‘We had everything before the war. Now we are here’

Hope for a better life has turned into a life of despair at Ritsona refugee camp. Sophia Duckor-Jones reports.

 

A handwritten sign is posted to the entrance of Ritsona refugee camp in Greece. It reads: “Where are the human rights?”

Currently, there are 57,000 refugees in Greece; 900 of those are at Ritsona, a camp located about an hour north of Athens.

This is the story of three of those refugees – Om Issa, Suham and Layla, who escaped war-torn Iraq and Syria, in search of hope and security, but instead found themselves trapped.

They live in airless white family-size tents on a hard rocky ground. Sleeping bags and a few UN blankets are their bedding. Some families have converted discarded wooden pallets into beds, but not Om Issa. She has five children and there is no space for a wooden pallet.

The family’s clothes are neatly folded and put to the sides of the tent. There are two cooking pots.  
There are 300 children at camp, and like Om Issa’s kids, they spend the days playing with sticks and throwing stones, somehow trying to erase the horrors they saw in their home country.

The smell of human waste hangs over the camp. Forty-one portaloos serve 900 people and they’re rarely cleaned out. There’s no running water. The army delivers a tank full of shower water twice a day and only one litre of drinking water per person each day.  

Food, delivered three times a day, consists of packaged potatoes, mouldy oranges, rice and sometimes spaghetti.

Last summer temperatures reached over 40 deg C, and with no running water or electricity for fans, life became even tougher for families there.

Om Issa spends her days sitting on a broken white plastic chair. Outside her tent she tends a little fire and using the two cooking pots she has, boils some water for rice.   

“We had everything before the war. Now we are here. Everyday I wake up and see my kids here I feel like I have failed them.”

Om Issa and her children, who range from age 3 – 14, escaped Aleppo one year ago. She loved her city. She says it was a beautiful place, and before the war she was happy there.

“We had a house, a car. My children went to school, my husband went to work. Everything was normal. My neighbours and I would go to the market, we would shop and come home and cook meals. My kids were happy, they would play with their friends.”

But in 2012, Aleppo became the new battleground between Syrian opposition groups and the Syrian government.  Om Issa saw her city begin to crumble in front of her. Buildings she was fond of were destroyed. Streets and roads she had walked disappeared.  

With the war showing no signs of slowing down, Om Issa and her husband sent their eldest son to Bonn in Germany. The plan was to wait for him to get everything set up in Germany and then to follow.  

But living in a war zone was too dangerous. Om Issa was sick of not knowing whether her husband would return alive from work, or her children from school.

In Syria, we die quickly. Here, we die slowly.

“My family felt shame that we couldn’t do anything. When you’re sitting in your house and you hear the bombs, and you know everything is getting destroyed around you. Everyday is a risk if you leave the house, you don’t know if you will make it back and there is only so much a human being can take, so you risk your life just to leave this life and to hope for a better one.”

However, the better life hasn’t come. Her family escaped Syria and made it to Turkey in January last year. Somewhere along the way her husband disappeared. She’s not sure if he was kidnapped or killed.
From Turkey, she had her children follow thousands of other refugees across the Aegean Sea in an attempt to get to Europe. In March, she made it to Greece.    

She repeats a phrase that’s said by nearly everyone at Ritsona: “In Syria, we die quickly. Here, we die slowly.”

A few tents over from Om Issa’s family are Yazidi cousins, Suham and Layla, 22 and 23, who spent close to nine months at the camp. The Yazidi are a small ethnic group from Iraq that has been ruthlessly targeted by Isis.

Suham and Layla escaped Iraq towards the end of 2015 and arrived in Greece after a harrowing journey with 28 members of their extended family, including their one year old nephew, Nolan.

“We smile to make the little ones feel OK, but we’re really sad to be here,” says Suham.

Their family is made up of artists and musicians. Volunteers at camp gifted their family with drums and guitars and every day the family play music, sing songs and showcase traditional Yazidi dancing.

Their tents were like Om Issa’s, small and stuffy. They had no beds, just blankets and piled up clothes to keep them comfortable at night.

Outside their tents hung a sign, painted on an old piece of cloth. The sign reads “#stopyazidigenocide #standforyazidiwomen”, their own form of protest to keep the Yazidi traditions alive from a refugee camp.

Both girls had happy lives growing up. They had homes, cars, friends, and went to school.Layla had grown up in Sinjal, but left and moved to Duhok to study English literature with her cousin Suham, who both had dreams to become translators.

Layla’s parents are still in Sinjal, a city devastated after the massacre of around 4000 Yazidi by Isis in 2014.  Her mother is too sick to travel. Meanwhile, Suham had grown up in Duhok, a city in northern Iraq, with her large family of 22, including siblings, nephews and nieces.

However, not being a Muslim was a problem the girls and many other Yazidi faced growing up.

I always dreamed of going to university and becoming a translator, but as I grew up I realised there is no life for me in my country because I am a Yazidi girl.

In 2007, two Yazidi communities were bombed killing between 300 – 500 people, and leaving more than 1000 people injured. Between August and September 2014, Isis killed between 3000 – 5000 Yazidi.
Even at Ritsona there have been some minor tensions between the Muslims and the Yazidi.

“I always dreamed of going to university and becoming a translator, but as I grew up I realised there is no life for me in my country because I am a Yazidi girl. I realised that all my friends who were Muslim were just pretending to like me, and that whenever they have a chance to attack you they will,” says Suham.  

By 2015, the idea of staying in Iraq was too dangerous for the girls and their family.

A report released by the UN in August last year exposed some of the terrible crimes committed by Isis towards Yazidi women, including the testimony of a woman who was sold to six men, who attempted to rape her seven-year-old daughter.

“We were given a choice – to become a Muslim, or to die. I would rather die than change who I am. Girls are being kidnapped and raped every day. Right now, there are 4000 Yazidi who have been kidnapped by Isis,” says Suham.

This was not going to be the fate of Suham and Layla.

Layla escaped with Suhams family towards the end of 2015. They were hoping to make it to Germany.
They left Iraq and made it to neighbouring Turkey, where life was just as hard. They attempted to get to Bulgaria six times and failed every time.

“The first time it was really hard,” recalls Layla. “We were 89 people in one bus. We couldn’t breathe because they closed all the windows and doors so the police couldn’t see us.”

But the bus didn’t take them where they wanted to go, instead, dropping them off in the forest. They were left to fend for themselves in the middle of winter.

Layla didn’t know if her family would make it.

“There was snow under our feet. It was really hard, we knew it was life or death. My cousin had an infection in her kidney and was about to die. Everybody was crying, they [smugglers] just left us there, they didn’t take us to Bulgaria.”

The next day an older cousin found a main road, and was able to speak with a taxi driver who was going past. The taxi driver helped arrange a bus to take the group back to Istanbul.

The family made five more attempts to get to Bulgaria over the next month, but every time they were dropped somewhere else and had to make their way back to Istanbul.

The six attempts cost the family 3500 euros per person.

Eventually, they gave up and decided on the dangerous sea crossing to Greece. They made three attempts at the crossing. On the first attempt, they were caught by the Turkish police. The second time, they ran into engine troubles and the boat was forced to turn back. On the third attempt, they made it to the Greek Island of Lesvos.

The girls were hopeful that they could restart their new lives. They were finally a step closer to Germany.

Things were looking up. But then the borders closed, forcing the family to move to mainland Greece, and into Ritsona refugee camp, where they would spend the next eight months.

Layla says they had no choice but to adapt to life at camp.

“Of course nobody wants this life, but we have to accept it because we don’t have any other choice.”
As winter arrived in Greece, Layla was able to leave Greece for Germany, and Suham’s family were relocated to France, where her  family asylum papers are being finalised.

Ten months after arriving in Greece, Om Issa and her five children are still waiting for an answer for the asylum request for Germany.

Cities, like people, are supposed to be resilient. But that depends on which city you are born in, and which city you will live in or die in.