Two important recent pieces help shed more light onto the plight of Syrian refugees in Bulgaria and in Jordan this winter.

“They Treat Us Like Crap”: Life In A Bulgarian Refugee Camp

The first piece is a blog post by Channel 4’s Jonathan Rugman, who write about his visit to a Syrian refugee camp in Harmanli, Bulgaria. Bulgaria is home to upwards of 5,000 Syrian refugees, around 1,000 of whom live crowded in tents at a facility intended to temporarily house 400 people.

Most of the refugees in Harmanli are Kurds who fled Qamishi on the Turkish border. To flee, they must pay smugglers around 300 euros per person for help making the five- to 10-hour crossing on foot from Turkey into Europe. The refugee camp has no running water, heating or electricity. Refugees receive around one euro a day for subsistence.

It can take up to a month to be registered as a refugee in Bulgaria. We were told there were just three officials to process applications and take fingerprints from the many hundreds housed in two refugee camps…. It can then take three years for asylum to be granted.

Refugees have two options: wait for that asylum in appalling conditions, including no schools for their children; or smuggle themselves further into western Europe, with Sweden and Germany apparently the most popular destinations.

Rugman goes on to describe how Syrians are living in a hospital:

In a hospital we found the brothers and sisters of 17-year-old Ali from Aleppo, comforting him after he had been punched and stabbed on the edge of their refugee camp.

Ali’s family live in a derelict school, 15 of them sleeping in one small room. They say their home was bombed by Syrian jets. So they crossed into Turkey, carrying Ali’s elderly grandmother for much of their six-hour trek to Europe.

“We had four rooms downstairs and four rooms upstairs,” Safar, Ali’s mother, told me with a mixture of pride and sadness in her voice. “Our home was a two-storey building. At least the children can sleep here because they cannot hear the sound of bombing and warplanes.”

The other children are too frightened to join those playing outside the school building, even though it is guarded by Bulgarian police, so they play in the corridors which double up as dormitories.

Ten Syrian families live in each classroom, their living spaces delineated by white sheets hanging from poles made of tree branches. There is no laundry area, no kitchen either, not even a sink to wash the dishes – even though EU law demands a dignified standard of living for refugees.

To read the full post, click here.

ADD

Meanwhile, two new videos from the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan highlight aspects of life for the tens of thousands of Syrians who call the desert camp their temporary home.

In this first video, Andrew Harper, the head of the operation in Za’atari admits, “It’s a nightmare trying to rescue people from (the Jordanian) border”. One issue is the increased fighting in southern Syria, from where about 80% of the refugees crossing into Jordan come from. People must cross the desert for several kilometers to reach the border, carrying as many of their belongings with them.

The journey is particularly harrowing for children. One of the children shown in the video is a 2 and a half year old girl, who arrived at the camp paralysed from the waist down after being shot in the back. The toddler also has shrapnel wounds to her head.

“She wasn’t crying, she wasn’t screaming, she wasn’t complaining… Her father brought her across because there was nothing else to do,” Harper relates.

This next video shows the same child (at 3:26). We learn that the baby does not yet understand that she will never be able to walk.

(Featured Photo: Syrian refugees in Bulgaria, credit Channel 4)