Taking refuge in Russia
Asylum seekers from the Middle East and West Africa face an increasingly anti-migrant environment in the country
December 20, 2015
MURMANSK, Russia — Azhar Ali is almost there. Just a bit more pedaling on his bicycle and he will arrive at the Norwegian side of the border leaving the Russian one behind. The two sides could not look more different. It has been a long journey for Azhar since he left Baghdad. He came to Moscow via Beirut on a three month ‘student’ visa he paid for by the way of a Russian visa service in late October of 2015.
Azhar vividly remembers growing up in the early 2000’s during the volatile years of the American-led invasion of Iraq. Over the course of nine years of conflict he witnessed many horrors and lost close friends and family members. In 2014, as a fresh engineering graduate, another event altered his life. The Islamic State’s sudden and violent emergence from the remnants of Al-Qaeda took many by surprise. This changed the landscape of his country once again as IS quickly took control over large swaths of Iraq and northern Syria. “ I couldn’t go back to Iraq because of the situation with a sectarian war, and explosions everyday,” said Azhar. After considering his limited options, he chose to leave Iraq for Russia with the plan to resettle permanently in Moscow. He had a small network there who would support him.
Soon after arriving in Moscow, the initial euphoria he felt quickly wore off and turned into disappointment. He spoke of the same difficulties many migrants with dark features in Russia endure: daily racial profiling and harassment by the police, the threat of arrest or deportation, Russian language difficulties which prevented him from obtaining legal work, and endless bureaucratic procedures seemingly leading nowhere.
He then learned from a Syrian friend, Muhammad, whom he had recently met in Moscow, of a new and seemingly safer route to Europe they could try to take together via Norway or Finland where they would then apply for asylum. This would be a much less risky option and cheaper than crossing into Europe on the overcrowded, rickety boats capsizing almost daily in the Mediterranean Sea from Libya or on rubber boats from Turkey to Greece. The only viable land route to Europe was also recently closed off through the Balkans from Turkey to Serbia for those who made it across the sea. Tens of thousands of people attempted these deadly routes with the hopes of eventually reaching an EU country. Most were stuck, detained, or sent back to the previous country they arrived from.
As Azhar sat in the Murmansk railway station, he described the various forms of transport he used along the way: flights, taxis, trains, buses and trucks to finally arrive here. He is not alone in this undertaking. Between September and November of 2015, an average of 60 to 70 asylum seekers attempted the ‘Arctic route’ to enter Norway and Finland everyday at two different border crossings 200 kilometers west of the northern Russian city of Murmansk — with an estimated 5,000 people successfully crossing by the end of the year.
According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, which has classified Russia as a safe third country for refugees, the majority of people attempting to cross the Norwegian and Finnish borders held Syrian, Iraqi and West African passports, most fleeing conflict in their home countries. After understanding the stark reality the majority of migrants face in Russia, most have decided that they don’t want to remain here any longer. They also understand there is little to no chance for them to formally seek asylum as they are not eligible for the same resettlement procedures granted to refugees from Eastern Ukraine. Most people at the train station who were interviewed for this story said that moving on to Europe was their only choice. They had already signed their deportation papers which gave them ten days to leave the country. Most know that if they made it into Norway or Finland, they would have their cases heard and be granted a temporary stay in a safe environment.
Azhar Ali, from Baghdad, Iraq, speaking in Arabic, describes his life in Russia after his second failed attempt to reach the Norwegian-Russian border from Murmansk in late November 2015.
The first and second times Azhar arrived in Murmansk with ambitions to cross into Europe, he paid the little money he had left to local drivers: roughly $250 each time for a seat in an old, Soviet-era shared minibus (mashrutka). He waited patiently with the 14 other passengers for the driver to show up at the train station to start their overnight journey. Among the passengers there were Syrians, Cameroonians, Nigerians, Afghans, and Congolese refugees. Their journeys have been prolonged by various setbacks and each had his own traumatic story to tell about fleeing violence at home to come to Russia. “I had a student visa and some families had temporary visas, and work visas. All of us got refused,” Azhar said.
Despite their initial hope to remain in Russia, most are now desperate to leave, nearly all with waning prospects for formal work or normal school for their children. There are constantly rumors that the border will be shut for days, weeks, or even permanently. This adds to the stress and urgency for most to go. Even in the harsh conditions early winter brings in the Russian Arctic, they are willing to take the risk and brace the cold together on the overnight journey to traverse the dangerous icy road. For most of November and December, Murmansk Oblast, like the rest of the Russian Arctic is in the midst of the most difficult weather period of the year: 40 polar nights which plunge into virtually complete darkness in below zero temperatures.
“They told us the border is open between Russia and Norway, and we can go there legally. We thought it was a lie and we were skeptical about it. However, we found out after asking if the border is open between Russia and Norway and if we could cross the border without a visa,” said Azhar.
Two degrees north of the Arctic Circle, Murmansk lays claim to being the most populous city in the Russian Arctic with just 300,000 inhabitants. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has seen its population continue to decline as younger Russians look for more lucrative opportunities in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or abroad. The city has been hit especially hard by the current economic crisis. Many residents are not used to foreigners coming here and look warily upon the dozens of Arab and African refugees arriving everyday in their city, at the airport, and at the train station.
Azhar described the situation once he arrived in Murmansk. “We slept on the street in the cold weather, and there were older and disabled people, family, and kids with us. The situation was really harsh for us, young people and I could stand the cold weather but seeing the older and disabled people sleeping on the street in the cold weather was really hard for us, we almost cried from that situation. We could do nothing to for them. Even the hotel did not allow us to stay in for one night so we slept in the train station.”
Local Russian media ran numerous stories warning residents about the potential dangers refugees pose, widely citing the unfolding crisis in Europe and circulated false reports of refugees committing crimes in the city. There were also numerous claims that Finland and Norway had ‘closed the border’ to asylum seekers because the two countries were ‘virtually collapsing’ from the number of refugees entering from the Middle East and Africa.
After enduring two cold nights, three military checkpoints, and extortionate taxi fares taxi drivers charged to those passing through, Azhar arrived in the evening in the industrial border town of Nickel. He shared a car for a short drive to the border with three others. Rumors swirled around that there are daily quotas of people allowed to enter Norway and Finland, but no one had official information. Neither do the consulates in Murmansk of what was actually going on.
As one of the most sensitive military zones in the whole country, most of the passengers didn’t realize that they would be likely turned back at any of the three checkpoints for not having the proper documents to pass. Many people interviewed in the railway station who had attempted the trip said they were forced to pay bribes to the soldiers at the checkpoints, or extra money to the drivers. If not, they would risk being left at the checkpoints or out in the cold. “There are three passageways; the first is called the intelligence, the second passageway is called the police, the third passageway is the last one before the border,” Azhar explained.
Those who are fortunate enough to make it all the way to the border post take the $200 bicycles they bought from shops in Murmansk or Nickel the last 100 meters necessary to reach the Norwegian border. It is prohibited under Russian law to cross by foot so they must go by bicycle. Locals taking foreigners by car can be charged with human trafficking by Russian and Norwegian authorities.
This unusual border crossing has appeared briefly in various international media outlets during the fall of 2015 at the height of refugee attempts to cross (The Guardian, WSJ, BBC, Huffington Post). However, it has received scant coverage by local and national Russian media outlets.“There are too few refugees in St. Petersburg from Syria and Iraq,” explains Nikolay Ivanov from the federal TV-Channel Russia 1 — St. Petersburg to justify the absence of refugee coverage in the Russian press. According to Dr. Svetlana Bodrunova from the Faculty of Journalism of St. Petersburg State University, pro-government media discredit the claim that, “the refugee issue is problematic at all for Russia.”
Stories pertaining to refugees have primarily appeared in liberal or business outlets in the Russian media and don’t appear in Russian press very often. When a Syrian family was detained for two months beginning on September 10, 2015 inside the Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, Kommersant and Lenta.ru were two of the few prominent Russian outlets to cover the refugee related issue. RIA Novosti also briefly reported on this case.
According to Bodrunova, there is a prominent division within the domestic media system in Russia. The difference lies in how the fallout of the Syrian conflict is being portrayed on different fronts in Russian media, with a heavy emphasis on the handling of the European migrant/refugee crisis. State media portrays the influx of refugees into Europe as exposing the weaknesses of European governments to insufficiently handle the crisis, while Russian media with more liberal tendencies reports more positive aspects such as hospitality towards refugees in Germany.
According to international affairs journalist Artem Galustyan, who formerly covered the Middle East for the Russian newspaper Kommersant, this posture by the Russian media and public opinion concerning the Syrian situation is, “highly influenced by the fact that Russia lacks prominent historical, cultural, and political links to the region. This inherently makes it difficult for the Russian audience to understand the regions’ complex political and cultural dynamics.”
Russian journalists are currently prohibited access to report in Syria without the approval of both the Russian and Syrian information authorities, he explains. Today, there are only two Russian foreign correspondents in Syria, both from pro-government news agencies. Rudimentary reporting from state media, which has been highly influential in shaping the Russian public’s perception of refugees, fills in the lack of regional coverage.
In a September article from The Christian Science Monitor covering Russia’s role in the Syrian refugee crisis, Maxim Shevchenko, a prominent Russian journalist and member of the Kremlin’s Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights commented that, “so far, Russia makes it very hard for Muslim refugees to come. It puts a lot of bureaucratic obstacles in their path but this needs to change. In the present situation, where minorities in Syria are threatened with genocide at the hands of IS, Russia has the ability and the responsibility to do something about it.”
Since Russia’s entrance into the Syrian conflict on September 30, 2015, the refugee situation has arrived at Russia’s doorstep while the refugee situation in Europe continues to escalate. After the Paris attacks, politicians in Europe and Russia have reformulated their stances, taking sharper tones toward the idea of accepting refugees while combating the threat of Islamic extremism.
In September, the Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Interfax news agency, “we expect for the most part that expenditures [for dealing with refugees] will fall on the countries linked to causing this catastrophic situation.”
Peskov claims Syrians can use Russian territory as a transit point, but the question about accepting refugees is ‘irrelevant for Russia’ and believes the “burden of the current humanitarian crisis should be shouldered by those countries whose policy led to the civil war in Syria,” and what he calls “a catastrophic situation.”
Alexander Molodoltsov, the vice head of administration in Nickel, Russia, talks about the town’s experience with the refugee influx in 2015.
President Vladimir Putin said that Europe’s migration crisis was ‘completely predictable.’ “These are the policies of our American partners. Europe blindly follows within the framework of its so-called duties as an ally — and then must bear the burden.” This, says Dr. Bodrunova, is the stance of Russian federal media as well. The major discourse says that Russia is not at all responsible for the plight of Syrian refugees despite militarily intervening into the conflict in Syria. “The intervention is portrayed as legal, because Assad asked for Russia’s help.”
According to Russia’s Federal Migration Service(FMS), 12,000 people have arrived in Russia from Syria since 2011. However, only 2,000 of them have managed to receive temporary asylum in the country.
Radio Free Europe published in September that approximately 2,000 Syrians are said to have arrived in the North Caucasian Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria seeking asylum. According to the republic’s government spokesman Yury Kokov, most Syrians coming to Russia are Circassians, with historical links to the country as an ethnic group that fled to Syria about 150 years ago. Prior to the civil war, roughly 80,000 Circassians lived in Syria. Maxim Shevchenko believes that Russia has the ability to take in “5,000 to 10,000 people.”
“For Syrian Circassians whose ancestors used to live in the Caucasus, we have to take into account that militants from international terrorist organizations could infiltrate the country disguised as refugees,” stated Kokov.
Soon after the November Paris attacks, three EU countries followed Russia’s rhetoric on the ramping up of purported risk associated with accepting refugees. Poland’s nominee to be European affairs minister, Konrad Szymański, spearheaded the post-Paris debate on migration quotas and policy, linking the Syrian influx with potential terror threats. Szymanksi said the country would not take part in the accepting any refugees. In the Netherlands, Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders called on the government to ‘close the Dutch borders’ in order to ‘protect the Dutch people’. In France, Marine Le Pen called for the government to ‘take back’ control of its borders and stop accepting refugees altogether.
“The European Council decision criticized by us to relocate refugees and migrants in all EU countries still has the status of binding EU law. In light of the tragic events in Paris, we see no political possibility of carrying them out. Poland must retain full control over its borders, over asylum, and its migration policies,” said Szymanksi.
After the Paris attacks, Russian deputy speaker of the State Duma, Igor Lebedev, proposed restricting entry to Russia from Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Lebedev said that, “today is June 22, 1941, but it is not a war against fascism, but against terrorism. We should adopt serious measures, talk to law enforcement agencies and ministries.”
“Xenophobic attitudes, anti-Islamic sentiment fresh from two Chechen wars, and a strong resistance to migration from former Soviet States, particularly towards the Caucasus and Central Asia are key factors which can help explain the lack of compassion from the Russian public towards Syrian refugees,” said Kommersant’s Artem Galustyan.
“The focus in the past two years has instead been on refugees coming from Eastern Ukraine, something that Russians can more directly sympathize with. Russian state media does not concentrate on other refugees and has echoed on numerous occasions that there is no obligation by Russia to share the burden of admitting Syrian and Iraqi refugees,” said Bodrunova.
Azhar Ali was one of dozens sent back to Russia from Norway two weeks after arriving in temporary asylum facilities set up to take in refugees at the border town of Kirkenes. He said that in the middle of the night Norwegian police sent back numerous asylum seekers to Russia against their will with no explanation about their current asylum status.
“The police were holding me from my left and right sides, and I told them I wouldn’t run away. I’m convinced I will be exiled, I just asked them not to mistreat me and to retain my dignity. I didn’t attack or terrorize anybody. Honestly, I was afraid of their acting toward us, we were 14 people, we were all living together and came through the same way. We told them we didn’t get have enough money to get back. I’ve never ever experienced treatment like that before. It was the worst night ever in my life.”
The Norwegian consulate in Murmansk, when asked about these reported cases, offered no comment.
Tor Espen Haga, the Chief of the Norwegian Police Immigration Service in Kirkenes, said that they had not received any refugees for many weeks dating back to October. He said he could not explain the major drop-off in asylum cases in comparison to the large number of cases he had registered at the border in the previous months. Both sides have continued to blame each other for the issue and have since built a fence to stem the flow of migrants.
For now, Azhar and many others who attempted to leave Russia by signing their deportation papers have returned to live in Moscow and other Russian cities where many others face a similar fate: no legal documentation to stay and no ability to leave. “Norway did not accept us as refugees, I don’t know what the reason is,” Azhar ended.