Situated in a picturesque mountain valley in southern Serbia, the village of Preševo used to have lots of work back in the day, i. e. back in the times of Yugoslavia. Grafofleks the printing house, July 7 the plastic factory, and the tobacco factory, among others, employed a large portion of the valley’s inhabitants, most of whom are ethnic Albanians. Today a monthly salary in the valley averages at around 100 Euros, while unemployment stands at 49 per cent. It is Serbia’s poorest region.
It was this same Preševo, together with the tiny neighbouring village of Miratovac, that in Spring 2015 welcomed thousands of people who were seeking refuge in Europe. They arrived from war-torn Syria and from Iraq – the land that has endured decades of torture by Western bombs, occupations, and sanctions; from Afghanistan – a land destroyed by those same Western bombs, and from the exploited countries of Africa, that have been left barely alive economically.
It was here in Preševo – Serbia’s southernmost point, almost on the border with Macedonia – that in 2015 the largest refugee camp in all the so-called Balkan migration route was established. In three years, this town with a population of 25,000 became temporary home to a million refugees seeking safety in Europe.
But whom were they met by at Europe’s “official” entrance?
Greetings from town youth
It was Preševo’s youth who pronounced the first “Welcome” to people who had travelled thousands of kilometres by land or by sea, to reach Europe. Without any encouragement from outside, these young people voluntarily formed refugee support groups. “Our aim was to be close to them so that they did not feel alone,” says one of the volunteers, a sporty young man with a fashionable haircut in Prugëtimi: Aktivizmi qytetar (The Journey: Civic Activism), a new film documenting the story. “There were people who lost their family members during the journey.”
The group, which consisted of no more than 12 people, took up a variety of tasks. The first one was to meet migrants at the Serbia-Macedonia border where they were given food and water, medicine and clothes. But the most important thing was to provide accurate information regarding what comes next: further actions, challenges and possibilities, and, importantly, what kind of help people might realistically expect to receive in the village. After that migrants were assisted in boarding buses that would bring them to Preševo for government registration. After many hours of waiting for the required documents, they would continue their journey through Serbia.
“At the beginning the work started in the area in front of the police station. This was where refugees positioned themselves in Preševo before help started to arrive from various international organisations,” says Petrit Arifi, volunteer-turned-coordinator for Youth for Refugees, an NGO that was established on the basis of the initial informal volunteer group. “Sometimes approximately 10,000 people passed through that place every day. While I was there, there were approximately 10-12 activists and various volunteers.”
Arifi says that at the beginning, only people living in the areas through which migrants travelled offered them any help. At that time there was no assistance neither from governmental institutions, nor international organisations. As the “official” refugee camp only had the capacity for a thousand persons, many remained without a shelter. “There were people [in the village] who turned their business offices into shelter for the refugees. Many people prepared food for the refugees because it was known that the majority of the refugees hadn’t eaten for days,” says Arifi about the townspeople’s response to the crisis.
As migrants’ needs and realities became better understood, the spectrum of volunteers’ activities expanded. Preševo’s youth introduced asylum seekers to local culture and cuisine and invited them to visit their town’s tourist attractions. Additionally, various sport activities were organised, while families with children were shown local schools and introduced to the education system in place.
Right next to the registration centre volunteers set up a café for refugees and named it Umbrella. Coffee, tea, and sandwiches were distributed for free, financed by the International Rescue Committee. The idea came to Valon Arifi, one of the founders of Youth for Refugees. For people who found themselves in dire uncertainty, the café became a place for meetings and conversations – a small reminder of an earlier life back home.
Local volunteers also helped organise transport for migrants to reach the border with Hungary or Croatia – a distance of some 600 kilometres from Preševo. At the time, the EU didn’t yet have such strict border control policies as it set up later, and orders from Brussels and other European capital cities hadn’t yet been given to force asylum seekers out. At that time, helping people in need wasn’t being considered a crime, yet.
Europe barricades itself
That first half a year volunteers with Youth for Refugees worked 24 hours a day, dividing themselves up in three shifts of 10 people each. This lasted until, at the beginning of 2016, European Union member states officially locked their borders and refused to allow in any more asylum seekers or economic migrants.
Up until 2015, the main migration route to Europe from Africa and West Asia was the Mediterranean Sea. But after Europe enforced stricter sea patrols, and the continent’s southern states started more and more often to refuse migrant boats entry to their harbours, migrants were forced to look for new, safer ways to travel.
One of these, the so-called Western Balkan corridor, is a migration route that usually begins in Turkey and continues through Greece, Bulgaria, and Macedonia, then passes through Serbia, from which the road unwinds onward in the direction of EU member states Hungary and Croatia. For many migrants, however, the final destination is not here, it is in western and northern Europe – places such as Germany, that had announced an open door policy in regards to migrants and where many migrants already had family members.
But in Spring 2016 the situation changed drastically as Europe barricaded itself. Macedonia, together with EU member states Croatia and Slovenia, announced that they were completely shutting down their doors to migrants. Greek authorities used extreme violence to destroy a migrant camp in the town of Idomeni, near the border with Macedonia. Hungary, led by its far-right racist prime minister Viktor Urban, built a 175 km long wall along its borders, meant to make migration more difficult. They did it during the very peak of the crisis. At the same time, the EU signed an agreement with Turkey, which ordered that people who had managed to reach Greece were to be sent back to Turkey, including those who were planning to ask for political asylum in Europe.
As the EU barricaded itself, the situation in Preševo also changed. The number of newly arriving migrants dropped significantly; during that period only 200-300 people were being registered daily. The town’s volunteers adapted their activities accordingly: after the EU closed its borders, an internet café was opened for people stuck in Serbia, to facilitate easier communication with their friends and families back home or in Europe; a school was established for migrant children and for adults, film screening evenings started taking place.
We were once refugees, too
Preševo is a town the size of Kėdainiai or Utena. Unsurprisingly, thousands of people entering and leaving every day was a huge challenge to the town’s infrastructure as well as the daily lives of its inhabitants. So where does such solidarity with strangers come from?
For some it is a reflection of their personal experiences. “The biggest motive or reason for why we helped or associated with them is that our families were in the same situation as they are now 20 years ago,” says a young volunteer to the camera. “Our families were refugees as well, they faced a similar situation to the refugees who arrived in our city from Syria. We tried our best to make them feel at home here.”
Idro Seferi, a journalist living in Belgrade, says that since his arrival in Preševo it’s been emotionally hard for him to see children sleeping in the street during cold, rainy nights. He knows what it feels like. “I used to be a refugee after the Kosovo wars,” he says. This is the reason why he has decided to postpone his personal projects and instead immerse himself in the efforts to provide assistance to people stuck in Preševo.
Some other volunteers, who during the hardest moments gave their time and energy to help those who needed it most, say they were motivated by – simply – human values. “I was young and I didn't know what was going on but I knew that they needed help and we were there to provide that,” says 17-year-old Drilon Ismaili.
His first task was to make friends with the arriving youth, to help them feel welcome. “I think everyone is welcomed everywhere because we are all humans and we need to respect ourselves, first of all ourselves and then other people. And not respecting or judging the refugees is a really bad thing to do. I wouldn’t do it myself and I hope my [fellow] citizens wouldn’t do it either,” says Ismaili. “Be kind to them because right now they are in a war. They are trying to help themselves. This is not for fun, this is all they have. You need to be kind to them, welcome them and make them feel loved.”
How do the young people of Preševo themselves see their work in the name of humanity? “We made a huge effort in terms of hospitality. We should be proud of it,” says the sporty guy. “It has influenced our mentality a lot with regards to our beliefs about humanity. We have learnt a lot about human rights because of the variety of people that have passed through and the compassion they displayed. This was one of the main reasons why we helped them.”
Currently, there are around 6,000 refugees and migrants in Serbia’s migrant detention centres, waiting for a chance to continue their journey. Living conditions in these centres, as elsewhere in Europe, are often close to unlivable.
