WashPost: Asian Refugees Find Misery in Ukraine Camp
09/28/2002 | esteban
Франт пейдж нюз про Україну -- без згадки про Кучму, Кольчуг чи опозицію
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13455-2002Sep27.html
Tough Stop on the Way to Good Life
Asian Refugees Heading West Find Misery in Ukraine Camp
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 28, 2002; Page A01
MUKACHEVO, Ukraine -- They came halfway around the world to escape misery, poverty and violence. But home was never this bad.
For desperate refugees from Asia hoping to sneak into Europe, using the underground route through the Carpathian Mountains has proved a terrible miscalculation. Instead of enjoying the bright lights and plentiful jobs of Berlin or Paris, they have sat for months in a dreary camp with locked bathrooms and no running water, sleeping on the floor, two to a mattress, and eating curdled porridge and stale bread.
Opened this summer to accommodate the influx of illegal immigrants captured in western Ukraine, the camp, surrounded by barbed wire in a thick forest near here, resembles a prison from Afghanistan deposited in Central Europe. The refugees have grown despondent. Some literally threw themselves at the legs of a visiting European politician, begging for help. Others staged a futile hunger strike. Finally, this month they revolted against the guards, hurling stones and threatening to kill themselves.
"If they don't release me, I'll suicide myself," Jamil Akhter, 28, a political activist who made it all the way from Bangladesh only to be caught at the border, said last week. "Just tell my parents I love them very much. Don't wait for me."
Thousands of refugees from Afghanistan, India, China, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and recently Iraq slip through this corner of western Ukraine every year on their way to what they hope will be a better life; some are caught, many others are not. Those who make it across are sometimes captured elsewhere in Europe and dumped back across the Ukrainian border only to land at the Pavshino camp. Last week there were 80 refugees in the camp, but a few weeks earlier it had held about 300.
On the path to the West, the town of Mukachevo is just a few dozen miles from the borders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. "Mukachevo is at the crossroads," said Ivan Porokhnavets, deputy administrator for the regional government. "That's why all the immigrants are trying to get to our territory to cross over. They're trying to get to any of four countries."
Soon it may become even more of a crossroads. When the European Union admits Ukraine's neighbors, as it is preparing to do, it will effectively shift the border of the economic alliance right up to the Ukrainian line. Once that happens, Mukachevo will become literally the last stop before an illegal immigrant reaches an open-border continent with free passage all the way to Germany, France or Portugal.
"They will try to use Ukraine as a launching pad when they come and wait for some time and then break through to the West," said Maj. Gen. Boris Marchenko, head of the Ukrainian border patrol department. "We expect this possibility, and we're working with police to control this sort of thing. It's very difficult to control."
This is a relatively new problem for a former Soviet republic such as Ukraine; until a decade ago, border guards spent their time trying to keep people from sneaking out, not the other way round.
Recognizing that its own interests are at stake, the European Union recently contributed $900,000 to buy jeeps and infrared detectors for Ukraine's checkpoints, while Kiev hires more guards to patrol the border. Yet that barely begins to cover the needs. The local immigration service that handles the paperwork for this area consists of just two employees with no budget. The government spends just $1 a day to feed each illegal immigrant it detains and cannot afford the $10,000 apiece it can cost to transport them home unless their native countries pay. For the past few years, Ukraine kept captive refugees in tents at the border patrol station, finally moving them into the Pavshino camp in July only after the first of three uprisings.
"For people staying here right now, it's not easy," said Ilya Pirchak, a pastor from the Seventh-Day Adventist Church who works with the immigrants. "They're weak, they're wounded. They got sick on the way here."
Many of the refugees pay thousands of dollars to smugglers, who get them into Russia and drive them across the border into Ukraine. Like immigrants crossing from Mexico into the United States, the smugglers resort to dreadful extremes. Last year 70 people crammed into a two-foot-tall hidden compartment in a truck; they were later caught at the border. Smugglers take refugees' passports and sometimes do little more than simply drop them at Ukraine's western border, vulnerable to capture.
Amit Dada, 23, left the Punjab area of India near the Pakistani border to escape factional fighting. He paid an "agent" in India $1,800 and was flown to Moscow.
"He told me he would give me a visa for Germany in Moscow," Dada recalled. "But when we reached Moscow, after three or four days, some Russian people came and took me in a car."
They crossed the Ukrainian border without being stopped. After six weeks in hiding in Ukraine, he said, he was put in a truck carrying 47 illegal immigrants from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, taken to the border near Slovakia and disgorged into the hands of the border patrol.
Akhter, the political activist, had the same experience. After paying his smuggler $1,500 and handing over his passport, he and four other Bangladeshis were driven to the Hungarian line. "They just dropped us at the border and said we could go," he said. "We went to the police and said we want to go to Hungary." Instead, the border guards arrested them.
They got off cheap compared with Shei Cheng, 19, who said he paid $10,000 to escape China, only to wind up in custody here for the past nine months. "I want to go to Italy," he said in halting English. "Father and brother there."
Women and children who are detained in the region are kept at a former railroad workers' dormitory in town where they sleep several to a room with no telephone, meager food supplies and dirty surroundings. The night before a Western journalist arrived, they said, the sheets were cleaned and the floors washed for the first time in weeks.
"Eight months I sit here," said Ye Sha Fun, 35, who left a husband and two children behind in China and now wants only to return there. "This is very bad. There is no good food. There is no doctor. I plead with them: 'I want to go, I want my father, I want my mother. I need out, out. Please, please.' "
Conditions are far worse at the camp. Refugees are housed in a run-down Soviet-era apartment building. Mattresses cover every inch of the floors in most rooms, and detainees often must share them. The bathroom facilities broke after too much use and, rather than fix them, the guards simply locked the bathrooms, leaving the refugees to use an outhouse that emits a wretched stench. There are no showers; the men wash their hands in the same buckets of water they drink from.
Virtually none of the refugees speak Ukrainian or Russian, meaning they cannot communicate with guards, the doctor who visits or the officials trying to repatriate them. Several men said they were beaten. A Chinese man who spoke no English waited until a burly Ukrainian guard turned away, then curled his fingers into fists, swung them at his stomach and anxiously pointed to the security officer.
"They hit us," said Akhter, describing an incident in which he said a guard struck his head after determining that he was Muslim.
Amjab Pervez, 35, a Pakistani who also fled fighting in Punjab, has lost so much weight he ties his 34-inch-waist jeans with yarn to keep them up on his 30-inch frame. His belt was taken away, as were those of the others.
"It's not human, they treat us like animals," said Rahamak Farahmand, 55, a pilot from Iran who was caught trying to join his family in Britain but who, like the others, would rather go back now than remain in Ukraine. "Here it's worse than my country." He pointed to his son, 14, standing beside him. "He's hungry. They don't give him enough food. They don't let me have my money. They don't let me call anybody. I'm sick and weak."
Ukrainian authorities react to such complaints with a mixture of sympathy and resentment. They catch 2,500 to 3,500 such people in this region each year, except for a spike in 1999, when there was a wave of Afghan refugees. In many cases, officials said, the immigrants have no one to blame but themselves for months of delays in processing their return home because they give false names or refuse to cooperate.
Farahmand offers a case in point. At the beginning of an interview last week, he claimed to have been just a tourist in Ukraine, only admitting later that he had been trying to make it to London. He also acknowledged lying to authorities about his name when he was caught.
Alexander Skigin, a guard who listened as some of the refugees complained, pulled a journalist aside afterward to rage about their intransigence. "These people, three times they fill out false information, and then they say they want to go home!" he screamed.
Just as Ukraine struggles with its place in the new Europe, its border guards are also caught between Soviet-era instincts and Western sensibilities. Marchenko, the head of the border department, and the top officers from the local post spent hours in interviews over two days describing their problems candidly and expressing compassion for the refugees they detain. They did nothing to obstruct an inspection of the Pavshino camp.
Yet after hearing the refugees complain of their plight during the visit, their mood hardened. Asked about the locked bathrooms, Marchenko snapped: "They came here uninvited. We're not going to clean their asses."
The Ukrainian officials point out that conditions are similar to those endured by their own soldiers. The food is the same. And while a dollar a day sounds paltry, the impoverished Ukrainian government hardly spends any more on its own pensioners; retirees in Kiev receive about $28 a month, just under a dollar a day themselves.
"These people come here, and they create headaches for us," said Marchenko. "There's a feeling that we are guilty. We didn't invite them. Why did they come here? If we let them go, they'll go to Europe. I don't think that's the right thing. Ukraine's doing a lot, according to our abilities. We don't have the money. These people fell from the sky on our heads."
After a few moments, Marchenko calmed down. Yes, he conceded, there is a problem. But it is one the rest of Europe needs to address as well. "Of course, there are questions here. Somebody somewhere should help."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13455-2002Sep27.html
Tough Stop on the Way to Good Life
Asian Refugees Heading West Find Misery in Ukraine Camp
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 28, 2002; Page A01
MUKACHEVO, Ukraine -- They came halfway around the world to escape misery, poverty and violence. But home was never this bad.
For desperate refugees from Asia hoping to sneak into Europe, using the underground route through the Carpathian Mountains has proved a terrible miscalculation. Instead of enjoying the bright lights and plentiful jobs of Berlin or Paris, they have sat for months in a dreary camp with locked bathrooms and no running water, sleeping on the floor, two to a mattress, and eating curdled porridge and stale bread.
Opened this summer to accommodate the influx of illegal immigrants captured in western Ukraine, the camp, surrounded by barbed wire in a thick forest near here, resembles a prison from Afghanistan deposited in Central Europe. The refugees have grown despondent. Some literally threw themselves at the legs of a visiting European politician, begging for help. Others staged a futile hunger strike. Finally, this month they revolted against the guards, hurling stones and threatening to kill themselves.
"If they don't release me, I'll suicide myself," Jamil Akhter, 28, a political activist who made it all the way from Bangladesh only to be caught at the border, said last week. "Just tell my parents I love them very much. Don't wait for me."
Thousands of refugees from Afghanistan, India, China, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and recently Iraq slip through this corner of western Ukraine every year on their way to what they hope will be a better life; some are caught, many others are not. Those who make it across are sometimes captured elsewhere in Europe and dumped back across the Ukrainian border only to land at the Pavshino camp. Last week there were 80 refugees in the camp, but a few weeks earlier it had held about 300.
On the path to the West, the town of Mukachevo is just a few dozen miles from the borders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. "Mukachevo is at the crossroads," said Ivan Porokhnavets, deputy administrator for the regional government. "That's why all the immigrants are trying to get to our territory to cross over. They're trying to get to any of four countries."
Soon it may become even more of a crossroads. When the European Union admits Ukraine's neighbors, as it is preparing to do, it will effectively shift the border of the economic alliance right up to the Ukrainian line. Once that happens, Mukachevo will become literally the last stop before an illegal immigrant reaches an open-border continent with free passage all the way to Germany, France or Portugal.
"They will try to use Ukraine as a launching pad when they come and wait for some time and then break through to the West," said Maj. Gen. Boris Marchenko, head of the Ukrainian border patrol department. "We expect this possibility, and we're working with police to control this sort of thing. It's very difficult to control."
This is a relatively new problem for a former Soviet republic such as Ukraine; until a decade ago, border guards spent their time trying to keep people from sneaking out, not the other way round.
Recognizing that its own interests are at stake, the European Union recently contributed $900,000 to buy jeeps and infrared detectors for Ukraine's checkpoints, while Kiev hires more guards to patrol the border. Yet that barely begins to cover the needs. The local immigration service that handles the paperwork for this area consists of just two employees with no budget. The government spends just $1 a day to feed each illegal immigrant it detains and cannot afford the $10,000 apiece it can cost to transport them home unless their native countries pay. For the past few years, Ukraine kept captive refugees in tents at the border patrol station, finally moving them into the Pavshino camp in July only after the first of three uprisings.
"For people staying here right now, it's not easy," said Ilya Pirchak, a pastor from the Seventh-Day Adventist Church who works with the immigrants. "They're weak, they're wounded. They got sick on the way here."
Many of the refugees pay thousands of dollars to smugglers, who get them into Russia and drive them across the border into Ukraine. Like immigrants crossing from Mexico into the United States, the smugglers resort to dreadful extremes. Last year 70 people crammed into a two-foot-tall hidden compartment in a truck; they were later caught at the border. Smugglers take refugees' passports and sometimes do little more than simply drop them at Ukraine's western border, vulnerable to capture.
Amit Dada, 23, left the Punjab area of India near the Pakistani border to escape factional fighting. He paid an "agent" in India $1,800 and was flown to Moscow.
"He told me he would give me a visa for Germany in Moscow," Dada recalled. "But when we reached Moscow, after three or four days, some Russian people came and took me in a car."
They crossed the Ukrainian border without being stopped. After six weeks in hiding in Ukraine, he said, he was put in a truck carrying 47 illegal immigrants from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, taken to the border near Slovakia and disgorged into the hands of the border patrol.
Akhter, the political activist, had the same experience. After paying his smuggler $1,500 and handing over his passport, he and four other Bangladeshis were driven to the Hungarian line. "They just dropped us at the border and said we could go," he said. "We went to the police and said we want to go to Hungary." Instead, the border guards arrested them.
They got off cheap compared with Shei Cheng, 19, who said he paid $10,000 to escape China, only to wind up in custody here for the past nine months. "I want to go to Italy," he said in halting English. "Father and brother there."
Women and children who are detained in the region are kept at a former railroad workers' dormitory in town where they sleep several to a room with no telephone, meager food supplies and dirty surroundings. The night before a Western journalist arrived, they said, the sheets were cleaned and the floors washed for the first time in weeks.
"Eight months I sit here," said Ye Sha Fun, 35, who left a husband and two children behind in China and now wants only to return there. "This is very bad. There is no good food. There is no doctor. I plead with them: 'I want to go, I want my father, I want my mother. I need out, out. Please, please.' "
Conditions are far worse at the camp. Refugees are housed in a run-down Soviet-era apartment building. Mattresses cover every inch of the floors in most rooms, and detainees often must share them. The bathroom facilities broke after too much use and, rather than fix them, the guards simply locked the bathrooms, leaving the refugees to use an outhouse that emits a wretched stench. There are no showers; the men wash their hands in the same buckets of water they drink from.
Virtually none of the refugees speak Ukrainian or Russian, meaning they cannot communicate with guards, the doctor who visits or the officials trying to repatriate them. Several men said they were beaten. A Chinese man who spoke no English waited until a burly Ukrainian guard turned away, then curled his fingers into fists, swung them at his stomach and anxiously pointed to the security officer.
"They hit us," said Akhter, describing an incident in which he said a guard struck his head after determining that he was Muslim.
Amjab Pervez, 35, a Pakistani who also fled fighting in Punjab, has lost so much weight he ties his 34-inch-waist jeans with yarn to keep them up on his 30-inch frame. His belt was taken away, as were those of the others.
"It's not human, they treat us like animals," said Rahamak Farahmand, 55, a pilot from Iran who was caught trying to join his family in Britain but who, like the others, would rather go back now than remain in Ukraine. "Here it's worse than my country." He pointed to his son, 14, standing beside him. "He's hungry. They don't give him enough food. They don't let me have my money. They don't let me call anybody. I'm sick and weak."
Ukrainian authorities react to such complaints with a mixture of sympathy and resentment. They catch 2,500 to 3,500 such people in this region each year, except for a spike in 1999, when there was a wave of Afghan refugees. In many cases, officials said, the immigrants have no one to blame but themselves for months of delays in processing their return home because they give false names or refuse to cooperate.
Farahmand offers a case in point. At the beginning of an interview last week, he claimed to have been just a tourist in Ukraine, only admitting later that he had been trying to make it to London. He also acknowledged lying to authorities about his name when he was caught.
Alexander Skigin, a guard who listened as some of the refugees complained, pulled a journalist aside afterward to rage about their intransigence. "These people, three times they fill out false information, and then they say they want to go home!" he screamed.
Just as Ukraine struggles with its place in the new Europe, its border guards are also caught between Soviet-era instincts and Western sensibilities. Marchenko, the head of the border department, and the top officers from the local post spent hours in interviews over two days describing their problems candidly and expressing compassion for the refugees they detain. They did nothing to obstruct an inspection of the Pavshino camp.
Yet after hearing the refugees complain of their plight during the visit, their mood hardened. Asked about the locked bathrooms, Marchenko snapped: "They came here uninvited. We're not going to clean their asses."
The Ukrainian officials point out that conditions are similar to those endured by their own soldiers. The food is the same. And while a dollar a day sounds paltry, the impoverished Ukrainian government hardly spends any more on its own pensioners; retirees in Kiev receive about $28 a month, just under a dollar a day themselves.
"These people come here, and they create headaches for us," said Marchenko. "There's a feeling that we are guilty. We didn't invite them. Why did they come here? If we let them go, they'll go to Europe. I don't think that's the right thing. Ukraine's doing a lot, according to our abilities. We don't have the money. These people fell from the sky on our heads."
After a few moments, Marchenko calmed down. Yes, he conceded, there is a problem. But it is one the rest of Europe needs to address as well. "Of course, there are questions here. Somebody somewhere should help."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company