* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
EU member states should do everything in their power to alleviate bottlenecks to avert a mental health crisis among stranded asylum seekers
Athens, GREECE – “The children are always asking for their father,” says 28-year-old Rosa Hamy, a Syrian refugee and mother of three young children – daughter Lila (8), son Mohammed (6) and daughter Arin (2). “Sometimes when I speak to them, they don’t respond. Lila often cries and asks me why we came here. She says that it is daddy’s fault. That her father is not coming for us.”
Originally from Kobani near the Turkish border, Rosa and her family lived in the IS stronghold of Raqqa which they fled in 2014, moving between Iraq and Turkey until money ran low. Facing a desperate situation, Rosa’s husband Bashir left her and the children behind in Turkey during the summer of 2015 to join the flow of asylum seekers trying to reach the EU, eventually settling in Brammen, Germany. They regularly speak through video chat, but Rosa and the children have not seen Bashir in person since.
After Bashir left, Rosa waited with the children in Turkey for seven months before finally scraping enough money together to make the trip to Europe themselves. They eventually arrived in Greece on 3 March 2016. But with Balkan borders effectively sealed, Rosa and the kids have joined the steadily growing ranks of refugees and migrants stranded in Greece and the Western Balkans – a number which has climbed from a little over 47,000 in March of last year to nearly 75,000 today, including around 25,000 children.
Like Rosa, many of the stranded migrants are living in government-administered shelters or camps. They have some access to essential services like healthcare and education for children, but it is far from an ideal situation. They exist mostly in a state of limbo, not knowing when they can move forward and unwilling or unable to go back.
There are but a few options for people who find themselves in this predicament: 1) they can apply for asylum to stay where they are; 2) depending on their nationality, they may be eligible for relocation to another EU country; or 3) if they have close family members in the EU, they can apply for family reunification. Rosa and many other single mothers in Greece fall into this latter category – hoping for official approval to be reunified with their husbands elsewhere in the EU, a process which, if successful, usually takes some 10 months or more.
In the meantime, these women are left as the sole caregivers for their children amidst conditions which are hardly ideal to raise a family. But it is the uncertainty of it all, the limbo of hoping and waiting for a family reunification that may never come, which exacts the greatest toll on the psychosocial wellbeing of the mothers and their children.
UNICEF and its partners in Greece are seeing more instances of depression and anxiety among single mothers and children waiting for reunification. Rosa and the kids are prime examples.
For the past nine months, they’ve been stuck in a refugee camp near Thessaloniki in northern Greece. A repurposed warehouse previously used for doorframes, its floor space has been taken over by a series of corridors lined with single family rooms constructed with plywood.
Approximately 150 asylum seekers, all of whom are Syrian Kurds, are currently being sheltered in the camp. Rosa and the children have been there for nine months, with their first official interview for family reunification occurring about six weeks ago. They’ve had no news since.
Rosa says she and the children are terribly bored. “We have no more patience. We cannot take it.” She reveals that she cries alone to relieve the stress and sometimes loses her temper with the children. She worries she might go over the edge and strike them in frustration, but so far, she has been able to restrain herself.
The absence of their father is also deeply upsetting for the children. When two-year-old Arin sees her father on video chat, she hits the screen of Rosa’s smartphone. Lila is now refusing to speak with her father.
SLOW PROCESS
Refugee families are being reunited across the EU, but the process can be painstakingly slow. In 2016, nearly 5,000 family reunification requests were made from Greece, with only 1,107 successful applicants having reached their destination country by the end of the year.
Marina Hamiri, from Afghanistan, and her four children aged 4 to 13 are among the lucky ones. She and the children have been stranded in Greece for 10 months, living mostly in Athens. But she has recently been informed that their application for family reunification with her husband in Germany has been approved and they will soon depart for their new home. It has been a grueling journey to get to this point though and Marina and the kids have the emotional scars to show for it.
Marina, her husband and four children left Afghanistan approximately five years ago because of ongoing insecurity and conflict. The journey was especially difficult for Marina’s husband who has a physical disability which came about because of a bomb blast injury. When the family neared Iran’s border with Turkey, the smugglers decided to split them up because of his limited mobility. He was placed in a car, while Marina and the children were made to walk – eventually apprehended by border police in Turkey and deported to Afghanistan.
Marina had no news of her husband’s whereabouts and was left as a single mother for three children, while pregnant with her fourth. “I had all the responsibility for the children, so I just couldn’t think about my husband. The children were young and didn’t understand. The pressure fell on me.”
After about 18 months, Marina received word that her husband had made it to Germany, so she and the children again used smugglers to get them to Europe. She sold the family home to raise the necessary funds.
As a single mother, the journey back to Turkey and eventually to Greece was a terrifying one. The smugglers were often aggressive and would ‘threaten the children to not make noise.’ Marina’s eldest child Omid tried to help her look after his younger siblings, but he was very stressed out. “(Omid) used to cry secretly because he didn’t want me knowing,” recalls Marina. After the boat journey from Turkey to Greece, the youngest child, Ali Jan, was so upset that his hair fell out in patches.
Marina tried to calm her children during the trip by telling them they would see their father soon.
The stress of their journey from Afghanistan still lingers, exacerbated by living in limbo in Greece for nearly a year. She and the children have been receiving counseling.
Marina finally feels like she can be happy and she is looking forward to her husband being involved in child care. “I want to share responsibility for their care with my husband.”
COMPLICATED SYSTEM
Sadly, there are also those whose cases for family reunification are not so simple, requiring added navigation of the complex reunification system. These are people like Raheela Zafiri and her three children, asylum seekers from Afghanistan, who cannot start the reunification process until Raheela’s husband has his own status clarified in the Netherlands. He had claimed asylum in Germany, but then moved to the Netherlands before the process was complete, leaving his current status very much up in the air. This only extends the amount of time Raheela and the children will be stuck in Greece and they are already struggling with depression and anxiety.
They have been in Greece for nearly a year, spending the past six months in a camp on the outskirts of Athens. Raheela speaks with her husband regularly on video chat, but the conversations are often difficult between the children and their father. “Every day Osra (eight-years-old) asks her father to do something to bring the family together, but he says there is nothing he can do. If it was up to me, I would leave this minute to go to Holland. Apart from that, I feel very stressed and I just think all the time about my family.”
The family reunification process in the EU is bogged down under the strain of a growing caseload in Greece and other transit countries. The involvement of at least two EU member states also adds layers of bureaucracy and family reunification policies vary widely from one member state to another, slowing the application process down further.
Nevertheless, longer processing times will surely be accompanied by increasing levels of stress and mental health issues among women and children stuck in limbo. Member states should do everything in their power to alleviate procedural bottlenecks before there is a mental health crisis among stranded asylum seekers. Children in particular should be reunited with their families as soon as possible to ensure their safety and wellbeing.
Rosa is unsettled by the departure of other refugees in the camp who have been approved for family reunification, while she and the children remain. “Friends and relatives are slowly leaving and I don’t want to be alone.” It is clear from her words and the expression on her face that Rosa may soon reach a breaking point. “We have no more patience,” she says. “We cannot take this much longer.”
