In the middle of the night a ship founders and a handful of men are lost forever. Because they were illegally crossing a border, no evidence is left behind. How often has this happened in history? It is very difficult for others to track those last steps. let alone confirm the actual death. Yet time itself is ample confirmation.
In this case we see the likely story and uncover others also lost as well. That fact alone confirms the base story. .
We live today with millions forced into motion. Many are falling through the cracks. It is all a dynamic mix of victims and exploiters with governments constantly back footed.
..
Without a Trace
Missing, in an age of mass displacement
In December
2015, a twenty-two-year-old man named Masood Hotak left his home in
Kabul, Afghanistan, and set out for Europe. For several weeks, he made
his way through the mountains of Iran and the rolling plateaus of
Turkey. When he reached the city of Izmir, on the Turkish coast, Masood
sent a text message to his elder brother Javed, saying he was preparing
to board a boat to Greece. Since the start of the journey, Javed, who
was living in England, had been keeping tabs on his younger brother’s
progress. As Masood got closer to the sea, Javed had felt increasingly
anxious. Winter weather on the Aegean was unpredictable, and the
ramshackle crafts used by the smugglers often sank. Javed had even
suggested Masood take the longer, overland route, through Bulgaria, but
his brother had dismissed the plan as excessively cautious.
Lesbos, Greece, 39°22’44.5″ N, 26°14’46.9″ E, a still from Traces of Exile,
a mixed-media installation by Tomas van Houtryve. Inspired by an
augmented-reality app that layers a smartphone camera’s view with nearby
social-media posts, the artist captured Instagram selfies posted by
refugees on their journeys through Turkey, Greece, and elsewhere in
Europe in 2017 and juxtaposed the images over footage of the locations
where the social-media posts were created. © Tomas van Houtryve/VII
Finally, on January 3, 2016, to Javed’s immense relief, Masood sent a
series of celebratory Facebook messages announcing his arrival in
Europe. “I reached Greece bro,” he wrote. “Safe. Even my shoes didn’t
get wet.” Masood reported that his boat had come ashore on the island of
Samos. In a few days, he planned to take a ferry to the Greek mainland,
after which he would proceed across the European continent to Germany.
But then, silence. Masood stopped writing. At first, Javed was
unworried. His brother, he assumed, was in the island’s detention
facility, waiting to be sent to Athens with hundreds of other migrants.
Days turned into weeks. Every time Javed tried Masood’s phone, the call
went straight to voicemail. After a month passed with no word, it dawned
on Javed that his brother was missing.
When I first met Javed, eighteen months later, I almost didn’t
recognize him. His profile photo on Facebook, taken shortly before
Masood disappeared, showed a tall, formidably muscled man with shoulders
like cannonballs. The figure greeting me at the Birmingham airport,
however, was skinny and stooped—conspicuously deflated. Ever since his
brother went missing, Javed explained, he had stopped working out, and
he’d lost thirty pounds. Javed had begun to vanish in other ways, too,
no longer bothering to see friends or attend mosque. Going about the
errands of daily life, he said, felt pointless, obscene.
Over black tea and tinned cookies, Javed told me that when Masood had
announced his intention to leave for Europe, he had tried to change his
brother’s mind. A former soldier, Javed had himself left Afghanistan in
2008, after being threatened by the Taliban. But, when he arrived in
the United Kingdom, his request for asylum was denied. In the years
since, waiting for another visa application to be considered, he’d led a
grim, purgatorial existence—sharing a room with three other
undocumented immigrants, toiling away at low-paying “black” jobs in
takeout restaurants and car washes—able neither to begin a new life nor
return to his old one. Living in the EU, he’d told Masood, simply wasn’t
worth the risks attendant in getting there. Better to stay home.
Masood, though, saw no future in Afghanistan. At twenty-two, he had
graduated at the top of his university class in Kabul, yet still
couldn’t find a decent job. With thousands of civilians still being
massacred every year in the war against the Taliban, Masood decided to
flee to Germany. “I could probably survive here,” he told friends, “but I
wouldn’t be able to live.”
After Masood disappeared, Javed’s first, panicked impulse was to rush
to Greece and begin a search. But he knew that the Greek government
would refuse to issue a visa to an Afghan citizen who lacked legal
residence in Europe. If Javed tried to cross a border illegally, he
stood a strong chance of being deported back to Afghanistan. He settled,
instead, on making phone calls, hundreds of them. He called police
stations, hospitals, consulates, prisons, coast guards—any entity that
might know something about Masood’s whereabouts. Most who answered
simply hung up; others pled ignorance or refused to provide information
over the phone. The Afghan embassy in Turkey and the Red Cross each
promised to make inquiries, but months passed without response.
So Javed launched his own investigation. He posted photos of his
brother on Facebook pages set up for families of missing migrants, but
these mostly attracted opportunists peddling dubious information. (A
Syrian man, for example, claimed that Masood was interned in a Cretan
sanitorium, suffering from amnesia.) Masood had said that he was making
the journey with two classmates.
Based on who had shared the last photo
Masood posted of himself on Facebook—in Istanbul, smiling in front of
the massive Obelisk of Theodosius—Javed was able to deduce the names of
his brother’s friends. He contacted their families, and learned that
they, too, had vanished. Javed also noticed on Facebook that the three
young men had all friended an Afghan man living in Istanbul named Mulla
Kaya before going missing. Surmising that this was their smuggler, he
messaged people who posted on Mulla Kaya’s page, asking after the man’s
whereabouts. All reported that Mulla Kaya had also disappeared at the
same time as the others.
The Hotak family was exceptionally close-knit, having survived
decades of conflict—the Soviet invasion, a torturous civil war, the
barbarities of the Taliban, the NATO occupation. Masood’s disappearance,
however, created a rupture without repair. His father spent days locked
in his bedroom, his mother cried endlessly, and his eight siblings felt
distant from one another in a way they had not before. Every
conversation began with “Any news?” Lacking hard information about
Masood’s fate, the family took to visiting fortune-tellers—jadoogar—all of whom offered the same vision: Masood was alive, somewhere, but in trouble.
When a year passed without further news of his brother’s whereabouts,
Javed’s friends began to gently suggest that he move on. Countless
migrants died on the way to Europe, with many families never learning
definitively of their deaths. A few months later, however, Javed
received some good news: his application for a UK visa, languishing for
years, had finally been approved. To celebrate, his girlfriend baked him
a ginger cake. It seemed that, at long last, he would be able to make a
home in Britain. But Javed couldn’t conceive of settling down while a
chance remained that his brother was still alive. His first official act
as a resident of the UK, he told me, was to apply for a permit to visit
Greece.
Having only just escaped the machinery of the immigration system,
Javed was hesitant to reenter it. Yet, as his parents’ eldest son, he
felt responsible for setting things right. Not wishing to get his
family’s hopes up, he had told no one about his trip to Greece except
his girlfriend, his elder sister, and me, with an invitation to come
along.
“Be careful,” his sister told him. “We’ve already lost one brother.”
Athens, Greece, 37°59’01.7″ N, 23°43’39.1″ E, a still from Traces of Exile © Tomas van Houtryve/VII
We are entering an age of mass
displacement, bearing witness to the first tentative gestures of what
promises to be a titanic redistribution of the world’s citizenry. More
than 68 million people are currently exiled from their homes by
violence, more than at any other point in recorded history. By 2050,
according to a recent study by the World Bank, at least another
140 million people will be forced to relocate because of the effects of
climate change. Accelerating inequality, meanwhile, continues to drive
inhabitants of poor regions to wealthier ones. While the most recent
exodus of refugees from wars in the Middle East into Europe has peaked,
such colossal population transfers will soon become routine.
In the midst of this unprecedented wave of dislocation, thousands of
migrants disappear every year. These disappearances are a function,
largely, of the imperatives of secret travel. Lacking official
permission to cross borders, “irregular migrants” are compelled to move
covertly, avoiding the gaze of the state. In transit, they enter what
the anthropologist Susan Bibler Coutin has called “spaces of
nonexistence.” Barred from formal routes, some of them are pushed onto
more hazardous paths—traversing deserts on foot or navigating rough seas
with inflatable rafts. Others assume false identities, using forged or
borrowed documents. In either case, aspects of the migrant’s identity
are erased or deformed.
This invisibility cuts both ways. Even as it allows an endangered
group to remain undetected, it renders them susceptible to new kinds of
abuse. De facto stateless, they lack a government’s protection from
exploitation by smugglers and unscrupulous authorities alike. Seeking
safe harbor, many instead end up incarcerated, hospitalized, ransomed,
stranded, or sold into servitude. In Europe, there is no comprehensive
system in place to trace the missing or identify the dead. Already
living in the shadows, migrants who go missing become, in the words of
Jenny Edkins, a politics professor at the University of Manchester,
“double disappeared.”
Taken as a whole, their plight constitutes an immense, mostly hidden
catastrophe. The families of these migrants are left to mount
searches—alone and with minimal resources—of staggering scope and
complexity. They must attempt to defy the entropy of a progressively
more disordered world—seeking, against long odds, to sew together what
has been ripped apart.
Javed was a decade older than Masood
and hadn’t seen his brother in person for years, but, speaking regularly
by phone, the two had remained close. His little brother, Javed told
me, has—he always spoke of Masood in the present tense—a flamboyant,
risk-taking streak. Back in Afghanistan, their mother forbade her
children to own motorbikes, so Masood borrowed a friend’s and went
zipping around Kabul in a leather jacket. On holidays, he’d terrify his
parents by visiting classmates in distant Taliban-controlled provinces.
While most Afghan teenagers played soccer or cricket, Masood practiced kushti,
an ancient martial art where opponents wrestle each other in a dirt
pit. Yet, Masood was forgiven his hell-raising because he was also sweet
and generous, not to mention uncommonly bright—the first of his
siblings to graduate college.
By the time Javed set out for Greece, nearly two years had passed
since Masood had disappeared. After such a long silence, it would seem
unlikely that his brother was still alive. Many migrants crossing the
Aegean, of course, were swallowed by the sea. But many, too, were
swallowed up by bureaucracy. It was not unusual, Javed had heard, for
migrants traveling without papers to be detained indefinitely, left to
languish in prisons or camps with no way to contact their relatives, or
held as captives and forced to work in locked sweatshops. Refugee
communities in Birmingham abounded with tales of miraculous reunions.
Javed believed that his brother was out there somewhere, in need of
help. “I would give an eighty-percent chance that Masood is alive,” he
told me.
When Javed arrived in Athens, his first appointment was with the
Greek police. He hoped they would take up the search for his brother,
though he was apprehensive about interacting with them. In 2008, when
Javed had fled from Afghanistan to Greece, he had been held in a
detention facility for two weeks, then ordered to exit the country. But
when he tried to cross the border into Macedonia, the Greek guards
pummeled him with sticks. Later, when he tried to catch a ship to Italy,
police again beat him. It was confusing: the Greeks had clearly wanted
him to leave, but they also seemed intent on keeping him from going
anywhere.
At the police station, to Javed’s surprise, he was directed to a
polite, baby-faced detective wearing sweatpants and a skateboarding
T-shirt who shook his hand and called him “sir.” Behind the detective’s
desk hung a poster with a photo of a frightened woman, whose mouth was
clamped shut by a fleshy, distinctly masculine hand; the text read, “one phone call could free her.”
The detective listened attentively as Javed explained how Masood had
abruptly fallen out of contact after reaching Greece. But when he typed
Masood’s name into his computer, his face darkened—there was no record
of him. “Usually, with a missing person, we have something to go on,”
the detective told Javed, rolling a skinny cigarette. “But this? This is
just a name. Your brother could be anywhere.” He shrugged and smiled
sadly. “There’s really nothing we can do.”
The detective agreed to file a missing-persons report, which would be
sent out to other police departments throughout Greece. Asked for a
recent picture, Javed handed him a glossy photo of Masood. It showed a
handsome man with an inky pompadour and meticulously trimmed goatee,
cradling his baby niece. As they parted, the detective suggested that
Javed inquire on the Greek islands, where officials would have more
information about arriving migrants.
First, though, Javed wanted to check in with the Red Cross. As he
made his way through the city’s stucco canyons toward the agency’s
Athens branch, he noticed that the city had deteriorated since his visit
a decade prior. It was dirtier, every wall blemished many times over
with a mess of graffiti. Even the Greeks themselves looked
unwell—thinner, more irritable, dressed in cheaper clothes. When the
Greek government suffered its financial collapse, the country lost much
of its capacity to respond to the migrant crisis. The missing, Javed
feared, were not a priority.
The Red Cross office did little to improve his outlook. Located on
the third floor of an ugly, dun-colored building with bars on the
windows, it had the echoey feel of a company on the verge of bankruptcy.
For years the agency has operated an extensive tracing service, which
seeks to reunite people displaced by conflict. But EU privacy
regulations have prohibited the Red Cross from posting photos of missing
migrants on social media, because they are unable to give consent.
Instead, it launched a program called Trace the Face, in which family
members can post photos of themselves on the Red Cross website,
in the hope that their missing relatives will see them and choose to
make contact. Javed dismissed the entire operation as hopelessly
antiquated: even tribal Afghans, living in the Hindu Kush mountains,
have Facebook.
Javed was met by a determinedly upbeat woman who, after reviewing
Masood’s file, confirmed that the case was still open. If the Red Cross
heard anything, she told Javed, they would inform him.
Javed rubbed his face, annoyed. What, he asked, was the organization actually doing to look for his brother?
“It is our policy to not tell you the specific steps,” the woman said.
Javed frowned. “But it’s been two years.”
“I understand,” the woman said with practiced calm. “The cases of
missing persons are very complicated.” If Javed liked, she went on, he
could provide a sample of his DNA. The Red Cross maintained a database
of DNA from the families of missing migrants, which can be used to
identify corpses.
Javed was not yet ready to consider his brother’s death. He asked the
woman whether there was a chance his brother had been admitted into a
Greek hospital. She shook her head.
“I know this is frustrating,” she said. “But you must be patient.”
Javed felt a swell of anger. Struggling to maintain his composure, he stared out a window into an empty courtyard.
After a minute, the woman leaned in close to him.
“Tell me what you are thinking,” she said quietly.
“You do your searching,” he muttered. “I will do mine.”
In his final messages, Masood reported that his boat had landed on
Samos, but Javed was skeptical. Smugglers sometimes lie to passengers
about their destination, saying that they’re headed one place and then
going to another. A migrant boat leaving Izmir could possibly aim for
any one of five islands—Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Leros, and Kos—running in a
line across from the Turkish coast. Javed decided to start with the
northernmost island, Lesbos, where the majority of migrants land. In a
photo he had found on Facebook, a group of Afghan men detained in the
island’s refugee camp stood behind a tall chicken-wire fence. The
picture was blurry, but one of the figures in the background, Javed
thought, looked a lot like Masood.
Javed boarded an overnight ferry to Lesbos and slept on the floor,
above the thrumming engines. He had bad memories of his own trip to the
island, a smuggling operation likely similar to the one Masood had
taken. After arriving in Izmir, Javed had been herded at gunpoint onto a
decrepit-looking boat with two dozen other men—Iranians, Bengalis, Sri
Lankans, Kurds. Scared to put weight on the thin plywood hull, the men
arranged themselves in a ring atop the gunwales, balancing skinny bodies
with plump ones. After a few hours in the water, the outboard motor
stalled, and the raft began to sink. Half the men frantically bailed
water with baseball caps while the others paddled with their hands.
Eventually, the boat washed up on Lesbos, its passengers soaked and
traumatized. Since then, Javed had distrusted smugglers.
As Javed was deboarding in Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos, he was
intercepted by two plainclothes port officers. They checked his travel
document, searched his backpack, and allowed a large dog to sniff him
thoroughly. He was unsurprised: an Afghan man traveling openly through
Europe always invited suspicion. Waved on, Javed walked along the
harbor, past rows of pastel-colored Neoclassical buildings, until he
reached the town’s main square, which he found occupied by a half-dozen
canvas tents. A gaunt Iranian man, sitting cross-legged on a carpet,
explained that he was entering the second week of a hunger strike. The
conditions at the Lesbos refugee camp, in the town of Moria, the Iranian
said, were terrible: a handful of soiled toilets for thousands of
migrants, little food, no blankets or shoes, and a constant threat of
violence. Asked how to get there, he pointed across the street to a line
of people queuing up for a dingy shuttle bus.
We got on and trundled up a hill, passing vast groves of olive trees,
until we arrived at a cluster of white metal shipping containers
surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Javed was briefly cheered—the camp
certainly looked like a place where someone might be held
incommunicado. But he was discouraged to spot migrants of countless
ethnicities passing in and out of the camp’s wide front gate, apparently
free to come and go as they pleased. Many carried cell phones. Slipping
past a security guard, Javed walked inside.
Constructed to accommodate two thousand migrants, the camp now held
three times that many. Piles of rotting garbage were everywhere. The
shipping containers, smelling of sweat and piss, were so crammed with
people that Javed couldn’t see the floor. For two hours he walked
around, showing people photos of his brother. One man, a
twenty-nine-year-old Afghan named Obaid, told Javed that Masood looked
familiar, but he couldn’t place him. Obaid, who was from northern
Afghanistan, spoke Dari, while Javed spoke Pashto, so they communicated
using Google Translate on their phones. Obaid explained that he, too,
had fled the Taliban. At one point, he was sent as a combat medic to a
location that Google translated as “the butcher’s area.” He had been in
Lesbos for forty-three days and was trying—like everyone else in the
camp—to get a pass to the Greek mainland. At the height of the crisis,
hundreds of migrants had been arriving on Lesbos every day. Most stayed
only briefly, just until they were issued documents allowing them to
continue on to Athens. Then, in March 2016, the European Union changed
its rules: migrants would no longer be allowed farther passage into
Europe. Only those whose asylum requests were granted could leave
Lesbos, consigning migrants like Obaid to an indefinite limbo while
their applications were processed. The camp, Javed realized, was not a
prison: the entire island was.
Before leaving Lesbos, Javed visited the police station. When
migrants land on a Greek island, their names, photographs, and
fingerprints are immediately entered into a database. Because many give
fake names—even fake nationalities—an officer agreed to show Javed
photos of all the young men who had arrived on Lesbos in early 2016. The
faces staring out of the pictures—fresh from the sea, their new life in
Europe only hours old—displayed a wide spectrum of affect, from horror
to euphoria to bland shock. Javed leaned forward until he was a few
inches from the officer’s computer screen, studying the photos one by
one. Every few seconds he whispered “no,” and the officer clicked to the
next one. Hundreds of photos later, Javed came to the end of the file.
No Masood.
Back at the dock, while waiting for a ferry to take him to the next
island, Javed was approached by an Arab migrant, who offered him an
absurd sum of money for a ticket to Athens. Javed declined, explaining
that even with a ticket, the man would still need a visa to board the
ferry. Javed showed the man a photo of Masood, but he didn’t recognize
him. As the sun began to set, Javed and the Arab watched as three
stowaways—two of them teenagers—were dragged from the ship’s dim hold.
Surrounded by a scrum of guards, they were handcuffed and made to kneel
under floodlights until they were taken away in a police wagon. The Arab
explained that they would be held in jail for the night, then released
to try again the next day.
The second island, Chios, turned out to be much like Lesbos: more
hassling by port security, more photos, more dead ends. The refugee
camp, though, was somehow in even worse condition. After checking in
with a police officer posted by the gate, Javed was escorted to a small
metal shed, which served as an office for the UN’s refugee agency.
Inside, scores of migrants with a range of requests and complaints were
laying siege to a handful of officials sporting shiny lanyards. The two
sides were engaged in a furious shouting match, carried on through a
half-dozen languages. The main official, a fat man, perspiring heavily,
seemed to be trying to quell the riot with salvos of bureaucratese—“No,
I cannot help you!” “You will need to return tomorrow!” “We have
discussed the problem with the UN and they are fully aware of it!”—but
was ignored.
Javed felt tired. He wore three days of stubble and his right heel
had swollen from constant walking, giving him a limp. After much
wrangling, he eventually got the attention of a UN staffer, who offered
him a seat and asked him about his case. But no sooner had Javed begun
answering his questions than, seemingly out of nowhere, a half dozen
police officers grabbed him, slapped him in handcuffs, and threw him in a
police car with two Syrian teenagers pulled from the camp.
Back at the police station, Javed was interrogated by two
plainclothes detectives. Why was he in Chios? What was he doing at the
camp? What was his father’s name and occupation? The detectives
inspected his phone, looking at his photos and his Facebook account.
Finally, after six hours, he was released. No explanation was given for
his detention.
While in custody, Javed was not, he would tell me later, scared—he
had committed no crime—but he was acutely aware of the precariousness of
his situation. Just as Masood had disappeared, so, he imagined, could
he. More than anything, the entire ordeal—his arrest, the thousands of
stranded refugees at the camp—struck him as both stupid and hopeless.
As we walked back to the dock, we passed a sign for an Escape the
Room game. I had noticed one on Lesbos too. “Can you escape in time?”
the sign asked. The game—players trapped in a small, claustrophobic
space, their freedom hinging on their ability to solve a series of
esoteric riddles—seemed less like frivolous entertainment than a
projection of displaced trauma. In the aftermath of World War II, more
than a million Greeks moved abroad, going to Australia, Canada, and the
United States. The anguish of migration had become part of Greek
identity, insinuated itself into the ethnic consciousness. Now the
nation was confronted with a different immigration crisis, to which it
was utterly unable to respond.
Moria refugee camp, Lesbos, 39°08’08.2″ N, 26°30’14.2″ E, a still from Traces of Exile © Tomas van Houtryve/VII
Javed had not wanted to leave
Afghanistan. His intention in becoming a soldier had been to help make
his country habitable, to secure it for future generations. When the
Taliban first rose to power in the mid-Nineties, the Hotak family had
moved to Pakistan, where they stayed for eight years. Once, during the
exile, a teenage Javed had snuck back to Kabul on an errand. Religious
police spotted him and, claiming that his hair was too long, flogged him
with an electric cable. Returning home after the American invasion,
Javed had enlisted in an elite anti-narcotics squad. Remnants of the
Taliban had transformed into an insurgency, primarily financed by heroin
sales. Javed’s unit arrested traffickers, raided drug labs, and set
fire to fields of mauve opium poppies. The insurgency, though, continued
to grow, and the Taliban soon reappeared in the Hotaks’ village. Rumors
spread that Javed, who sometimes translated for the British army, was
serving as an informant, and his relatives became targets of violent
reprisals. Javed saw that there was no way he could remain in
Afghanistan without further risking his family’s safety. With great
reluctance, he turned in his uniform and set out for Europe.
Masood had always looked up to his elder brother, and Javed worried
that Masood’s decision to emigrate was born of a desire to be like him.
In truth, he felt profoundly guilty over Masood’s disappearance.He
replayed their last discussions over and over in his mind. If only he
had been able to talk his brother out of making the trip, Javed thought,
he would never have gone missing. Yet, if he could find Masood and save
him, all would be made right.
The first two Greek islands had been discouraging, but Javed arrived
on Samos optimistic. Samos, after all, was where Masood had said that
his boat had landed. The night before, Javed had dreamed that Masood had
shown up at his family’s village in Afghanistan, bringing everyone
chocolates.
But at the police station, the officer on duty told Javed bluntly
that after two years, there was almost no chance Masood was still alive.
Javed winced. “Yes, there is a chance,” he said. “He could be in jail, where he has no phone.”
“This place does not exist,” the officer said, shaking his head. “In
Greece, even in prison, all the murderers make phone calls.”
“My friend,” another officer interjected. “I do not know if you know
this, but sometimes? People come from Turkey and—” He dipped his hand
downward, indicating a sinking ship.
Masood said he had landed on Samos on January 3. For the rest of that
week, according to the coast guard, the Aegean Sea had been so rough
that no boats had been able to land on the island. Winds had been
blowing at gale-force levels, and no one who fell overboard could have
survived the freezing water. On January 4, two rafts filled with
refugees had crashed into rocks off the Turkish coast, killing
thirty-four. In the weeks that followed, a handful of unidentified
bodies had washed up on the Greek islands—casualties, presumably, of
other, unreported shipwrecks. An officer informed Javed that only one
unidentified male body, which appeared to be that of a man in his early
twenties, had been discovered on Samos, on January 16.
Javed, suddenly ashen, pulled out a photo of Masood.
“Do you think it’s him?” he asked.
“I cannot identify him,” the officer said, taken aback. “You must do it.”
Inserting a thumb drive into his computer, the officer summoned an
image of the body. Javed, holding his breath, turned to face it.
Drowning, he was reminded, was a violent death. The photo showed a naked
man in a body bag. His face was coated with sand, his mouth rimmed with
dried foam. Streaks of crusted blood trailed, horribly, from his ears,
mouth, eyes, and scalp. The photo had been poorly composed, shot from a
canted angle that seemed to distort the corpse’s features. For several
minutes, Javed looked back and forth between the image on the screen and
the one in his hand. Finally, he shook his head. It wasn’t Masood.
Wiping tears from his eyes, he left the station.
A little while later, over coffee, I asked Javed how he was doing.
“Okay,” he said, smiling barrenly. His devastation, however, was
obvious. Throughout our journey, Javed spoke little and would seldom
admit to being anything other than okay. Often, he had the deadpan
countenance of someone actively suppressing deep pain. Allowing any
emotion out would, I imagined, render his investigation impossible.
Over the next few days, Javed pressed on to the last two islands,
Leros and Kos. The results were no better. Finding no sign of Masood, he
decided to continue on to Turkey, only three miles across the water.
When he went to purchase a ticket, however, the travel agent informed
him that his documents did not grant him entry to Turkey, which is not a
member of the EU. Instead of taking a forty-five-minute ferry, Javed
would have to fly all the way back to England and apply for a visa at
the Turkish embassy in London.
On the plane home, Javed, exhausted, looked out his window. Far
below, white clouds cast dark shadows on the Aegean’s great,
obliterating plain.
One day on Lesbos, I went looking for a
cemetery. For a long time, the bodies of unidentified migrants that
washed up on the island’s beaches were routinely buried in unmarked
graves. Overwhelmed by the number of unclaimed dead, local authorities
soon ran out of money for interment, leaving plots to be dug by
volunteers. Simon Robins, a researcher at the University of York who
visited Lesbos in 2015, reported that many of the resulting efforts were
little more than shallow holes—“bodies . . . lightly covered by earth
with only a piece of broken marble on the grave.”
Seeking to remedy this
insult, a local Egyptian man established a new cemetery, exclusively
for migrants, one in which their final resting places were well marked
and their corpses prepared with full Islamic rights. Yet, sometime
later, this charitable caretaker left the island—driven off, it was
rumored, by supporters of Golden Dawn, the Greek neo-fascist group.
Curious what had become of the Egyptian’s cemetery, I took a taxi out
to the village of Kato Tritos, where it was said to have been erected.
But, after circling the village several times, I could find no sign of
anything resembling a burial ground. Eventually, an elderly man riding a
moped spotted me and, after a long, confused exchange of poor English
and abysmal Greek, agreed to take me to the site. He drove me down a
succession of dirt roads splitting fields of wizened myrtles before
stopping next to a vast, unremarkable plot of grass. Two strands of a
barbed-wire fence, I saw, had been pulled apart, making a small,
person-size hole. The man pointed into the middle distance, gestured for
me to proceed, then sped away.
Ducking through, I walked for a long time, finding nothing but
daisies and milk thistle. I was just beginning to worry that I’d been
the victim of a prank when, suddenly, an enormous black bumblebee rose
up toward my face. Startled, I stumbled backward and tripped on what I
assumed was a rock. It was, of course, a headstone. Looking more
closely, I saw that there were headstones everywhere. I was standing on a
necropolis, now badly untended and overrun with weeds. The weeds, I
noticed with a throb of nausea, grew highest over the grave sites.
Dozens of such potter’s fields have been dug throughout southern
Europe. Similar cemeteries exist in North Africa, Yemen, Malaysia, and
the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Death can come to a
migrant in many ways—perishing from heatstroke in the Libyan desert,
freezing in the mountains of Bulgaria, suffocating in an overstuffed
truck in Hungary, or being executed by a smuggler as punishment for
moving too slowly. Yet, with few governments taking measures to record
these deaths, the invisibility that such migrants endure during life,
notes the immigration scholar Robin Reineke, follows them to the grave.
When people die while traveling through legal channels—say, a plane
crashes or a yacht sinks—the right of families to know about the
disposition of the dead is self-evident. There are sophisticated methods
to gather clues as to the dead’s identity. Evidence—clothes,
documents—is preserved, identifying marks—scars, tattoos, dental
records—noted, witness statements taken, DNA extracted and stored.
These techniques, however, are seldom applied to migrant deaths. When
authorities do collect postmortem data, there are few routes by which
this information can reach families. In Europe, there is no central,
publicly accessible database cataloguing missing migrants or the
unidentified dead, nor is there significant outreach to potential next
of kin. Rather, migrants’ bodies, Robins notes, exist in a “gray zone”
of bureaucratic ambiguity, where no one is responsible for their care.
Aware of the danger of their journey, many migrants make strenuous
efforts to, in the event of their death, ensure that their bodies will
be given names. Most, like Masood, stay in close contact with family or,
lacking a phone, leave word along the way with friends. Some migrants,
if the seas become rough, inscribe their names on their T-shirts or on
the boat’s hull. Others write relatives’ telephone numbers on their life
jackets—“If found, please call.” Survivors of the shipwreck off the
island of Lampedusa, Italy, in 2013, in which 360 migrants were killed,
reported that some passengers, knowing that they would drown, shouted
out their names and the names of their villages, hoping that word would
be carried ashore.
Idomeni, Greece, 41°07’21.0″ N, 22°30’37.7″ E, a still from Traces of Exile © Tomas van Houtryve/VII
Back in Birmingham, Javed allowed
himself a week of depression over his failure in Greece before snapping
once more into action. Masood, he was forced to conclude, had lied to
him about reaching Europe. Perhaps his brother, wanting him to stop
worrying, had texted about his arrival prematurely.
Desperate for leads,
Javed revisited a mysterious note he had received from a Hungarian man,
one of the few replies to his Facebook posts about Masood. A few months
after Masood’s disappearance, the man said, he had been locked up in a
jail on the outskirts of Istanbul with one of Masood’s friends, a young
man named Tamim. He did not know the jail’s name, but he offered a
detailed description. It was a low, flat building near one of Istanbul’s
bridges. There was no sign, just a small door. Opposite the building
was a tall tree. Inside, the hallways were very dark. The prison cells,
painted black, had no beds, just carpets and blankets. Most crucially,
the Hungarian said, there were no calls allowed in the prison. Prisoners
had no way of letting anyone know they were there.
Though the story was far-fetched, Javed wondered whether Masood might
have decided to take his advice and skip the harrowing voyage to Greece
in favor of the less dangerous route through Bulgaria. There were
reports of Bulgarian authorities detaining Afghan migrants for extended
periods of time. Javed decided to visit bothTurkey and Bulgaria. The
arrangements took weeks and forced him to exhaust the last of his
savings. His girlfriend, worrying about his health—he had returned from
Greece skinnier than ever—urged him to postpone the trip, but Javed
refused. Back in Afghanistan, his parents were slowly bankrupting
themselves on fortune-tellers, who continued to insist that Masood was
alive, though they couldn’t see precisely where. While he’d once
dismissed them as haram nonsense, Javed now found their consensus
reassuring.
Finally, during the first week of January 2018, Javed landed in
Sofia, Bulgaria, where he was promptly pulled aside by customs officials
and extensively questioned. Released after midnight and unable to find a
hotel, he spent the hours until dawn wandering through the city’s gray,
Communist-era architecture. The frigid air, choked with smoke—Sofia
is among Europe’s most polluted cities—stung his lungs, and by morning
he was coughing persistently. Sucking on throat lozenges, he took a taxi
to the city’s immigration office. In the packed lobby, he waited in a
long line next to a poster for an EU program offering cash payments to
migrants if they return voluntarily to their countries of origin. Sweden
was the most generous, promising migrants up to 3,000 euros and the
cost of a plane ticket; Bulgaria, by contrast, offered just a hundred
euros as inducement to pursue “a new life” in their countries of origin.
After a long wait, a sullen police officer refused to provide any
information, because Javed lacked legal proof that he was Masood’s
brother. He got a better reception at the Afghan embassy, where a
diplomatic officer served him hot tea with honey and gently explained
that the odds that Masood had come to the country were extraordinarily
remote. By early 2016, the Bulgarian border had been effectively sealed
by aggressive policing and a long razor-wire fence. Self-described
Bulgarian migrant hunters, clad in ski masks and carrying machetes, had
taken to patrolling the forests of the Strandzha Massif, pushing back
anyone who looked like a Muslim. And if by some chance Masood had wound
up in a Bulgarian jail or refugee camp, he would have had access to a
phone.
Feeling increasingly sick and unable to stomach anything but Red
Bull, Javed bought the cheapest ticket available on a train bound for
Istanbul, an eleven-hour overnight trip. But the conductor, a
mustachioed Turkish man, saw that Javed was ill and escorted him to a
private sleeping cabin, with a Murphy bed that folded into the wall and a
little snack of crackers and apricot juice. As the train juddered
through the Bulgarian countryside, Javed, fighting a mild fever, lay on
his back and went over his plans. Turkey, he understood, would almost
certainly be his last chance to find Masood alive.
When Javed arrived in Istanbul, he hailed a taxi and asked the driver
if he knew of a jail near a bridge. There was, in fact, a men’s prison
on the eastern side of the city, not far from the Bosporus River. When
the taxi arrived at the site, Javed’s heart began to pound in his chest.
The building seemed to match the Hungarian’s description. It was low
and flat, and though there was no big tree, Javed could see a large
construction site nearby, and he reasoned that the tree could have been
chopped down. Forgetting his illness, he all but ran to the front gate,
where he was ushered inside by a sympathetic guard. For a brief moment,
as he passed though the door, Javed believed that he was on the verge of
finding Masood. This, he thought, was where his brother had been the
whole time.
Moments later, an administrator pointed out a pay phone on the wall
of the prison’s common room. Later, at the Ministry of Justice, he
learned that there were, in fact, no inmates by his brother’s name in
any of Turkey’s prisons.
His heart sinking, Javed realized that there was only one place left
for him to go: Izmir, the coastal city, from which Masood had planned to
depart for Greece. And the only place in Izmir to look, he knew, was
the morgue.
When it became clear that Masood had
failed to arrive in Greece, I expected Javed to turn his attention to
the person who had organized his brother’s trip. Mulla Kaya—the smuggler
whom Masood and his friends hired to take them to Greece—was missing,
but his associates, whom Javed had found on Facebook, lived in Istanbul.
Perhaps they could offer clues about what had gone wrong? Javed,
though, seemed uninterested in pursuing this avenue of inquiry. Nothing,
he insisted, could be learned from those men. It was better to press on
to Izmir.
I disagreed, however, and arranged, with Javed’s permission, to meet
one of Mulla Kaya’s contacts at a café on Istanbul’s massive Taksim
Square. Although it’s a public space, I had heard enough of Javed’s
stories about the depredations visited on migrants by smugglers to feel
skittish. Mulla Kaya’s associates might not appreciate someone asking
questions about their friend’s highly illegal line of work. I became
even more nervous when, at the appointed time, not one but two men
approached me. The first of them—tall and cheerful—introduced himself as
Khushal; the second—small and stone-faced—said he was Mulla Kaya’s
brother, Manaf. Both shook my hand warmly and, drawing up seats,
preceded to tell me a story remarkably similar to that of Javed and
Masood: two Afghan brothers seeking sanctuary in the EU, only for one to
abruptly disappear.
Mulla Kaya—not his real name, but a pseudonym used for his career as a
smuggler—had, they explained, lived by a Pashto proverb: “Take risks,
otherwise you risk your life.” A few years before, Mulla Kaya and Manaf,
both in their early twenties, had sought to travel from Afghanistan to
Europe, but could afford to make it only as far as Istanbul. The
brothers had taken jobs at a car wash, hoping to earn enough to complete
their trip. But after Mulla Kaya got in a fight with the owner over
unpaid wages, he decided that the best way to escape the city was to
become a “gamer”—a smuggler of people. Partnering with an established
smuggler, Mulla Kaya found the work exceedingly lucrative.
In a single
year, he was able to fill twenty boats with twenty-five migrants each.
Earning a commission of $300 per passenger, he was quickly able to send
Manaf on to Sweden. His style was daring. Unlike most smugglers, who
placed their clients in a raft and pointed them in the right direction,
Mulla Kaya kept expenses to a minimum by transporting the passengers
himself, saving him the cost of replacing the raft.
At the end of 2015, Mulla Kaya, having amassed a small fortune,
announced to his friend Khushal that he was ready to retire. The next
game, leaving in the beginning of the New Year, would be his last. When
he arrived in Greece, he planned to scuttle the boat and continue on to
Sweden. Khushal encouraged him to wait until spring: the winter weather
on the Mediterranean was unpredictable.
But Mulla Kaya was eager to
reunite with Manaf. After that, Khushal said, his phone went dead.
Then, six months later, Khushal and Manaf—who had returned to
Istanbul to search for his missing sibling—received distressing news.
On January 8—only a few days after Mulla Kaya’s boat was scheduled to
leave—the police had found a dead man, drowned, at a beach in Izmir
province. Finding a phone number in the man’s pocket, the police had,
after much delay, reached the dead man’s cousin, with whom Khushal was
friendly. The police had sent him a picture of the bloated body in a
coffin, wearing a life vest. The cousin confirmed the identity of the
dead body, a man named Mohammed.
Mohammed, he said, had gone missing in
early January while on his way to Europe. His smuggler, he recalled, had
been named Mulla Kaya.
For Khushal and Manaf, the discovery of the body was evidence enough
that Mulla Kaya’s boat had wrecked and that he was no longer alive. To
them, the matter seemed settled. They still hoped, though, that his
corpse might one day turn up, so that it could be accorded a proper
Muslim burial.
“It is always better to find the body,” Khushal told me. “Always.”
Izmir, Turkey, 38°25’32.8″ N, 27°07’55.1″ E, a still from Traces of Exile © Tomas van Houtryve/VII
I once asked Javed whether he thought
it would be worse to know for certain that his brother was dead or to
have the matter remain unresolved. He thought about this for a long
time.
“To learn that Masood was dead?” he said finally. “That’s the worst thing I can think of.”
Javed had, in fact, already heard the story of Mohammed’s body being
discovered in Izmir—had learned of it even before departing for Greece.
It seemed, given the timing, an undeniable likelihood that Masood and
Mohammed had taken the same boat to Greece, and that the boat had sunk.
Yet, Javed, it was clear, had pushed this evidence out of his mind. For
his entire search, he had refused to seriously entertain the notion of
his brother’s death. Now, in Izmir, Javed found himself approaching,
with great reluctance, a reckoning he’d dreaded and could no longer
postpone.
Yet, when we arrived at the municipal morgue, Javed encountered still
another bizarre obstacle. Normally, the morgue attendant explained, the
coroner would have records of all the unidentified bodies discovered in
the province. But in 2016, after a failed coup, Turkey’s authoritarian
president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had initiated a purge of thousands of
government officials suspected of being allied with the plotters. Among
them was an employee of the coroner’s office whose computer contained
information from the first six months of 2016—the period when Masood had
gone missing. Both the man and the computer had been seized by
authorities.
There was, the attendant added, one more avenue to explore. The
gendarmerie—the Turkish army’s law-enforcement arm—should have records
of any bodies found, as well as photos of the corpses. He directed Javed
to the station of a town called Menderes, ten miles south. Pale and
sweating, Javed found a taxi.
In Menderes, Javed’s request was greeted with perplexity. An officer
explained that he had been sent to the wrong place—he would need to go
to the town of Özdere, another fifteen miles to the south. Concerned by
Javed’s wan appearance, he offered to provide him a ride in a police
van. The drivers, two smooth-faced cadets in their early twenties, were
in a playful mood and spent the trip blasting Turkish techno music,
running the siren at pretty women, and using the loudspeaker to make
random announcements to the countryside. Javed stared silently out the
back window. As the van reached Özdere, the sun was setting over the
beach, which was lined with resort hotels, vacant for the winter. It was
two years to the week, Javed realized, since Masood had disappeared.
Inside the gendarmerie station, Javed was met by the commander—an
aristocratic-looking man with a powerful jaw—in full military uniform,
enthroned behind a big wooden desk. Shivering and short of breath, Javed
explained his reason for being there. “Did you find any bodies here?”
he asked, barely able to get the words out.
The commander looked confused. Gendarmerie postings rotated
frequently, and he and his troops had only arrived in Özdere during the
past year. To his knowledge, though, no body had ever been found nearby.
For a second, Javed looked like he might cry. Instead, he took out
his phone and pulled up the picture of Mohammed, in his life vest, lying
in the coffin. Inspecting it, the commander’s eyebrows rose.
“This,” he murmured, “is a Turkish coffin.”
The commander was quiet. Then he sat upright and, staring into
Javed’s eyes, declared with absolute conviction, “I will figure this
out.”
For the next two hours, Javed watched as the commander put on a
virtuosic display of police work. Copying Mohammed’s photo onto his
phone, he made a series of texts and calls, all in Turkish. Javed had no
idea what the commander was saying or doing, but he deployed a variety
of tones—authoritative, wheedling, chummy, polite—and hastily scribbled
notes on a small pad as he went, pausing only to sip from a glass of
tea.
Finally, the commander put down his phone and turned to Javed. He had the story.
On the morning of January 8, 2016, a fisherman had been walking on
the beach near Özdere when he stumbled across a dead body. It was
Mohammed. The man contacted the local gendarme, who gathered up the body
and photographed it. For several days, the police searched up and down
the coast, looking for signs of a shipwreck, but had found none. No boat
and, more significantly, no bodies.
“So there was no chance another body was found?” Javed asked.
The commander shook his head. He had asked every gendarme commander
within thirty miles. If Mohammed had been on a boat, his corpse was the
only remaining sign it had ever existed.
Javed paused. “There is no place else to look?” he finally asked.
The commander was silent.
And just like that, it was over. Javed’s search had hit its final
dead end. He stood up, shook the commander’s hand, and headed off into
the night.
As we walked outside, I was hit with a wave of despair. Javed had
come all this way, traveling thousands of miles through three countries,
had spent untold amounts of money and sweat and anguish . . . for what?
To have it confirmed that his brother could not be found? That Masood
would, despite everything, remain lost forever? It was hideously unfair.
And yet, Javed was smiling. “I thought for sure we were going to find his body,” he chuckled. “But we didn’t.”
The worst thing Javed could imagine, I realized, had not come to
pass. As long as there was no proof of Masood’s death—no photograph, no
official report, no corpse—there was still hope. The van drivers, whose
mood now nicely aligned with Javed’s, dropped us at a subway station,
where we boarded a train for our hotel.
Then, as we were sitting on the train, a strange thing happened.
Javed was in the middle of talking to me—explaining how much he
appreciated the commander’s efforts—when he was overcome by an
uncontrollable fit of coughing and sneezing. All at once, his entire
body seemed to explode with illness. By the time we got to the hotel, he
was almost too weak to move.
The next morning, I texted Javed to ask how he was doing. He had
never once answered this question from me with a response other than
“Okay.” Now, though, I received a text reading, simply, “So bad.” When I
knocked on his door, he took several minutes to open it. I found him
kneeling on the floor, supporting himself on a low end table. He
looked—there was no other word—cadaverous. The hotel desk clerk summoned
a taxi, and Javed was rushed to the hospital. But, once there, the
doctors could find little wrong with him other than a mild fever. They
prescribed an antiviral medication and sent him back to the hotel. When
Javed returned, he crawled into bed and, for several days he stayed
there, drifting in and out of consciousness.
During this delirious interlude, Javed would tell me later, his body
had felt like it was on fire. His limbs and chest had been racked with
burning pain, and he wasvisited by vivid nightmares—of Masood, of
his parents, of Afghanistan, of the Taliban. He’d never been sick like
this in his life, and it scared him. He wondered if he had done
something wrong to bring this on himself. Perhaps this was Allah
punishing him for his trust in the fortune-tellers. Or maybe he had
never been meant to visit Turkey at all.
It was hard not to see Javed’s illness as a symptom of his search,
the physical expression of an unspoken—or unspeakable—emotional state.
Failing to find Masood, or his body, denied him the right to either
celebrate or grieve. He would likely remain, for the rest of his life,
in the liminal agony to which the families of almost all missing
migrants are consigned: knowing that his brother was almost certainly
dead, but unable, once and for all, to move on.
A few days later, after recovering, Javed flew back to Birmingham. I
wondered whether, given time, he might look at the facts of the case and
be able to settle on a narrative of what had happened, as Khushal and
Manaf had. It was not the same as a resolution, but it was perhaps a
kind of peace.
Yet, when I spoke with him recently, Javed said that he was
considering looking for Masood in Syria. Afghan migrants, he had heard,
sometimes pretended to be Syrian to improve their odds of being granted
asylum. If Masood had tried that, he might have been deported to the
wrong country, where he wound up trapped in Syria’s brutal civil war.
When the war was over, Javed planned to travel there. In the meantime,
he planned to submit DNA to the Red Cross, in the hope that if Masood’s
body was somehow discovered, it might be correctly identified. He was
also considering proposing to his girlfriend. He wanted to wait,
however, to have children, until Masood came home.
And if his brother wasn’t there? I asked. If Syria turned out to be another dead end?
“I keep looking,” Javed said, incredulous. “how could i not?"
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