Unspeakable

AMYGOODMAN: Talk more about Molenbeek.

PETERBOUCKAERT: So it is a neighborhood where weapons are easily available.

AMYGOODMAN: Why?

PETERBOUCKAERT: Because Belgium has been a center for the illegal weapons trade for decades. It’s where shipments to conflicts like Angola, traditionally, have taken off. And that commerce has led to the easy availability of weapons. And that is a very dangerous development, because for just a few thousand dollars, you can buy Kalashnikovs and other weapons of war on the black market in Belgium.

AMYGOODMAN: Were you surprised when you heard about this connection between the Paris attackers, some of them, and Molenbeek in Brussels, Belgium?

PETERBOUCKAERT: I was not really surprised, because I’ve been working on the Syrian conflict for many years, and we have seen many people from these areas of Belgium and France heading to fight in Syria. And, you know, there’s been this focus on this fake passport, when Europe really should be focusing more on the marginalized Muslim communities at home and try to better meet their needs, make sure that young people are educated and have jobs available, because the reality is that the majority of these people who carried out the Paris attacks were French citizens -- some of them resident in Molenbeek -- who have been living in France all of their lives.

AMYGOODMAN: Tell us the stories of people. I don’t think people care about refugees when you say one million, when say 1000, until you hear the story of one person.

PETERBOUCKAERT: I have met so many people with their own tragic and at times inspiring stories. I have met many Syrians who made this boat journey and then actually stayed in Greece to help their fellow Syrians when they arrived. But one person who touched me quite a bit is a doctor from Syria, Dr. Ali Jabour. He made this journey and I met him about two months ago in Hungary where he was sleeping on the streets. And just imagine you’ve spent four years in Syria, digging people out of the rubble and saving their lives at the hospital -- you're a hero, really, and you end up on this journey of utter humiliation. I wrote about him, and my last line of the piece I wrote said he’s now in Austria, one step closer to achieving his dream of continuing his medical studies in Germany. And he contacted me from Germany and said, actually, the last line is not right, because my dream is to be back in Syria.

AMYGOODMAN: Tell us the journey he took. Explain how people go from Syria.

PETERBOUCKAERT: So for most of these people, they have to sell their land and their house and borrow very heavily from neighbors and from family to make this journey because they have to pay smugglers incredible amounts of money. Then they have to cross the border into Turkey, often illegally, over razor wire fences, and then they have to make their way to the smugglers, who they pay about $1200 at least, sometimes much more, to be pushed onto these boats. And all of them are being told the journey will be safe, there will be 30, 35 people on the boat. But when they arrive on the coast, up to 55, 60 people are pushed onto these boats. And the smugglers have guns to force people to take off. There’s nobody to guide these boats. One of the refugees is given the handle of the engine on this rubber boat, and then they set out at sea. Many of the boats break down at sea and drift for hours. We’ve talked to people who have been at sea for as long as two days. Sometimes the boats are attacked by vigilantes.

AMYGOODMAN: And where do they go in this boat journey?

PETERBOUCKAERT: They go from Turkey, from the Turkish coast to the Greek islands. And the numbers have been growing exponentially. In July, 24,000 people arrived on the island of Lesbos. In August, it was up to 50,000. And by September, it was 111,000.

AMYGOODMAN: So how many a day?

PETERBOUCKAERT: It can be up to 5000, 8000 people a day. So that means 100 boats.

AMYGOODMAN: A hundred boats.

PETERBOUCKAERT: And you just do the math. I did the math, and the smugglers are making over $100 million off the plight of these people.

AMYGOODMAN: And then what happens when they end up in Lesbos? What happens then?

PETERBOUCKAERT: You know, for many, they think that their journey -- the worst part of their journey is over when they arrive in Lesbos. But actually, their suffering is just about to begin. When they get on the beach, wet and often cold, they’re helped by the volunteers. They are given dry clothes if dry clothes are available. And then they end up in these horrible camps, completely overcrowded with very little shelter and food, where they have to wait for days just to get a registration paper to get onto the boat to Athens. And then they continue, sleeping out in the open with their children -- it’s stunning to see how many babies are on this journey, and toddlers -- for day after day after day until they ultimately reach Germany.

And, you know, I think the real scandal is that we’re now five months, a year into this crisis, that keeps growing, but there still is no organized EU response, both in terms of coherent refugee policies, but also in terms of saving lives at sea and meeting the humanitarian needs of these people. This is not an insurmountable task. I mean, OK, we’re talking about a maximum of 8000 people a day, which seems like a huge number, but we handle those kind of crowds every day at rock concerts, at soccer matches. We do have the capacity to address these people’s needs and to make this journey a lot more humane, but we’re not.

AMYGOODMAN: How have the Paris attacks complicated this whole situation, the horror for refugees? I wanted to turn just in the United States to Donald Trump, the repub -- one of the leading presidential candidates, Republican candidates, speaking Monday after the Paris attacks.

Fear throws its hat into the ring for 2016 race: image via Reuters Opinion @ReutersOpinion, 23 November 2015

DONALDTRUMP: With all of the problems -- and you probably heard that at least one, and probably more, of the killers, the animals, that did what they did in Paris, came out of the migration, right? They came out of the migration. So we have a president that wants to take hundreds of thousands -- hundreds of thousands of people and move them into our country. And we don’t -- no, think of it. And we don’t even know who they are. There’s no paperwork. There’s no anything.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s Donald Trump. Peter Bouckaert?

PETERBOUCKAERT: Well, I normally make a policy not to respond to such idiotic statements. But in reality, every Syrian refugee who reaches the United States has gone through four levels of security review. These are the most carefully screened refugees anywhere in the world. And there have been no incidents with the hundreds of thousands of refugees that the U.S. has taken in over the years. The United States’ values are built about being welcoming to refugees. And it’s our most powerful tool in the war against Islamic extremism, are our values. It’s not our military planes and our bombs. The only way we can fight against this brutality, this barbarism, is with our values. And if we’re going to shut the door on these refugees, we’re giving a propaganda victory to ISIS. And I think that’s exactly why they left a fake Syrian passport at the scene of their attacks, because they would love it if we shut the door on the people who are fleeing their so-called Islamic caliphate.

AMYGOODMAN: What happens to Afghan refugees?

Just taking the bus is an increasingly deadly enterprise for Afghanistan's Shia Hazara: image via Kenneth Roth @KenRoth, 23 November 2015

Severe persecution in Afghanistan explains why so many Afghans arriving in Lesbos are Hazara: image via Kenneth Roth @KenRoth, 23 November 2015

PETERBOUCKAERT: You know, I think a lot of the focus has been on the Syrian refugees and their plight. But as one Afghan refugee told me, the Syrians have had four years of war, now coming onto five. We’ve had 40. And we should not ignore the plight of the people fleeing Afghanistan. The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan. The Islamic State is also targeting people there. And there’s many abuses being committed by the Northern Alliance. But the Afghan refugees also are fleeing from Iran. There’s millions of Afghans who live in Iran, and one of the reasons they’re fleeing from Iran, which is a very little-known fact, is that Iran is actually forcibly recruiting them to go fight in Syria. They’re rounding up Afghan refugees and giving them the choice between being deported back to Afghanistan, a country many have not lived in for decades and fear, or being forced to go fight for Assad in Syria.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to continue on this track, this idea of what has caused people to flee and what our responsibility is, not just as human beings that are not attached except that we’re humans and care about other human beings, but our responsibility for the cause of the refugee crisis.

PETERBOUCKAERT: You know, I do think it’s important for people to understand that the 2003 Iraq invasion, and especially the very irresponsible policies which were put in place by the Bush administration, played a very direct role in creating the Islamic State. It ripped apart Iraqi state and allowed for the rise of Islamic extremism. The only way we can respond to that is not just with a military strategy, and certainly not with brutality. I mean, we’ve seen that the kind of brutal policies pursued by the Bush administration and Rumsfeld and Cheney utterly failed. They failed on the ground. They achieved nothing in terms of stabilizing Iraq or dealing with the threat of Islamic extremism. So, you know, I totally understand in the aftermath of the Paris attacks people want to respond, they want to go strike against the Islamic State, but we have to be smart and learn from our own history. And actually, our values, respect for human rights and welcoming refugees is an important part of fighting against the kind of Islamic extremism that the Islamic State represents.