Four times per week, weâd go to the park. Our old van loaded with blankets, litres of tea (chay), biscuits, some footballs, games like Uno and chess, and our good spirits. Upon unloading, anywhere between 10 and 50 people eagerly served themselves, and, with chay in hand, started to hang out.
the main ingredients for a park hangout: cakes, tea, sugar (lots), and biscuits.
Large groups of shouting men scare me, so football was off. Instead, my comfort place was on a blanket with the card game Uno. And as Iâd sit and play, Iâd build relationships with people. Iâd get to know what their life was like back home, what their plans were for the coming months or years, and what they dreamt of. In return, theyâd ask me about my life in Amsterdam. Sometimes, weâd hang out in smoke-filled bars in the evening.
We formed careful friendships. So whatâs the âeffective and revolutionaryâ part of this? Well, these relationships is what allowed us to understand what was going on inside of the camps. Weâd talk, and someone would mention a clear violation of the law, conflicts, struggles. By being close, we could report on what was happening to the outside world, and try and intervene. We had some basic resources - press contacts, computers, small amount of money - that, together with the inhabitants, we could put to use! Only by being so close, were we able to understand what was going on. For example, in December we reported on violations of asylum law, The Guardian picked it up, and this has stopped some deportations back to Bulgaria! This closeness is not common, I believe, and many NGOs have a much greater distance between their âemployeesâ and the âothersâ.
This was something No Name Kitchen worked hard to fight, to undo the paradigm of âhelpersâ and âhelpedâ. Instead, opting for a horizontal way of relating to the people on the move (moving away from stifling categories as ârefugeesâ or âasylum seekerâ, and preferring the term âpeople on the moveâ). The philosophy was: we are here, with our passports and our resources, using that privilege. Comrade to comrade, person to person. Together, fighting borders. That was the ideal we strove for. Hanging out was the cornerstone of what we did. It informed where we spent our energy, what the needs were, and where we could be most effective. Who did I meet hanging out?
(some of) my new friends
Jamal
Jamal
It was a sunny winter day when we were, of course, playing Uno. Syria had just been freed from Assad - a watershed moment in the lives of many of our newly made friends. For Jamal, too. While listening to the freshly dropped Syrian freedom song of Ismaeil Tamr (I recommend you turn on automatic translated captions - the lyrics are fascinating) Jamal was telling us about the Syria he left in 2014. He had been organising protests in his region Deir ez-Zur, in the east of Syria. In fact, he had become one of the top ten most wanted people in the east of the country due to his political organising.
Excitedly, I sensed something in common - organising people together to oppose injustice. He asked me how that looked like in The Netherlands, so I told him of our road blockades, the occupations of offices, I showed him a picture of the water cannon on the A12 highway splashing people in summer.
We had been talking using Google Translate. Upon seeing the water cannon, so he took my phone, spoke Arabic, and showed: âwith all respect, my friend, those are just childrenâs gamesâ. He proceeded to explain how, when the Syrian government doesnât like a protest, they put a bomb in a car, park the car around the demonstration, and let it explode.
Right. Damn. This was a conversation I still think about all these months later.
Since early February, Jamal is finally back in his home town after being exiled for over 10 years. He sent me a picture proudly standing next to Syriaâs changed flag (from red - chosen by the Assad family, to green - the âoriginalâ flag colours)
Mojhim
Mojhim
Some people in the park were highly talkative and eager to show you anything and everything. Others were quiet, contentedly sitting on a blanket playing chess, sipping chay. Mojhim was one of those quiet ones. We didnât talk so much as look. He had a stare that was so intense, it was daunting. With Circassian heritage, he had lived in Syria. Now, he hoped to make it to the U.K.
I donât know if western nationalists think ârefugeesâ blink and just appear at the border - but they donât. Getting to Western Europe requires a diverse set of skills:
the navigation of diverse & difficult terrain;
physical, mental and emotional stamina;
planning for routes, food, water & logistics;
a sharp and sensitive social antenna;
adaptability and improvisation;
knowledge of routes, checkpoints, and locals laws and contexts
Like, genuinely, doing âthe gameâ (the term for reaching Europe, like itâs a video game) is very challenging and difficult, and I donât think I understood this before coming to Harmanli. Interestingly enough too, how prepared people are for âthe gameâ is frequently correlated to their country of origin. Yeah, really. Moroccans, generally speaking, have a wide range of skills and knowledge and attempt âthe gameâ by themselves, without the help of paid smugglers. Syrians, in contrast, more often rely on smugglers and seem to know less about reaching Western Europe. These smugglers know the routes, and can have someone leading you from one side of the border to the other.
Not Mojhim, though. He was figuring things out for himself. In the park heâd show me his preparations. He had multiple phones, asked me for advice on offline maps, knew which trains to take, and how to walk (incredibly precisely) to avoid being spotted. I was very impressed. A few weeks after meeting him, he left, and he is currently in Sarajevo, working to save up money for the rest of the trip to the U.K. We video call from time to time.
âWe did a lot more than hang out, of course, but Iâd lose you if I described all of them in detail. Maybe Iâm already losing you right now, in which case: what are you still doing here, drifting off? Better stop reading now, bookmark this, and come back in a few days! â
the anarchist-ish way or organising
Youâre back? Or youâre still here? Cool. So, you should understand by now that socialising over tea was, as banal as it sounds, the backbone of the No Name Kitchen operation in Harmanli. Yet aside from that, we, the team of 5-8 people:
accompanied people to the hospital, so that they got the care they needed (many Bulgarian doctors refused to see them if we werenât there);
visited people in the various smaller camps scattered around South Bulgaria;
distributed clothes, hygiene products and other essentials (when we had them available, which is why we are collecting money for NNK);
reported on what we saw & heard to relevant media and on our own channels.
A lot of it was done, letâs say, on the basis of initiative. We didnât really have a âbossâ or a âleaderâ telling us what to do. It was us, the team (whose members also changed every 3-6 weeks) who decided. I saw many team members come and go since I stayed much longer than I anticipated (my original term was 1 month, but became more than 2.5 months). The team collectively decided what to prioritise, and a lot of choices were left to personal initiative. Had a close relationship with someone in the camp, and they needed a hospital visit? Alright, you go. Felt like reorganising the messy warehouse? Sweet, have fun! You think there needs to be a big distribution of jackets (like i did)? Nice, do it.
Not that doing all of these tasks was easy. Oh no. Doing all of these daily activities well, and taking good care of yourself, and keeping a healthy and pleasant group dynamic, was⊠quite challenging. And thatâs before weâve even touched on the most intensive part: emergency calls. So letâs do that now.
welcome to: emergency calls to the border
a spectacular book discussing the intricacies of doing âhumanitarian workâ at the border, and how it can naturalise borders and border violence. also mentioned on my âresourcesâ page
đł to start: why are people in the forests?
When you deny people safe and legal ways of entry, like the âŹ21,- Flixbus Istanbul-Plovdiv ticket, people will put themselves at risk to get to their destination. Polly Pallister-Wilkins (who commented on my recent video, oh my gosh!!!) uses the incredibly potent story of JosĂ© Matada in her book âHumanitarian Bordersâ to illustrate this point. JosĂ© was found dead in East London, having fallen from an airplane landing in Heathrow airport. Flight BA76 departed from Angola, where he hid on top of the landing gear for the whole flight. Heâs assumed to have survived the whole journey, only to fall right when the plane was about to land. The ticket price was ÂŁ89.
đš treacherous forests & pushbacks
Deny people safe ways to enter, and they are put in danger. [1] Just so in Bulgaria. The south-east of the country is dotted with forests and hills and has become a relatively common way for people to enter Europe. Since itâs illegal, however, you canât be seen anywhere in your journey. Any local villager might see you and call the police. So you hide in forests for weeks, making very slow progress as you avoid all signs of civilisation, drones, camera towers and police.
If youâre found, anything between these two extremes might happen:
youâre found by police, and taken to the border police station where your basic data is taken and your asylum claim is started - Great!
youâre found by police, all of your belongings taken or destroyed (phone, power bank, clothes, shoes and money), beaten badly, forced to stand in the cold for a long amount of time, taken in a car and dumped back to the Turkish side of the border - a pushback (illegal) .
A small tangent: The law is a funny thing, right? It can just.. not be followed. Iâve always been skeptical of them, laws. The outrage over when laws arenât followed, as if thatâs some large, surprising moral scandal, when we know that countries can be very creative using words and laws to legalise evils. Looking to laws for protection is a pretty hopeless move, in my opinion (look to Michael Mooreâs Fahrenheit 11/9 at 1hr44min to make that argument more sharply).
đ a ragtag team (us) trying to stop pushbacks
The Bulgarian/Turkish border is a horrific, violent and truly lawless place. Border police was incentivised by other European member states to âdecrease migrationâ, push people back, and so they did. Almost everyone I met in the camp or the forests tried to cross more than once, some people having tried more than 10 times. Our goal with NNK was to prevent these pushbacks. The idea simple: if we are there before police find a group, police follows the law, and peopleâs asylum claims are processed as they should be. Why? Because we have European passports (and usually also white privilege) and this was enough for them to follow the law. The tricky bit was just getting to the group before the police did. When a group was in distress for whatever reason, they would call our emergency hotline. This phone, with a horrific loud ringtone, was on us 24/7. And it could ring 24/7. Everyone was aware of the fact that it could ring any time of night or day, and weâd hop in our car, drive for hours, and try to reach the group.
It became the most high-stakes, morbid and deadly cat-and-mouse game between the border police and us. They have checkpoints installed all across the region, even on tiny country roads. We memorised them and would find ways around. Theyâd discover our workarounds and install new ones, and so forth and so forth. Sometimes, right when we would arrive at the location, they would spot us, stop us, and pretend their car broke down, blocking the entire road (letâs say their acting wouldnât pass the audition - it was peak kafkaesque absurdism). Meanwhile their colleagues would swoop in, and out of our sight find the distressed group, put them in a car, and push them back to TĂŒrkiye. In the fatal night of finding Ahmed Samra, we were screamed at by the man in balaclava above, forced to abandon our car in the middle of the forest and walk for 4 hours to the nearest town.
In the darkest rendering of the violent border, I urge you to watch the 1 minute 30 second short video below.
extreme border violence - in memory of Ahmed Samra
Watch the video. Then read my statement. It was directed towards the EU committee that checks if new and existing laws comply with 'civil liberties and human rightsâ. I wrote this addressing them:
âDear people in dresses and suits of the LIBE committee,
Often, while driving towards locations where people are in (extreme) distress, I sit in the car and ponder the perverse absurdity of my situation: why am I the chosen person to bear this much responsibility? Iâm Sebastiaan, a random 24-year old from The Netherlands and Iâve been experiencing the Turkish-Bulgarian border up close for around 2 months now. Whenever weâre out on a searching mission, I feel so deeply and utterly unequipped to go out to freezing forests looking for people who shouldnât be there in the first place. This last point is extremely relevant: When I found Ahmed Samraâs body, this was not an instance set in the stars of the universe bound to happen. No. On the contrary.
Aliâs death was a deeply political one. Finding his lifeless body was a choice enabled and legitimised by you, who are tasked with âprotecting civil liberties and human rightsâ within the European Parliament. What a total sham when safe and legal means are systematically denied to people from Muslim-majority countries, and who are thus forced to hide in the shadows of the Bulgarian forests and freeze to death. None of that talk about âhumanitarian idealsâ, the supposed failure of Bulgarian authorities or victim-blaming of Ahmed Samra that I know will be your knee-jerk reaction. Youâve chosen to shape the European border this way, and his death is a totally calculated part of your bordering policy. You will forever be implicated in the death of Ahmed Samra, and on the experience we went through finding him. May you speak about his death with the intensity and fervour it deserves. For him, for his community, for those trying to enter Europe and ultimately for all those alive.â
read the report about how people are left to die (killed) at the Bulgarian border here.
Ahmed Samra was a 17 year old boy from Egypt. He was part of a group of 6 who were crossing from TĂŒrkiye into Bulgaria. At some point, 3 of the 6 members were too fatigued and/or injured to continue. The 3 members still fit to continue decided to text our emergency line, sent the locations of the ones left behind, and continued. We never heard from them again, so we hope they made it through.
I mourn for the family of Ahmed Samra and of the 2 others boys who froze. Thereâs no words that capture the cruelty and disrespect they suffered at the hands of Europe. This is ultimately what border violence looks like. These are political choices, there is nothing natural about their deaths. It provides me with the ultimate motivation to fight borders with this trip, and to fundraise together with you for MiGreat and No Name Kitchen. Less than 2 months later I would cross the same Bulgarian/Turkish border by bicycle in less than 1 hour. Essentially no checks, no questions, nothing at all.
In the weeks after their deaths, various members of No Name Kitchen worked hard on a report dubbed âFrozen Livesâ. The video I made coupled with the report was shared to Instagram, and by now has over 150.000 views. The story made some rounds in media (The Guardian) across European countries. People seemed genuinely shocked and surprised by the story. In turn, this took me a bit by surprise. As if this is not the logical outcome of a decades-long expansion of border controls, done by parties both on the left and the right? Some reactions were outraged about the dangerous conditions the boys faced. I taste similar outrage from (excellent) films like Shadow Game about Europeâs border: a moral outrage pointed towards the danger of the border as the main issue. As if, when people are handed cups of water and blankets at police checkpoints along their way in the forests, it would be fine. Letâs remind ourselves: the issue is not that the border is not humanitarian enough. The issue is the border itself, and the fact that some people can buy a ticket across, and some canât.
searching
A lot of my time in the Harmanli team, especially after these events, has become a slight blur. I went on many of these emergency calls but was emotionally detached. Even now, writing this piece months later, Iâm searching for what it has meant. I donât know. I cried about it a handful of times, then no more. A few times there were deep bursts of anger, then they went away. I didnât know Ahmed Samra. When we found him, I was intensely sleep deprived, not remembering much. What sticks mostly is the anger about what is being done to us, to us humans, by borders. Knowing that borders are a fiction upheld through violence by us.
Ultimately, none of the people involved in that night should have been there. Ahmed Samra wouldnât have been alone under that snowy tree crossing illegally if he could have entered safely. We, the rag tag team of NNK volunteers, wouldnât have been there if no one needed to use dangerous paths. The border police that showed up wouldnât have been there if there if there were no borders to patrol. None of this should have happened ever, at all. Itâs like a fever dream trapped in reality.
So before I close off this piece, I want to reflect on what the border does to us, as people. In one of my final weeks, I was on another emergency call with Nicholas and Millie (who became 2 close friends). We had just witnessed a pushback happen right around the corner of where we were stopped and held up by police. In the aftermath, we went around the snow followed by 2 police officers, looking for bootprints: proof that the pushback had indeed happened. We couldnât find anything and after an hour or two, we gave up. I had this interaction with the border guards (who understood & spoke English before, by the way) đ
An interaction like this is so dystopian that it borders on the absurd. But itâs real, it happened. Itâs what the border does to the tens of thousands of border guards that are employed to patrol it. Entire industries are created to surveil the border. Infrastructures are set up with buildings and cars and suits and instruction manuals. A whole ethics of dehumanisation created and taught to the guards to treat certain human life as worthless. What you get as an outcome of that is this subset of humans that roam the world with a soul devoid of love called border guards.
Call me melancholic, Iâll accept it. But to me, this is it. The force of the border so strong it robs the people in its orbit of one of our most powerful human instincts: compassion.
and there is still so much more to say
but i wonât, not now, anyways.
I havenât mentioned some iconic and deeply wonderful people I had the joy of working with in the No Name Kitchen team;
I havenât talked about how horrifically difficult it also was to be constantly surrounded by people;
I havenât discussed the high-stress environment that gave me to multiple personal meltdowns;
There are dozens of stories my newly made friends told me from Syria that I could share with you, about bravery, resilience and solidarity;
Or moments where I felt utterly grateful for being at the border doing these meaningful things;
I didnât talk about how I couple these experiences to the wider political discourse in the Netherlands and the rest of the world about migration;
Or about specific learning points about âthe borderâ, linking it to this cycling campaign.
But maybe, thatâs okay. Perhaps, one day, Iâll get to writing about Harmanli again, and continue on these questions. If you truly want to know how I experienced it, the best thing is always to call (through Whatsapp or Signal!). Thereâs no way a single blog post can cover even 10% of what happened. Hell, I donât even think I fully understand what happened yet. It doesnât help that Iâm very self-conscious of what I write, and delete my sentences many times before I make them stick.
I think itâs cool youâre still reading. If you want to, let me know how you felt or what you thought while reading this piece. Comments below, email, Instagram, I think itâs already very rewarding to hear what people think đ. (tiny tiny side-note: donât feel the need to console me about being there, though, in case you wanted to do that. The genuinely sweet and well-meant comments like âoh, it mustâve been so difficultâ always make me feel slightly uneasy as they portray me as some âheroâ that was ânobleâ and âsufferedâ for a âgood causeâ. It was my choice to stay for so long because I thought it was very rewarding and cool work to do - besides, I always slept in a warm bed in a warm room, in contrast to many of the people we were working with.)
[1] Do you feel the urge to say âBut they choose to come hereâ? ! Let me quickly remind you that the reasons people come to Europe are often (in)directly caused by Europeans: ecological breakdown (Hickel estimated around 92% of climate breakdown is the âwestâsâ responsibility), economic agreements ruining economies (trillions of USD are extracted from Africa each year, profits flowing often to western companies), wars, western-backed dictatorships oppressing people, and so on.
