The war followed us here
An interpreter navigates a broken legal system for refugees.
By Weyam Ghadbian
As a Syrian woman born and raised in the U.S. by Syrian political exile parents, my heart has been with Syrians from day one of the revolution, when children in the village of Deraa were kidnapped by regime security forces and tortured for writing, “The people want the fall of the regime” on the walls of their school.
My family and I eagerly followed the spread of protests and did what we could from across the world (and on the internet) to amplify the grassroots call for freedom and dignity for all Syrians, and an end to the regime.
We continued to watch and advocate for Syrian self-determination as the events turned violent, witnessing the horrific repression at the hands of the Assad regime, backed by Russia and Iran, and the eventual degeneration of revolution into a proxy war.
As I watched the death count rise from where I sat in the U.S., I felt a sharp, gnawing sense of survivor’s guilt — the knowledge that it was pure luck that allowed my family to escape Hafez al Assad decades ago.
Were it not for this luck, I knew that I, too, would be facing the horrors of barrel bombs, imprisonment and torture. In an attempt to fend off hopelessness, and to mobilize this sense of guilt and compassion into action, I joined a delegation of Arab youth volunteering as translators with refugees on the Greek islands this summer.
I arrive in Vial Refugee Camp on Chios, Greece to an unsettling scene: tall chain-link fences, dust everywhere and people desperately pushing each other to get into the asylum office. Aid workers are ignoring the throngs of people pleading for help and walking past the security guards into the compound. It feels wrong.
More than once over the next few days, I slip off to hold someone’s baby or sit with someone’s kids.
That’s how I find out about the woman who had been forcibly sterilized.
It was during one of the many days that refugees shut down Vial camp headquarters by protesting. This time, it was the Afghan refugees — they barricaded aid workers inside using empty food pallets and banged on the walls of the warehouse, yelling the name of the director of Greek Asylum Services.
It was an effective strategy because no workers could come or go.
You could hear the director’s name reverberating through the whole office. This forced the Greek Asylum Office to meet with protesters and hear their demands, although there were days when they just brought in the police to arrest them.
Earlier that day, I had sat in on a meeting between a Greek Asylum Services officer and a British lawyer. The asylum officer told me, “Between us, Greek Asylum Services is not processing any cases except North African ones this week and for the foreseeable future.”
They had decided this based on the political pressure they were facing inside and outside the camps, in effect admitting to me that protests had an impact on who would get processed. The officer tells me not to tell anyone.
I tell everyone I can.
Syrians deserve to know that their cases are on pause, and that they have the power to advocate for themselves. I slip it into every introduction, until the lawyer starts to pick up on what I am doing. She sharply confronts me and tells me I need to stop because it will jeopardize their access to the camp.
Informing people about what is going on is framed as insubordination and threatening to their system.
While we are stuck inside during the protest, I sit with a family from Deir ez-Zour, Syria. I wait with the mom, Jamila,* and her visiting friend who is holding a newborn. The friend seems shaken.
She mentions an incident that happened to her days before at the hospital. She says a week ago, when she came to the Greek islands, she gave birth. She was really scared to give birth here because she heard horror stories from other women. When she went to the island hospital, the floors of the rooms were smeared with blood.
She says, “In Syria, the hospitals never looked this medieval.” The hospital did not give her any option but to do a C-section. After the C-section, something went wrong. She bled for three continuous hours until there was a pool of blood on the floor.
She screamed for help. None of the nurses or doctors would help her.
Finally, after her husband begged and begged, the doctor came and dragged her away into emergency surgery, ignoring her cries demanding an explanation. She woke up and the next day the doctor told her, “Sorry, we had to remove your uterus.” Then the doctor took a leave of absence for 10 days and didn’t return until her discharge.
The nurse told her confidentially that the doctor had botched the C-section and her hysterectomy could have been avoided if he had done his job right.
Jamila tells me, “I wish I had stayed in Syria and not had my life destroyed.”
After that, I lose it. I storm into the lawyer’s office where they are chatting with the air conditioner blasting. I tell them that I believe this woman had been forcibly sterilized. They tell me there is no way to really know unless we have documents from the Greek doctor proving it. They tell me she must have consented — that they would not have done the surgery without her consent. I tell them it was clear to me she did not consent. Later, when I take a full statement from her, she tells me the doctor tied her down to the bed when she was bleeding to keep her from resisting surgery.
The lawyers treat me like I need to be disciplined.
At that point, I can’t stand it anymore. I tell them I think the legal system is broken.
There is another incident.
I’m translating for a British volunteer lawyer. She asks one young man to recount his trauma for an appeal. The man, who is from Raqqa, tells us that seven members of his family died — three of his sisters, and four of his nieces and nephews — when the regime bombed their home in Syria.
He shows us the pictures of his decimated home. He says the European Asylum Services officers said to him, “How do we know this is your house and not any other house? Everyone has a destroyed home.”
The destruction of his home happened less than a month before, and he fled Syria, leaving his elderly parents homeless. His case was denied because he wasn’t considered “vulnerable.” He is slated for deportation.
He keeps repeating, “There’s no justice. There’s no justice.”
The lawyer I am translating for keeps pushing him to revisit the events of that day in detail: “What did it look like? What did it smell like? Tell me about your nightmares.” I know that this is the asylum process, and that he needs to provide details to prove he’s vulnerable and that he’s suffered, but it is another thing to participate in retraumatization.
The lawyer puts her hand on the young man’s knee and wants me to translate: “You must trust us, we will find justice for you. You must believe that there is justice, and I will help you find it.”
He becomes more and more agitated and less willing to talk to us. I intervene because her strategy isn’t working.
I tell her I refuse to translate her false refrain: “You must believe us, there is justice.”
This is a man who had witnessed half his family die in front of his eyes, including small children, and who had to pull their bodies from the rubble.
It is not the right thing to say.
I could not sit with the false promises, empty sympathy and ludicrous insistence on getting him to believe in a system that was completely failing him.
Yet, my role is to be an interpreter in a system that is a farce. It is incredibly frustrating. What I learn from Greece is this: Everyone knows the system is failing—the Greek asylum officers, the NGOs, the lawyers.
Almost every lawyer I talked to privately admitted that if they were refugees, they would hire a smuggler to get out before the system took their fingerprints.
People are languishing for close to a year unprocessed, and most Syrians are summarily denied their claims.
Nearly 60,000 refugees are stalled because of the EU–Turkey agreement, and even the ones whose claims are rejected are still in limbo because borders are closed.
But I learn what does work: grassroots organizing, protests, alternate economies and whatever you have to do to get yourself out of the camp.
This is what I saw on the island of Lesvos, where I traveled next.
I spend my first morning in Lesvos in Karatepe family camp, which feels a little less like a prison than the camp in Chios. It’s in the middle of a beautiful grove of ancient olive trees, which feels like home. As I walk in, I see a truck laying down cement, paving the camp, and I get the ominous feeling that this place is becoming permanent.
Then I go to Moria camp. Moria feels even more like a prison than the camp in Chios. You walk in and the barbed-wire-lined fences are 10 to 15 feet high. We usually have no problem getting past security because of our white lawyers, and our NGO badges. But the European Asylum security frequently don’t believe that I am an aid worker and demand to inspect my badge while letting the white lawyers pass.
In Moria, I feel pressure pushing down on my body. It is oppressive — it does its job, and makes me feel small and unable to change anything. It reminds me of when I first saw the separation wall in Palestine.
The camp is completely overflowing with people. There is a whole row of makeshift tents leading up to the entrance by the street. I later learn the number of people registered in Lesvos was 5,660 while the capacity of the camps is only 3,500.
The number is now upwards of 6,000.
One of the residents’ makeshift tents has a bench area, with a coffee pot and some plants. I learn it was someone’s homemade “cafe.” I love how my people always find a way to chill, no matter what the context.
While there, I meet Sara and her husband, Riyadh. Sara is Moroccan, and Riyadh is a Syrian citizen journalist and activist who survived torture by the Assad regime. He is now disabled from the torture he received in prison and is wheelchair-bound. Sara is his partner and full-time caretaker. They married right before making their voyage.
The two of them have a great sense of humor and always crack jokes. She wears t-shirts and cargo shorts and is a tae kwon do master. When guys give her weird looks, she yells at them to mind their own business.
Riyadh has gangrene as a result of his torture, and the medical negligence on the island only makes it worse. The medical NGO in the camp tell him that if he doesn’t get it treated immediately, he risks amputation.
The doctor in the provincial hospital doesn’t have adequate expertise or equipment to treat the infection, and neither do the medical NGOs in the camp. Camp authorities sometimes bar Riyadh from attending his doctor’s appointments by arbitrarily canceling his transportation out of the camp. Because he is in a wheelchair, it is hard to hitchhike, and he doesn’t have money to get a cab.
When he does make it, the Greek doctor refuses to believe his concern about gangrene and prescribes only light painkillers and useless antibiotics.
Every day that the asylum office delays his medical transfer to Athens, Riyadh’s risk of amputation grows.
Finally, the news comes that they have granted him a transfer to Athens, but his wife’s transfer is denied. The authorities are skeptical that they are married because they have only Islamic marriage papers. Since Sara is his caretaker, it in effect means he cannot go. He needs her support for everyday tasks, like using the bathroom. The legal system, again, has failed them.
Taking matters into her own hands, Sara finds an under-the-table ticket for the Athens ferry — but she cannot buy it herself because refugees aren’t allowed to leave the island without permission. But if you look white at the ferry checkpoint, you can get by.
But Sara looks North African. She gets a lot of scrutiny and fails twice. I stay on the phone with her throughout her third attempt. She makes it to Athens. Through an informal volunteer network, we find her a volunteer-run squat location where refugees can stay safely without being deported.
The next night, a fire in Moria camp breaks out.
Protesters of every ethnicity set the European Asylum Services Office compound on fire for its complete failure to process their cases, we learn. Sara is desperate to get help for her wheelchair-bound husband who is still there. Much of the camp burns to the ground.
Fortunately, Riyadh is able to get out, and he later joins her in the squat location in Athens. But the Greek legal NGO that was helping her dropped her case, and every day she is terrified she will be arrested for being undocumented.
But back in Moria camp, before the fire breaks out, I learn some of the most valuable lessons from working with unaccompanied minors.
Many of the boys I meet are orphans seeking out extended family in Europe. They made the dangerous journey from war-torn Syria, through Turkey and across the deadly sea alone and survived. Fourteen-year-old Kamal is from Aleppo. He tells us that he and his friends had to drive through the streets of Aleppo and bury the corpses that were left after the bombings because there was no one else to do it.
One day, a bomb destroyed his home and he woke up in the hospital. He searched from hospital to hospital for the rest of his family. But his parents and sister were never reported found. He never had any closure. He doesn’t know if they are alive or dead.
We meet Kamal in the unaccompanied minors compound, a fenced-off, locked area covered in graffiti.
The lawyer I am with notices he has been cutting himself.
She gently points it out. He tells us, “What else am I supposed to do? When I used to get upset, I could talk to my mom. But here, we’re all boys, there’s no one to talk to, there’s no one who can help me. What am I supposed to do with all of these feelings? The social worker here is a liar. He gave me a document saying that they were going to look for my parents. Why would he do that? Why would he give me false hope? That’s why I started cutting myself.”
When I was in Moria, the youth successfully led a three-day hunger strike to demand they be transferred to safe quarters away from other boys from other countries. Many of the other boys are Afghan and Pakistani and are not even registered in the system, so they are just trapped.
The Afghan and Pakistani kids also escaped violence and left family members behind who were counting on them. They are deprioritized, and discriminated against by staff. Their cases have little hope of being successful because they do not meet the requirements for asylum. They set the Syrian boys’ container on fire and frequently fight with them.
As my friend Jessica Zweng, a lawyer, put it, “Creating these micro conflicts gives their minds something to focus on other than their unbearable loss.”
The Syrian youth leader of the hunger strike is a 16-year-old named Ahmed. He has the street wisdom of a young Che Guevara. When I meet him, his head is bandaged from a recent tussle with the Afghan boys. Many of the boys were granted transfer to a new shelter, but not all of the Syrian and Iraqi boys were given permission to leave. The camp authorities decided to leave some of them behind.
Ahmed looks on as the Iraqi and Syrian boys heatedly argue, then at me, and says, “See what has become of the Arab nation?”
He leaves me with the most accurate analysis of my time in Greece. He says, “We went out in Syria every day to fight for our rights. Now we’re here in Europe, but there are still no human rights. Only animal rights. We left the war in Syria, but the war followed us here.”
*Several names have been changed to protect the individuals I spoke with.
