Following the journey migrants take as they try to smuggle themselves into Europe poses a unique set of challenges. First, you need to find the migrants. This isn’t a simple task, as my director Jacob Waite and I soon discovered. Although hundreds of thousands enter the EU from the east via Turkey every year, these are people who have dedicated themselves to being invisible. They are breaking the law and risking their lives to slip unseen across borders.
Even if we did manage to find them, there was no guarantee they’d be willing to talk to us. If you’ve sold everything you own to pay a people smuggler to sneak you into a foreign country, it’s unlikely you’d want to draw attention to yourself by speaking to a film crew.
We’d heard the beaches on the Aegean coast in northwest Turkey are popular launching points for migrants trying to sail across to the Greek Islands. They are well-known enough for local journalists to have spent time staking out the area, staying awake for nights on end trying to find those making the illegal crossing. But no one, so far, had managed to see any migrants attempting the journey from here.
As we settled in to spend the night on the beach, our expectations were low. It was clear the shore was in constant use by migrants – it was littered with the rubbish they had left behind, such as discarded shoes, bottles and boxes that had once contained life jackets and dinghies – but the area was eerily still. That was until just before 3am, when we heard whispered voices approaching the sea.
The twenty-five migrants we met that night were all from Afghanistan. So was the people smuggler, who had charged each one of them over $4,000 to take them a thousand miles from Turkey’s eastern border with Iran to this beach on the western coast. We were amazed when they allowed us to film them pumping up the dinghy and preparing to set sail. They were fearful of the journey ahead of them, but not our cameras.
There were women and toddlers waiting to board the tiny dinghy, as well as unaccompanied children. The desperation and determination of these migrants became clear when we started talking to 18 year old Hadi. He’d left Afghanistan aged 13 after the Taliban captured his father, and had been living in Iran for five years, saving up the money to continue his journey to the west. He told us he wished he could stay in Afghanistan, but faced certain death if he went back. His only option was to risk his life trying to make it to safety in Europe.
As we soon learned, arriving in Greece and the EU was just the start of a new set of troubles for the migrants. We found them detained in squalid conditions, we saw marks on their bodies they said had been inflicted by the Greek police, and we discovered them living rough on railway lines. Those who could afford it stayed in flea-infested flats crammed with as many as ten people per bedroom. They were desperate to make it out of Greece as soon as they could.
The migrants we spoke to want their voices to be heard. They want British people to know what they are prepared to endure to make it closer to our shores. Hearing their stories made me realise how much we take our freedoms for granted. I left Greece clutching my passport tightly, knowing that so many are willing to risk so much for their chance to have one.
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