Click here for Seatown, ye Buachaill, a lockdown commission from the Táin Arts Centre for the Argus.
Click here for The Art of Getting Cast in Film Ireland.
Click here for episode 106 of Jarlath Regan’s podcast An Irishman Abroad where he invited me on to tell Louai’s story, talk about the background to interviewing the migrants in the Netherlands and have a chat about writing and casting.
Click here for my Q&A with the Dundalk Democrat.
Click here for Interesting Reasons for Voting Yes to a Dull Treaty in The Irish Times.
Click here for Letter to a Young Man planning his Death Parade.
Click here for How my Car Insurance jumped from €373 to €3673 in The Irish Times.
Syrian Migrants in the First Person
Maria & Aboud’s story of escaping Homs: please click here.
Louai’s Story
In Syria, I had a good job – I worked in IT. I lived in Damascus with my dad and three sisters. My mother died when I was much younger. I could see Bashar’s castle from my house – so you see we were right in the middle of the city. When the uprising started in Daraa, I still supported Bashar al-Assad. I went to rallies to say we needed him to stay in power. In 2011, we had no problems in Damascus – we went to work as normal. We could hear it, but we couldn’t see anything. After six months, they put the army everywhere on the streets.
One night, we were playing computer games at my friend’s internet café. There were fifteen of us. At about three in the morning, I and three of my friends decided that we wanted to go and get something to eat. It was always very safe at night, no one would give you any trouble. We got into my friend’s mother’s car. There were a lot of soldiers on the streets – they checked our IDs and let us go on. We wanted to eat shawarma, so we drove for about ten minutes to get to our favourite place but it was closed. We doubled back to try another one. The army spotted us and pointed their guns at us. It was a small car and we had stopped in the middle of the street so everyone would see us. They asked ‘What are you doing?’ and we explained that we were doing nothing – we just wanted to eat but the shop was closed. They said, ‘It’s OK, hand over your IDs.’ Then they said they wanted to see inside the car. They searched the car, looking for weapons or something. By this stage, it was 4am. They wouldn’t let us leave.
Two police cars arrived. They asked ‘What’s the problem?’ They took our IDs again and they checked again. They asked ‘What are you doing here? Where are you working?’ They called their database to check if we were criminals. Then four jeeps full of soldiers rolled up behind us. When we saw them we started to get scared. A general hopped out and asked the officer in charge what was the status. The officer said ‘They’re students – we’re checking them.’ The general said ‘Take them to the Mukhabarat.’ This was the Syrian Intelligence barracks. The officer told us that we’d be questioned there and then released. They pulled our t-shirts over our heads to act as blindfolds and handcuffed us. When we asked why they were doing that, they hit us.
It was the first time I’d ever been to the police station. We were taken downstairs to rooms in the basement and when they removed the handcuffs and the t-shirt from my head, I looked left and saw ten men kneeling down, wearing only boxer shorts. Two police officers held whips made of metal and plastic and they were hitting the men. I asked ‘Why are we here?’ and he hit me and told me to face the wall.
He called my friends to be interviewed first and I was the third to be brought into a room. He threw insults at me and at my family for no reason. He examined my belongings and said ‘We have a problem.’ My ID was slightly cracked. They were made of plastic and there was a small tear in mine. At that time, anyone who was anti-Bashar purposely broke their IDs, so they were out to catch these people. Of course, a lot of people would have accidentally damaged their IDs over the years, but the man questioning me was being deliberately stupid. He asked me ‘Why did you break your ID?’ I said it happened two years ago.
‘No you broke it because you don’t want Assad, you want freedom.’
I told him I wanted nothing and that I supported Bashar. I said I could show him pictures of me at celebrations for Bashar.
‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’ he said. He was two metres tall and muscular, altogether a very scary man. So I couldn’t talk back to him. When he said ‘Shut up!’, I had to shut up. I had to keep my eyes to the ground too – if I looked at him, he hit me. He told me to take off my t-shirt. Then he told me to take off my trousers. I told him I didn’t have any boxers on underneath, but he told me to take them off anyway. I took them off. He told me to kneel. So I knelt down. Then he told me to stand up and then kneel back down. Up. Down. Up. Down.
After that, he ordered me to take my shoes off and to take the shoelaces out. When he said this, I knew that I was going to prison. He told me to put my clothes back on and came up to me. He shouted in my face ‘You want your freedom right?’
I shouted back ‘I just wanted to eat shawarma’ and he slapped me in the face. When someone hits you and you can’t do anything about it, it’s like you are burning inside.
So I looked at him and told him ‘God Forgive You.’ I didn’t mean to say it, but I couldn’t help it. It was as if I had cursed his mother. He screamed insults at me and got his cable-whip and said ‘Stand facing the wall.’ He hit me on the backs of the legs, across my back and on each side of my face until I fell unconscious. I woke up to people washing the blood off my face. I opened my eyes and asked where I was. The men around me said ‘You’re in prison’. It was a room thirty-five metres long and eight metres wide with two-hundred and-five people inside. There was a partition wall between a disgusting blocked toilet and a tap where you drank and washed. There was only room to stand in the cell. They were people like me who had been just picked up for no reason. Families had been arrested – the men were in the room with me and their wives and children were in another room. Old people too. I saw a man who died inside that room. I swear I saw it. He was eighty and had breathing difficulties. Over two hundred people all cramped together, underground, in the August heat of like 50 degrees meant we couldn’t breathe properly. The only window was a letterbox-sized slit in the wall.
I asked, ‘Where do we sleep? Where do we eat?’ and the other prisoners said, ‘You have to stand up and wait until they call you.’ Some people had been there for two, three and six months. Some people arrived and were released within five days. Some people were there for eight months and they didn’t know why and didn’t know if they would ever get out. I asked, ‘Where do I stand?’ And the others just shrugged and said you have to find wherever you can. I couldn’t find a place to put my legs. I had to stand on one foot. I was in the same room as one of my friends – the other two were in another room. My friend – he’s now in Malaysia – we leaned on each other. You couldn’t sleep – he’d put his head on my shoulder and then when I’d get tired, I would put my head on his shoulder. I barely ate for the first seven days. They would bring some rice and a loaf of bread to share amongst everyone. I just ate a little bread, that’s it. I didn’t feel hungry. I was just obsessed with getting out.
I saw an 11-year-old boy die in that room. Again, like the old man, when he came in, he had breathing problems. He couldn’t sleep – he had to stand at the slit and he just couldn’t breathe, so he didn’t survive. I was in that room for thirty-three days. After two weeks, I started to wish for death. I said ‘My God, take me out or let me die.’ It was getting very bad. People inside were fighting and every time they did, the soldiers would come in and beat everyone. Then when people were taken out, we had a little more space and we’d spend five or six hours on our knees instead of standing. But then this started to be a problem when our knees began to bleed.
After twenty days, they called my name and I was taken upstairs with seven or eight men. I heard screams where they were torturing people in rooms all around me. So I started wondering what I would have to say. We were in a kitchen with an open window and I was very happy because I could smell the air outside. Breathing fresh air after twenty days was like seeing my family. They called people one at a time. A man came and asked ‘What are you doing here?’ He asked me my name and brought me to a room. He told me to kneel down. He asked me to tell him what my situation was. I told him what I had told the first man. I told him I had participated in every entertainment event for Bashar, like the making of the largest Syrian flag. I told him I had pictures at home showing me at pro-Bashar rallies. He said ‘Why then did we find videos on your phone that were anti-al-Assad?’ When he said that I knew they were lying, because at the time, I had two phones, one i-Phone and a cheap one just for calls and texts. On the night we went out, the i-Phone wasn’t charged, so I only had the small one on me and it couldn’t take pictures or video.
I said ‘I don’t have any pictures on my phone – there isn’t even a camera on it.’
He said ‘You did. Maybe it belonged to one of your friends.’ He just wanted me to admit to doing something wrong. I said, ‘If one of my friends has done something wrong, it’s nothing to do with me.’
He said he would check on my case and that I’d probably be out in two or three days. But on one condition. He made me sign a declaration that I would join the army when I was free. I told him that I didn’t want to fight, but he said that it was a term of my release – I wouldn’t be let out otherwise. I couldn’t fully open my eyes as they were infected and my legs were very sore, so I said I would have to rest and get healthy before I could join the army and he agreed to that – that as soon as I was recovered, I must join up. I made a thumb print on the paper. I thanked him profusely and was taken back to the cell.
Every time they came in to announce the names of those being moved either in or out, I was in hell. They did it twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. I was beginning to go crazy. I started to hallucinate. I saw someone painting on the wall and a guy in the corner drinking coke and eating pizza. Nine days after my interview, my two friends in the other room were let out. This was good news though, as it meant we were close to being released. On that last day, the names were being read out at 8am. It was extremely hot – I was just wearing shorts. He read my friend’s name. And then read out other names. I started to pray, ‘Take me out or kill me now’ because I knew I wouldn’t survive without my friend. My name was the last one they read out. The policeman said ‘Take your clothes and come outside.’ This was twelve days after my interview. I looked for my t-shirt and shoes and couldn’t find them, so I just followed him and he asked, ‘Where are your clothes?’ I said that someone stole them, so he went back in and shouted to the people in the cell to give me a pair of shoes. They gave me the boots of someone who was dead inside. When they let me out, the police gave me my wallet back, but they’d taken whatever money was in it.
I walked down the street in the centre of the city at morning rush hour with five others who’d been let out with me. All eyes were on me – this bare-chested, dirty, bearded man with scars on his back looking like a crazy person. I tried to get a taxi but none would stop for me. I took out my phone. On the day I was arrested I turned it off before I handed it over, so there was a tiny amount of battery power left. I looked to see if I could ring my friend to collect me as if it was the most normal thing in the world. A taxi stopped and the driver asked where I wanted to go and what had happened to me. I told him and he took me. He said his brother had been imprisoned there too, so he took me to my house. He didn’t even charge me. I am the only boy in my family, so when I got home, everyone was crying.
Afterwards, for eight months, I had a phobia – I was scared of everything – I couldn’t leave the house. I couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t work. I was terrified that they would come to my house and take me back there. I couldn’t go out and visit my friends, as I was scared they’d take me there instead. I was scared in my home, in my room, the one place where I should have felt safe. I just re-played the things that had happened to me. I remembered when the officer interrogating me put his shoes in my mouth and said to me ‘I am fucking your mother. Eat, Eat, Eat!’
After six months, I told my father I couldn’t stay in Syria. I told him ‘I’m going to die here. I have to start a life. I can’t work. I have to leave.’ My Dad owned a clothes shop. I told him that if he wanted, he could stay, but I said that I’d seen a lot of men his age in prison. And a lot of them would die. I said ‘If they catch you and bring you to the Mukhabarat, I can do nothing to help you. And even you, you can’t help yourself.’ I couldn’t feel safe anywhere, so I was leaving anyway, whether he went or not. So he said OK, we’ll sell everything. We sold our shop, our car, our house and went to Egypt and stayed there for eight months. It was the easiest way to go – this was 2012. You didn’t need a visa to go there at the time.
I was back working in IT. My father found it impossible to start a business in Egypt, so I was working to support my father and my two sisters. The third – the youngest is eighteen, married and was then already living in Dubai. My eldest sister, twenty-nine now, is married and living in Saudi Arabia, but she was staying with us as her husband is away working for half the year. And then the middle one is twenty and isn’t married so she was with us as well. It was becoming a bad situation for Syrians in Egypt. The Egyptian government started to treat us really badly. The police would kick and hit Syrians for no reason. They would say if you don’t have Egyptian residence, then you must pay. I had to give most of my salary over to them. We couldn’t even afford to go once to a restaurant. Also my family is liberal, my sisters wear make-up and dress and behave like Western women, so then in Egypt, they couldn’t leave the house.
We went to Turkey and we stayed there for eight months as well. My father started to get work in his friend’s shop. He could speak a little Turkish. I started thinking about staying, but I couldn’t work until I learned the language. I had some savings from working in Syria, but I didn’t want to waste it on opening a shop that might fail. At this time, the people who were going to Europe were only the ones who had the money to pay the smugglers. But some of my friends had made it to the Netherlands and they told me how you could start again and they would help you learn the language and go to college. In Turkey, you’re on your own. There is no welfare, no fall-back at all. I didn’t study all my life to pay all my money to start a small shop and work in a market. I started looking into ways of going to Europe so I’d have a chance at starting a new life.
Five thousand euros was all I had. If I lost it in Turkey, I wouldn’t have another chance to start a life. I researched all the ways of getting out for a long time, when we could go and where from. I found someone from Sudan – his name is Abdullah – he was taking people by boat to Greece. My friend, also from Syria, knew him so he thought we could trust him. We met him and he told us that he had a boat going the next day if we wanted. We agreed and his associates took us from Istanbul to Izmir in a small van. It took about eleven hours – there were forty of us in the van all jammed in together, including six children and eight women.
We arrived at an isolated spot in the countryside outside Aliağa at 1am. We were told to wait until we were called. A Turkish person came up to me and took me, my friend and three Africans by the hands. They took us by car for another twenty minutes to a sheer cliff running down to the water. They told us to carry all the equipment down to the boats. I said ‘What?’ He shouted, ‘Take the gear down to the boat or I will beat you right here.’ Now if we’d been doing this in daylight, when you could see where you were going, it would’ve been hard, but in pitch darkness, it was treacherous. The first time I went down the cliff, I had to carry two full petrol tanks. If I’d tripped, I would’ve broken my leg. When I came back up, he said, ‘OK, take the rest’ and hit me. So I had to bring down the other tanks. I didn’t like it, but I just wanted to get on the boat and get the journey under way. They collected the others in the van and we walked down to the beach. All I had was my backpack which I kept strapped to me.
It was an inflatable boat about eight metres long. The men pulled it out and we walked alongside until the water was up to our chests, then they heaved us in – women and children in the middle and men along the sides. The men who’d brought us pointed at the lights across the water and told us to aim for there. We asked which one, that there were ten different lights. They just pushed us off and walked back to shore. We asked the man driving if he knew the way and he said, ‘No.’ And we said, ‘How do you not know?’ And he said, ‘I’m like you – they told me to drive the boat, so I’m driving the boat!’ And off we went.
The sea had been calm close to shore, but once we were out in deep water, the waves were very high and we weren’t making any headway with the small engine we had. In normal conditions, the journey should have taken three hours. The waves were bashing the boat. All we had to pitch the water back out were plastic shopping bags. I thought we were going to die. I looked towards the islands and I saw a huge wave coming for us. It hit us head-on and knocked most of our luggage into the water. Luckily I had my bag on my back. We’d been on the water for four hours now and once the sun came up, the swell calmed down. We are very close to the island and we were all getting very excited. And then we saw the Turkish flag flying from the headland. A lot of the migrants now wanted to go back. I didn’t. I said, ‘We can’t go back. We started, so let’s finish it – we don’t want to have to do this all over again. I want to continue. Who wants to continue?’ Fourteen people agreed with me. The rest of the them wanted to either go back or stay on the Turkish island we’d landed on.
I called Abdullah and told him what had happened, where we were and that people wanted to go back, but that I didn’t want to go back to Istanbul and go again from there to Izmir and that I wasn’t going to do it again if I didn’t go now. So he said, ‘OK, you can go. Take whoever wants to go on with you and go.’ We left the people on the island and navigated using our GPS. We’d only use the phones just enough to get the general direction as we knew we’d need to save our batteries. We went straight away, in daylight, but we didn’t care – we felt that if they catch us, they’ll send us back, if they don’t, we could continue. We made it to Mitilini Island by four in the afternoon, so altogether, we’d spent fourteen hours on the water to get to Greece. We sent our codes back to Abdullah so that he could claim his money from the office we’d lodged it at – that crossing cost us one thousand two hundred euros each.
The police took us to a camp. They cursed and insulted us to provoke us, but once we didn’t react angrily to them, they were OK. We didn’t come from Syria to fight anyone in Europe. If I’d wanted to fight, I would’ve stayed in Damascus. If I wanted to kill people, I could’ve stayed in Syria and killed people. I just wanted to be a normal human, to have a family, to have a life. They’d say, ‘Maracha’. I knew it was an insult. So I told them with a smile, ‘No, you are the Maracha.’ Anyway, they were better than the police we had at home.
On Mitilini, we were given temporary papers to allow us travel within Greece and they took us to the ship going to Athens. I found my friend who went with Abdullah before me. We stayed in a cheap hotel for twenty days. I didn’t have to go out searching for people to get fake IDs in Greece – they came up to you at the hotel. I tried to fly out of Athens airport three times, but I was caught each time. This was last summer – the only way out then was through the airports. After that, we tried flying out of Rhodes four times. When they catch you, they take the tickets and IDs and kick you out of the airport.
Back in Athens, I heard a lot of people talking about a Kurd, Omar, who said he could take groups of people out on the same plane. So I approached him with my two friends – the one I came from Turkey with and the one who waited for us in Athens. Omar said he wanted three thousand five hundred euros each. He said it would be easy for me to get through because I don’t look like an Arab, with my lighter skin and green eyes, that I could pass for a Mediterranean, but that it would be harder for my friends. I told him I wouldn’t go without them. I said ‘If we go, we’ll go together.’ Omar agreed to that and told me to wait for his call.
He called me that night and we came in to have our pictures taken. He told us to go and get our belongings and come back. He gave me a Cypriot ID, one friend a Belgian ID and the other an Italian ID. He told us to go back to Rhodes and get another flight. I’d been there four times already, but he insisted that it would be different when we were travelling with him. He said that he had the route decided and that there’d be a stopover. I asked him what it was but he said I didn’t need to know that. When I got the tickets, I opened them up and saw it was a flight to Budapest. I called Omar and asked why. I told him that if they catch me there, I’d have to stay in Hungary and the authorities there aren’t very friendly to Syrians. He said that he would send someone with us to show how it was done. He assured me he knew what he was doing, so I had to trust him. On the boat to Rhodes, there were sixteen of us, but we were all sitting in separate seats and not speaking to each other, so we wouldn’t draw attention to ourselves. We stayed overnight in Rhodes and then went to the airport. Not everyone had their IDs yet. I had mine, but my friends didn’t have theirs yet, as theirs were more complicated to make. So Omar said he would send theirs with the man who was travelling with us.
The IDs looked perfect. The man was a Greek – he was there to see who successfully went and who didn’t – but he seemed to know everything. He told us just to act naturally and then when he gave the word, we’d go. We were waiting at the airport. All of us were terrified. He told us to go to the gate. The airline we went with didn’t check the IDs at all. They just took the tickets. Maybe he’d paid them to skip it or maybe it was just a loophole they’d found. So we boarded along with our Greek guide and flew to Budapest. We didn’t have to show our IDs on arrival either. When we got off, the Greek asked us where we were all going. Ten of us were going to Sweden, me and my friend to Holland, one to Belgium and another to Germany. He told me and my friend to stay at the airport until he sent us the new plane tickets. He took the people heading for Sweden to a hotel as there wasn’t a flight yet. It was very scary to stay in Budapest Airport because if they catch you, you have to stay in Hungary.
The Greek came back with the tickets as promised and we checked that they were in the same name as on our IDs. We went to Departures for the fight to Eindhoven. The only thing the airline checked as we boarded was the same as we did – that the names tallied. At this stage, no one was taking this route into Europe, so no one was expecting us to be using fake documents in Budapest. Omar knew that no one was going this way – stopping over in Hungary. Once we landed in Eindhoven, I rang him and he said ‘Send me the code when you’re free.’ He was happy that we’d got through and I gave him my code and my friend sent his code so that he could pick up the money from the office in Greece I’d lodged it with. That was three thousand five hundred euros each for the flights and IDs.
It was nine in the evening and I was exhausted. We went through the security checks and then went to the police at the airport to claim asylum. It was the first time I loved the police. They were very kind to us. In Syria, when you see the police, you see the Devil. You can’t look at them, you can’t speak to them. The Dutch police fed us. When I saw that, I thought ‘Fuck the Police in Syria.’ I still remember the faces of the policemen from that day until now, because they were very good with us. We stayed until 1am at the police station and then they took us to a camp for a day. There they gave us our temporary travel documents, a chip card each with 50 euros on it and a map so that we could travel ourselves to the main reception centre at Ter Apel.
The first night at Ter Apel we slept on the floor, but the next day they took us to beds. It was much better than the camps in Greece, where they insult you and won’t touch you as if you are diseased. We were very happy to be in the Netherlands. I stayed for two days registering and doing the medical checks, then spent two months at another camp at Budel, then another month in Gilze – it’s where they conduct the IND Immigration interviews. I told them my whole story and that I couldn’t go back to Syria because of the agreement I signed to serve in the army. They granted me residence and sent me to the camp in Alkmaar. It was nice to be in a small city like that. I stayed there for six months. Then they gave me the apartment in Tuitjenhorn.
It’s a small village far away from everything. I am very happy to be starting my life in the Netherlands, but it was very lonely at the beginning. I got a bike and tried to cycle to Alkmaar, but after ten kilometres, I had to stop. My neighbours don’t like me, they don’t reply when I say hello. So I feel quite isolated here. If I want to go to Alkmaar or Schagen, it costs money and I only have two hundred euros a month. So I just do my Dutch classes and stay at home and go on the laptop and watch TV – that’s the life I have here. I have two friends from Syria in the Netherlands, but they are very far away. One’s in Nijmegen – if I have to go, I pay twenty euros to see him and twenty euros to come back. The other one lives in Dordrecht, so it’s the same cost to visit him. It’s like I’m a lifer. I don’t have a life here. I’m just waiting to learn the language. I’m doing something, but I kill a lot of time.
Although I must say that Dutch people in general have been very friendly to me. It’s just my neighbours for some reason, I don’t know why. When you need help, Dutch people help you. I’m open-minded, so I feel comfortable when I speak with them. The people in Tuitjenhorn just want a quiet life to raise their children. They never speak to me and I never speak to them. If I need help and ask, they help you, but it’s like they are in their lives and I am in mine.
I interviewed Louai (27) on September 8th 2015 at his home in North Holland. I have changed his name and obscured the faces of he and his fellow Syrian migrants in his picture of their time on the boat from Turkey to Greece.
Open Letter to the Irish Minister for Justice: