“Usually always,” he said.
“How do they usually get out?”
“If you don’t have a passport, we can send you out of Turkey. The illegal people ...”
“But, if you are here and you have no passport ...”
“Yes.”
“You don’t stay here forever. You leave somehow. How do they usually go? Do they go to Syria?”
“Yes. They go over the mountain to Syria, because Syria doesn’t have military people on the border. We have military people on the border. They cannot come back to Turkey, because we shoot them.”
“How long do people usually stay here?”
“Usually one month, or fifteen days or whatever. If they know this area, they go easily. But if they don’t know the area, and they have no passport, they wait until they get a passport. This is international land, not Turkey, not Syria.”
Barbara explained that Christians like Ernest and Antonio sought the help of the Church. Others, she said, paid money to shepherds and smugglers to sneak them into Syria. Once inside Syria, they had to avoid the police until they could find their way to some other country.
“Do the Syrians dump people here too?’ I asked the border guard.
“No,” he answered.
“One day,” Ernest told us, “the Syrian police came here, and they wrote down the names of all the people. But me and my brother, we didn’t give our names. There was one Iraqi boy. I told him, ‘Don’t give your name.’ But he gave his name to them. The next evening, the Syrians came back and took all the people whose names they had. They came again to take me and my brother by force, but we ran away. We don’t want never to go to Syria.”
“What happened to them?” I asked.
The border guard answered, “They took the three girls from Dominica to Syria. I think they went to Greece and then to their country. They were call-girls. The Syrians beat the Iraqi boy, because, you know, the Syrians don’t like the Iraqis.”
“The girls had passports?”
“Yes, but their visas expired,” the guard said. “Are you sure you are not a journalist?”
“I came here with the Church.”
The two Egyptians had been in prison near Izmir for twelve years. When they were released, the authorities gave them expired Egyptian passports. Because their passports were invalid, the authorities dropped them in the no-man’s-land. “Why were you in prison?” I asked one of them, a wiry man in his middle age, who answered in fluent English with an American accent. “For hash, man. I was taking it from Lebanon to Italy.” Then he whispered in my ear, so the border guard would not hear, “Can you believe it? For hash? These people are uncivilised.” He said their families had expected them home a few days earlier. “They just took us from prison to here. They didn’t give us a chance.”
Turning to the Gambian, a short, thin man, I asked, “Why are you here?”
“I lost my passport at the bus station in Istanbul, and I reported it to the police.” He showed me a receipt from the Istanbul police. “They took me to Ankara, and from Ankara they brought me here.”
The Bangladeshi gave his details to Barbara, telling her his name was Mohammed Abdul Mosabbir. When I looked at his Bangladeshi passport, it said his name was Shirez Jul Islam. His only problem was that he needed $100, because the Syrian customs officials required all non-Arab visitors to change $100 in foreign currency before they could enter the country. Mohammed, or Shirez, had left Turkey legally, discovered he could not enter Syria without $100 and could not return to Turkey.
The Armenian from Iran was a thirty-five-year-old electrical engineer. He spoke no English, so Ernest translated from Farsi. “He says he is here because Iranians coming into Turkey do not need visas. The Iranians can stay three months. His three months finished three months ago. The police caught him and threw him here. He can go to Syria, but he needs $100.”
“Does he want to return to Iran?”
“No. He says he wants to live as a free Christian. He wants to go to America or Europe. His sister and brother are in America.”
“Are they American citizens?”
“No, but his sister has a green card. She lives in Los Angeles, but he does not have an address or phone number. Also, he says they would not let him bring his baggage here, which he left in Alexandretta.”
“Where?”
“In a hotel.”
“Which hotel?”
After conferring for a minute, Ernest answered, “An Iranian home.”
“Where?”
“He does not know the address.”
“Does he have the telephone number?”
“No.”
Barbara and I took details of all the deportees, as well as letters from some to their families and embassies. We promised to contact their consuls, to bring them food and to let them know what we had been able to do. We believed that, when we returned, some of them would be gone. They would however be replaced by other victims of the absurd borders in a region which had done without them for centuries until the British and the French drew them across the map. As we walked to our car with their letters in hand, one of them shouted, “You are our only hope.”
The many travellers who had preceded me in the Levant over the ages, from Ibn Jubayr in the twelfth century to Lawrence of Arabia in our own, had not had to contend with borders. They were free to go all the way from Alexandretta to Aqaba without a border formality, customs search or visa. In the post-colonial era, I would have to cross frontiers to go into Syria, into Lebanon, back into Syria, into Jordan, into Israel and back into Jordan, just to traverse a Levant that was less than six hundred miles long. And at each border, there were those who could not make it, because their papers were not in order, because they did not have enough money or because, unbeknownst to them, their governments had offended the regime in one of the countries they wished to enter.
A friend of mine who was crossing into Lebanon from Syria met an Armenian who found himself caught years before without the proper papers, unable to enter either country. By the time my friend met him, he had resigned himself to his fate, opening a small shop between the two countries selling coffee and sandwiches to travellers during their long waits for permission to cross. The absurdity of this has not been lost on the inhabitants of the region, whose grandparents remembered fondly the Ottoman days when they could go from Beirut to Jerusalem and up to Damascus without seeing a single border guard. The Syrian film maker, Doureid Lahham, made a movie entitled Al-Haddoud, “The Borders.” Lahham, Syria’s Woody Allen, wrote and directed the comedy, and starred in it as a taxi driver who plied his trade carrying passengers across the frontiers. The driver, who believed official doctrine about Pan-Arab unity, did not recognise the borders. He endured ludicrous confrontations with officialdom each time he crossed. His yellow taxi was painted with black lines like a net across it, representing the artificial divisions of a land which had been united until 1919. It was a funny film, which sadly was all too true.
When Sister Barbara and I returned to Antioch, we telephoned the embassies and consulates of the men in no-man’s-land, none of which sounded surprised at the men’s plight. We sent their letters to their families, and I notified the Red Cross and Amnesty International. I had a feeling though that, if they were ever to escape, they would have to rely on bribery or cunning.