BULGARIA WELCOMES REFUGEES WITH ATTACK DOGS AND BEATINGS
Zach Campbell
November 7, 2016
Abdul Bashir was resting when the police dogs came. He and 11 others were in the dense mountainous forest that joins Turkey and Bulgaria. They had just crossed to the Bulgarian side, for the second time in a month, stepping over the low-hanging wire that divides the two countries. The dogs came out of the woods behind them. Abdul Bashir saw one attack a man in his group, biting his shoulder and dragging him across the ground. The man was bleeding.
The Bulgarian border police arrived soon after the dogs. They ordered the refugees to keep their heads down. Then Abdul Bashir felt police kicking him and striking him on the back, head, and legs with batons and “something with electricity.” The police took the refugees’ money and cellphones before bringing them back to the border fence, where they beat and chased them some more. One of the border guards told the asylum seekers: “Don’t come again.” Then the police opened the gate and pushed the group through, back to Turkey.
Tall and skinny with dark wispy hair, Abdul Bashir told me his story as we sat on a cold, concrete wall outside one of three refugee centers in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia. He curled up in a ball when he talked about the beatings. He had a far-off stare.
The first time he had tried and failed to cross the Bulgarian border with the same smuggler, he had been comparatively lucky: The police didn’t steal his money or phone. They only hit him once. He returned a week later, with a smaller group. This was when the police dogs found him. The exhausted refugees passed that night sleeping in the Turkish woods — it was early summer, still warm enough to do so — before making the three-hour drive back east to Istanbul. And then, two weeks later, the group returned to the border with the same smuggler and passed through the same woods from Turkey into Bulgaria, this time without a problem. What had changed?
What might have looked to Abdul Bashir like the luck of the draw was actually the outcome of systematic abuses. Abdul Bashir’s story matches those of numerous other refugees, as well as nongovernmental organizations, the European Union’s border agency, and sources on the border, including a Bulgarian border police translator and smugglers who work the route. Bulgaria’s border police are engaged in a game of questionable legality, both when they force asylum seekers out and when they let them in. They routinely use violence — not only to send particular asylum seekers away, but to make sure that the larger stream of refugees turns elsewhere. Unless the refugees pay.
