Passport, lifejacket, lemons: what Syrian refugees pack for the crossing to Europe
by Patrick Kingsley and SimaDiab (extract)
In Abu Jana's bag (from top left)
1) a box of Winston cigarettes 2) a yellow plastic bag, to contain documents 3) tape to make the plastic bag watertight 4) lemons, to fight sea sickness 5) a laser pen, to attract passing boats in the event of a shipwreck 6) bandages 7) dates 8) a government booklet, documenting his family 9)sun cream 10) painkillers 11) a change of clothes 12) a lifejacket
Of all the bits and piecescrammed into 35-year-old former army officer Abu Jana’s bag, little says as much about his trip as the laser pen. The lemons suggest he expects to get seasick: his wife thinks the bitter juice will ward off the worst of the nausea. The plastic bag and the roll of tape mean he expects to get splashed: together they’ll make a watertight pocket to hold his documents.
But the laser pen tells us that he knows he risks drowning. If in the dead of night, he is bobbing around in the waves, he wants passing ships to be able to find him – which is where a green laser might come in useful. […]
Abu Jana certainly understands the risks of going to sea. He was arrested by Egyptian police after trying to board a boat to Europe last summer, while a friend of his later drowned. […].“I don’t think the rescue mission has any effect on my decision or others’ decision to go by sea,” says Abu Jana […]“Because at the very core of the decision to go there is risk. […].”
His recent life explains why he is so desperate. He left his job as an officer in the Syrian army after witnessing a state-led massacre in the early months of Syria’s 2011 uprising. The decision makes him a wanted man in Syria, so he can’t return. Nor can he get a passport from the Syrian embassy in Cairo, Egypt.That means he can neither travel legally, nor find work in Egypt, or enroll at a university. It also means he can’t get a proper rental contract. Many other Syrians are in similar positions in Egypt […].
But Abu Jana’s plight is even more severe than most. It’s left not just him in a bureaucratic no man’s land – but his two young daughters too. With no valid paperwork himself, he cannot get them a birth certificate, so legally they don’t exist and when the time comes, they will find it hard to enroll at school.
“For all these reasons, I decided to leave,” he says. “I want to go by sea […],” Abu Jana says. “Even if there was a [European] decision to drown the migrant boats, there will still be people going by boat because the individual considers himself dead already. Right now Syrians consider themselves dead. Maybe not physically, but psychologically and socially [a Syrian] is a destroyed human being, […].”