71 Lives
When the two policemen from the Potzneusiedl Highway Inspection in Burgenland approached the lorry at around 11 am on 27 August 2015, from the right back door a chicken on a promotional photo is looking at them saying “I taste so good because I am fed so well.” Through the crevices of the load compartment a reddish liquid drips onto the asphalt. The stink from the lorry is coming towards them. When participants are asked to describe this smell later, they shake their heads and wave aside. Indescribable, they say, they have never smelled anything like this before.
The refrigerated lorry type Volvo FL 180, with the Hungarian license plate Z-12198, transported fowl long-term through Slovakia before the company Hyza discarded it and sold it to Hungary. It has been standing in the park bay for over one day on the A4 direction Vienna, just before the Parndorf exit. On the Balkan route, as the highway is called, because it leads from Vienna to Hungary and Serbia, it occurs more frequently that old vehicles are parked. But there are more important things to do. It’s over 30 degrees, a record summer, holiday season. The Neusiedler See is not far, and the popular late night shopping starts in the outlet centre next door, the Furla ladies’ bag for 70 instead of 353 euros.
But this lorry can no longer be ignored. An employee of the highway authority, mowing the lawn, has called the police because of the smell.
The officers open the load compartment. And then step back. They see decaying bodies, sunk into each other, leaning against each other as if they were standing in a crowded subway and would have fallen asleep. Their feet are stuck to the ankles in a mixture of excrement, urine, and corpses. The policemen call into the load compartment. Nobody replies. They notify the emergency physician and the service centre. They make a photo that is supposed to describe the situation to the colleagues, which appears the next day in the “KronenZeitung”. They close the door. It’s too much. At 11.25 am, they send a message via the police system “SMS Pro”: “A lorry with about 20 dead found on A4 Parndorf”.
There are 71 dead. 21 Afghans, 29 Iraqis, 15 Syrians, 5 Iranians and a man who cannot be identified. 59 men, 8 women, 4 children. The youngest, Lida from Kunduz, Afghanistan, is eleven months old. Persecuted, despaired, Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, teachers, lawyers, traders, policemen, teenagers, three families, FC Barcelona fans, Facebook poser, a kaleidoscope of mankind. 71 dead, who have not done us the favour to drown far away in the sea. 71 lives, which wanted to be transported in a much too narrow load compartment of a lorry through Hungary and Austria, because at the end of their Odyssey Germany shone, the promised country. 71 corpses that deprived us of the illusion of having nothing to do with the wars and problems of others. A few days later refugees begin to cross the Hungarian-Austrian border at Nickelsdorf, 25 kilometers from the parking bay near Parndorf, across the highway from Hungary to Austria. “We can do it,” Angela Merkel says, opening the doors.
So many have lost in this story. Nahed Asker, 31, has lost her husband. Farah Al Shaikh, 31, her family. Two stories from many, which are connected in the refrigerated lorry on the A4. After the tragedy, Asker travelled after her dead husband with the children from Syria, and is now waiting for her asylum in a refugee home in Austria. Alshaikh has been living in Germany for a long time. She had encouraged her family in Syria to flee to Germany. Now they are all dead.
The women did not know each other before the disaster, although both come from Deir az-Zur to the east of Syria. Through the city flows the Euphrates, there grow jasmine flowers, splutters petroleum, pomegranates and cotton grow. There has been war for five years. Asker and Al Shaikh have still not met each other. They write Whatsapp messages to each other, make phone calls. Since 27 August 2015 they share their fate, but not their grief. It cannot be shared.
“They treated my family like chickens,” says Alshaikh. “My soul is broken,” says Asker.
Asker lives with her son Zaid, 11, and her daughter Tala, 5, in a small room in a refugee home in Wiener Neustadt. She has placed three mattresses side-by-side to form a large bed. They sleep together, wake up together. Asker likes to watch Beyoncé music videos, post a lot on Facebook, wear leggings, lipstick and mascara. She cooks with the other Syrians. She knows what medication her children need when they are ill, because she has been working in a pharmacy in Syria. She cannot work in Austria. She doesn’t speak German, has applied for asylum, for the family that remained for her. “When we last saw each other, my husband told me, ”No matter what happens to me, always look after the children. I will fulfil this wish,” says Asker.
Alshaikh lives with her husband Fateh Alhamad, 41, and her son Omar, 1, in a spacious apartment in Northern Germany. They speak almost accent-free German, have German nationality. She is a gynecologist and just on parental leave. He works as an internist in the hospital. During Ramadan they eat and drink only after dark. Alshaikh wears headscarf, not because she has to, but because she wants it. Omar has brown hair and eyes, just learns to walk and lands mostly on the butt. Then his mother sometimes smiles. She often walks with him to a small playground at the end of the street, buys food, otherwise she stays at home. The neighbours know nothing about their history.
She went twice to the Immigration Authority in Saarbrücken in November 2014. They lived in Saarland, worked in the hospital, owned a car and a house in the suburb of Saarbrücken. It had a garden and more rooms than they needed. She asked the woman from the immigration office for the application for family reunion, which she had submitted half a year ago. She wanted to bring her mother Fadila, 53, her father Abdel, 57, her brother Almuthanna, 23, and her sister Hend, 17, to Germany, because no more everyday life was possible in Deir az-Zur. IS against government forces, the situation was unclear.
Her brother Almuthanna studied law and was arrested by the IS because he had smoked. Her sister Hend was no longer allowed to go to school, just before graduating from high school. The business of her father, Abdel, who traded with car parts, was looted, destroying the houses of the family. Farah Alshaikh telephoned her mother Fadila daily. She sensed that the mother was afraid, even if she did not say that.
At that time, Alshaikh was eight months pregnant. She wanted to bring the family at her own expense. But the woman from the foreigners’ office said: “In parental leave you get only 60 percent of your salary. That’s not enough to provide for your child and your family.” “We’ll get it. In our house there’s enough space. We don’t want money, really not,” said Alshaikh. The officer asked her boss. The request was rejected. A week later she went back to the office. She begged her at least to bring her sister to her. She had asthma. Rejected.
“My father didn’t want to flee. He feared for the family, had fear of the human traffickers. He only wanted to leave Syria if they could enter legally anywhere,” says Alshaikh. She offered him the rooms in her house. If it was to become unbearable, they should come, no matter how. “I’ve been pushing. Maybe I’ve put too much pressure on them.”
“We canät stand this any more,” her father says when he calls in early July 2015. He sets off with 20,000 dollars and the family. They drive in their Toyota from Raqqa to the Syrian-Turkish border. They abandon the car there, pay a smuggler to lead them through a forest. 4 They get to Urfa in Turkey. There lives another sister of Alshaikh. They stay a few days. Abdel Alshaikh, the father, spreads the word to his acquaintances. He is looking for a smuggler. A man named Abules is recommended to him. A Syrian, who organises smuggling from Urfa. He collects commissions from human traffickers and refugees. Abules explains Abdel Alshaikh the route and the prices.
On 17 August 2015 the family is waiting for a hotel in Izmir. From the Turkish west coast, they want to go to Belgrade via Samos, Athens and Macedonia. There they are to meet a man named Afghani, who organises the journey through Hungary and Austria to Germany. The Alshaikhs are not alone, their group consists of twelve people. They include Alshaikh’s Uncle Youssef, 39, a brother of her father – and Hasan Al-Damen, 36, the husband of Nahed Asker.
He left Asker and the children in Damascus. They wanted to move him into the military. He was to fight for Assad, whom he despised. As a teacher he can no longer earn money. He wants to bring his family to Germany later.
“Give us your luggage. That doesn’t fit the dinghy,” the human traffickers say in Izmir. Alshaikh’s sister Hend is horrified. She only keeps her mobile phone, the pants and the T-shirt that she wears. In a photo, which she sends to her sister in Germany via WhatsApp, the wind blows into her black curly hair. She stands by the water and tries to look happy. She fails. The 17-year-old is a girl from the city who wants to listen to romantic Arabic pop music on the smartphone and to study medicine. She is afraid of the sea. She is wearing her mother’s silver wedding ring on her right hand. It shall protect them.
The human traffickers collect 1200 euros per person for the crossing to Samos. Two starts fail. The first time, they were caught by the Turkish coastal police, who left them at the beach and sunk the boat. The second time, the police patrols caught them when they wanted to cast off.
It is only the third time that they leave at midnight. In the early morning of 19 August, the boat is captured one kilometer before Samos by the Greek coastal police. Mother Fadila is glad. She vomited the whole night. When they enter the EU, the sun rises. In the port of Samos, they receive provisional travel documents with which they can buy tickets for the ferry to Athens.
In Samos they sleep one night on the ground, have little to eat. The next day they take the ferry to Athens. From there they call Farah Alshaikh in Germany. Her father Abdel sounds tired, but he says, “We’re okay. We’ll go on.” Her sister Hend cries. “I’m done, I can’t go on anymore.” Her mother Fadila would like to go back to Syria.
In Athens, they rest, go to an Arabic restaurant. Some of the group would like to stay longer. But Hasan Al-Damen, the husband of Nahed Asker, urges them to continue. He believes the borders will be closed soon. After a day in Athens they take the bus to the Macedonian border. There they split up, trying to get across the fence at various points. The border guards beat the refugees with sticks and spray tear gas into their faces. They catch Al Shaykh’s brother Almuthanna. He can escape, suffers only bruises. Mothers are separated from children, many cry and cry.
The group reunited after an hour on the Macedonian side. It’s raining, it’s cold, they’re freezing, their clothes are soaked. By bus, they travel four hours through Macedonia towards Serbia. They look out the window. They have imagined Europe differently.
In Belgrade they meet the human trafficker Afghani. An Afghan who has been living in Europe for some time. He is thin, has black hair, wears a t-shirt, jogging pants and a shoulder bag. “Trust me! I will make sure that you are taken directly to Germany without your being registered in Hungary or Austria, and your fingerprints taken,” he says to Al-Damen and Abdel Alshaikh, who are leading the negotiations. He is asking for 1600 euros per person for transport. A common price for the route this summer. The men agree. They had deposited part of their money with Abules in Urfa. He is to transfer the fee to the human traffickers only after they have arrived well in Germany. They hope to be able to protect themselves, not to be deceived.
It’s Monday, 24 August 2015, when the Alshaikhs call Farah Alshaikh in the afternoon from a hotel near Belgrade. They are in a good mood. Her brother Almuthanna has received an e-mail from Syria that he passed the lawyer’s examination. “Be careful what you say to me in the future, I am a lawyer now,” he tells his sister. “We got a little bit of rest and bought new 5 clothes,” says her mother Fadila. “I have a good feeling with the trafficker, he doesn’t seem to do it for the first time,” says her father Abdel. Her sister promises Alshaikh that soon after their arrival they will go to the zoo, to the Wilhelma in Stuttgart, because Hend wants this for a long time. It’s the last conversation with her family.
In the evening, the group arrives at 6:00 pm in the park next to the coach station in the centre of Belgrade. There it’s teeming with refugees and human traffickers. In these weeks, Belgrade is the hub of the refugee route across the Balkans. Afghani talks all the time on his mobile phone, in a language they don’t understand. His cell phone is old. Traffickers use old mobile phones and prepaid cards, so they cannot be located. Refugees use smartphones because they need the Internet as much as water. The phone is their only contact with those who they had to leave behind.
“Wait in the park until it gets dark. There’s a lot of police, we have to be careful,” says Afghani. Most of them try to sleep. At midnight Afghani wakes them up. They follow him through the night, along the rails of the tram, over a bridge that crosses the river Save to a parking lot. From the river banks the basses of the discos drone. The Belgrade youth is partying.
Afghani calls on them to divide themselves into three groups. Four people would be taken in each car. In the first one, a thug drives mother Fadila, brother Almuthanna and Al-Damen away. In the second one sits Youssef Alshaikh, the last to leave the parking lot are father Abdel and sister Hend in the third car on the parking lot. “You go with your mother, take care of her,” says Abdel Alshaikh to his son Almuthanna, who wanted to join his uncle Youssef. The decision costs Almuthanna his life.
The journey takes three hours to the north, via the E75 motorway through flat land to the Serbian border. Outside, the darkness flies by, everything is black. The sense of time and orientation is gone.
The human traffickers drop their passengers off in a forest near Domaszék on the Hungarian side of the border. After the first, the third car arrives a bit later. “Wait here, we’ll be back soon,” the human traffickers say. The Alshaikhs are in the forest.
Only Youssef Alshaikh is missing, the uncle. The second car in which he was sitting suddenly stopped, after two hours’ drive. The human trafficker had received a call and shouted into his phone in Serbian. He threw the refugees out of the car on the highway. “Waiting, waiting,” he shouted, driving away. Youssef Alshaikh had not bought a SIM card in Serbia, couldn’t call anyone.
They come to a village at dawn, drive back to Belgrade by taxi. He buys a SIM card and calls his brother. Abdel Al Shaikh tells that they have been brought together with other refugees and are waiting in a forest. “We are hungry and thirsty, bring something to eat and drink” he says. “Don’t go any further,” says Youssef Alshaikh, “something is wrong.” He doesn’t follow. That saves him his life. The group disintegrates.
On 25 August 2015, her father writes to Farah Alshaikh, “Sitting in the forest and waiting to go on.” She wants to reply, but suddenly he’s gone. She sees on WhatsApp that the last time he was online was at 12 o’clock. She can’t reach the rest of the family any more. At 10 pm, Nahed Asker gets the last news from her husband Hasan Al-Dame in Damascus. “I’m in the woods. The human traffickers say we have to wait for police checks. I am hungry and eat apples from the trees. Please kiss the children from me. Soon everything will be over.
A week ago, a man bought 6 a refrigerated lorry from a used car dealer in Kecskemét. He registers the lorry in his own name, doesn’t even bother to conceal his identity. The business with the refugees is running well, hundreds of human trafficker vehicles roll uncontrolled towards Austria every day. The man belongs to a group of traffickers which organised and carried out over 20 towings. It consists of four Bulgarians and the Afghan. The five men are all involved in the act on 27 August 2015. The load is valuable, 71 times 1600 euros. Therefore the bosses take care of it themselves.
On Wednesday, 26 August 2015, the traffickers will drive the refrigerated lorry at 4 am from Kecskemét to the forest on the border. Kecskemét, an old Hungarian university town, is situated an hour north of Domaszék. The sky is clear, it will be a nice, hot day in southern Hungary again, where tomatoes, peppers, strawberries and apricots grow. In the forest the 71 refugees have been hiding for more than a day and are waiting for the continuation of their journey.
The Alshaikh family from Deir az-Zur, Syria. The Rahm family from Kunduz, Afghanistan. Father Khuda, his wife, three children, including the little Lida, and a cousin. Rahm worked as a policeman in Afghanistan. The Taliban threatened him and his family. Muhammad Ali and his wife Lefana from Tall Abyad, Syria, who married three months ago and want to found a family in Germany. The Iraqi Mahmoud Abidi, who was just promoted to a four-star officer and fled with his wife Sine Gailani from Baghdad. She wants to see her brother in Germany, because as an engineer, he leads a good life there. She persuaded not only her husband, but also her siblings Ali and Seineb Gailani to come along. The Kurd Saeed Othman from Sulaimaniyya in Northern Iraq. He hopes that a doctor in Germany can help him, because he only has one kidney and that causes him pain. Mohammed Baba from Karkur, Iraq, who can’t find a job and believes in a career as a football professional.
Nothing indicates that the refugees had to be forced to board.
At five o’clock the lorry drives at Domaszék on the M5 motorway to the north, and is captured by the cameras of the Hungarian toll system. A car escorts the lorry, runs ten minutes ahead. The escort vehicle is supposed to warn the traffickers in the lorry, if there are police checks on the line, and to collect the drivers when something goes wrong.
The lorry passed Kecskemét at 6:03, two hours later Budapest and reached the border to Austria at 9:15 am Nickelsdorf. About 20 minutes later the traffickers set it off in the park bay near Parndorf. Why? The smugglers are silent. There was no police block on this day. The group must somehow have realised that their cargo is lost.
The load compartment of the 7.5-tonnes vehicle cannot be opened from the inside. The cooling unit doesn’t work. The air would only have been rearranged, but no oxygen would habe been supplied. To the refugees remained only the oxygen, which was in the loading area at the start of the journey. In order to determine where they died, whether the Hungarian or Austrian judiciary is responsible, an expert’s report is commissioned after finding the lorry. It calculates the volume of the load space and divides it by the number of persons. About five refugees were standing on a square meter of the load compartment. They must have suffocated before eight o’clock in Hungary. There are no traces of death agony in the load compartment or the corpses. It can be assumed that they have fainted from oxygen deficiency and died unconscious. The position of the corpses shows that children were held high. The bodies of a 7 couple look as if they hugged each other.
The smugglers are arrested shortly after finding the lorry in Kecskemét. They’re about to prepare their escape, but the license plates and the records of the highway cameras lead the investigators to them quickly. They are held in remand in Kecskemét and don’t comment. In September, the prosecution is scheduled to begin early next year with the process.
The lorry is taken from the parking bay into a hall to Nickelsdorf, which can be cooled. Forensic doctors carry the bodies out of the load compartment, photograph them, assign items to them, for example, passports that are stuck in breast pockets, money sewn into sleeves or belts. In Hasan Al-Damen, the husband of Nahed Asker, one finds his teacher diploma. He had had it translated into German in order to find work later.
As the policemen had opened the load compartment in the morning, air came in, and the decomposition of the bodies was accelerated. In their salvage, the victims look like dark-skinned people. On backpacks and jackets glue corpse scraps. Most phones are in a state as if they were thrown into an acid bath. They can no longer be used for forensics. Nothing can be known this way about the last moments in the lorry.
The forensic doctors have provided the white corpses with numbers. The dead are lying there nameless. Unlike a plane crash, there is no passenger list that can be processed. The investigators switch a hotline for relatives. They need the DNA of relatives to identify the dead. For one man there are no enquiries. It will continue until 10 December 2015, until the identification of the others is completed.
In the afternoon of 27 August 2015, Nahed Asker sees a report on the lorry on television. She lives with the children at her mother’s house in Damascus. Asker says she immediately sensed that her husband is dead. When she calls the translator of the Burgenland state police authority, who is carrying out the identification, a few weeks later, she is not shouting. The body of her husband cannot be transferred to Syria. He is buried on the Muslim cemetery Inzersdorf in Vienna. Asker wants to say goodbye to her husband. She goes to Vienna with the children. The refugee route is now open.
Farah Alshaikh holds Omar in her arms, stands at the window of her house in Saarbruecken and looks into the garden as the call comes. They had found the passports. She drops Omar.
Since the beginning of the year they live in northern Germany. She could no longer hear the questions of friends in Saarbrücken, was fed up with condolences. She recently put a picture of her family on the cabinet over the TV in the living room. The Alshaikhs are also buried on the Inzersdorf cemetery. At the funeral on 07 October 2015, Farah Alshaikh insists on seeing her mother’s face. She lets them open the coffin. She hasn’t been again in the cemetery ever since. She can’t do it.
On the weekend after the Parndorf disaster, thousands of refugees arrived at German railway stations. They were applauded to, given water and clothing. The children got teddies and sweets. Many leave the gyms and shelters during these weeks. They start a new life.
Destination Paradise: Among the jihadists of the Maldives
Many Western tourists don’t even notice that this is a Muslim country. But in fact, the Maldives are the non-Arab country with the highest number of foreign fighters per capita: 200, more or less, out of 400,000 inhabitants. The government denies it. But each and every one has a brother or cousin in Syria. While the rest of the world watched the Olympics in August, everyone here was watching the battle of Aleppo. And rooting for al-Qaeda.
In theory, the Maldives are an archipelago of 1192 islands. But for the Maldivians it is just one island: Male. The islands contain only a couple of shops and one school. Plus a tiny football pitch. Sometimes they don’t even have electricity. For whatever you need, you come to Male. It may look like a town like a thousand others, but it covers 5.8 square kilometers, has 130,000 inhabitants and a real population which is double that: in Male every nook and cranny is inhabited.
Walking along one of the main avenues, the Buruzu Magu, I sneak into a gap, every bit a post-card view – a blue house, a green and a yellow one. At the end there’s a spiral staircase. There are five living behind the first door to the right, nine behind the first on the left, behind the second one they are all immigrants from Bangladesh – just one room with 18 living in it, sleeping in shifts. In the next house, behind a door made out of a plank of rotten plywood, mother and daughter are chatting in the dark, and next to them, on some worn-out matting there’s a old woman, also worn-out, wheezing and groaning, her wispy grey hair looking like the filaments of a burnt-out light-bulb. There are 16 of them living here in a heap of rags and worn-out shoes, the walls patched up with jute and sheets of corrugated iron and the stench of bodies hangs in the air. The kitchen is a camping-stove. There are no tables, chairs, nothing in the rooms, not even windows and everything is just thrown together in a jumble, the washing hanging from the ceiling to dry. On the wall there’s a plasma television acquired at the last elections in return for a vote. The average monthly wage here is 8,000 rufiyah, 470 euros. The rent, for three rooms, is 20,000 rufiyah.
Kinaan grew up in a house like this. With six people in one room, with their parents constantly fighting. The sea was their shower. He’s 31 now and he is the most notorious, and feared criminal in Male. Hang out with him and everybody will stand aside. Male is divided by about thirty gangs, each one with 50 to 500 members. We are talking one tenth of the inhabitants at most: a fifth of all young people. In the first and most recent study on street violence, in 2009, 43% of the interviewees said that they didn’t feel safe, not even in their own houses.
Kinaan ended up in prison, for the first time when he was 15. For getting into a fight. Ever since he was 17 he’s been a heroin-addict and an alcoholic. Even now, to make ends meet, he still sells drugs. “Because here no-one gives you a second chance”, he says. “I’m prepared to do any kind of work, but nobody ever wanted to take me on. Not even as an unloader down at the port. Sooner or later we all get arrested, and all of us for drugs, because when you live ten to a room, the truth is you are living in the street. Male is a hell-hole, you have no future, nothing: and alcohol is forbidden. Heroin costs a lot less than a vodka. And the crazy thing is that sentences are really harsh. Steal a mango and you risk is getting a year in jail and being branded for life. But at the same time, there’s zero tolerance: because we’re in the service of politicians. With a price-list too. 1200 dollars for breaking a shop-window, 1600 for mugging a journalist. You get hired for anything, from distributing leaflets to knifing someone. So if they want it, if you can be of use to them, they’ll get you out of prison”. Kinaan has been convicted twice, but has never served time. Like his friend Naaif. And so what do you do for a living? I ask him. “I’m doing 25 years of prison”, he laughs.
Picture: Tommaso Bonaventura
Kinaan has been trying to change his life for ten years now. So now he’s taken things into his own hands and decided to give himself a second chance: he has decided to go to Syria. “It’s not difficult. Nobody stops you. They have every interest in getting rid of us, we have committed all their crimes for them, we know all their secrets. And we all want to leave. Anything is better than Male”.
“In Syria, if I’m killed, at least it’ll be for a good reason”.
For many here Syria is an economic and moral opportunity: a sort of deliverance. The only thing stopping Kinaan is that he’s trying to save his brother Humam. After a sixty-year moratorium, the death penalty has been reinstated. And Humam is top of the list, accused of having knifed a member of parliament. He retracted his confession, maintaining that it was given under police pressure, and above all, according to Amnesty International, that he has shown frequent signs of mental disturbance. But the fact remains that he is the mere executor of what is clearly a political homicide. Afrasheem Ali was a presidential candidate and Maumoon Aboul Gayoom, who had been president of the Maldives for thirty years, from 1978 to 2008, and is to this day still considered to be the father of the country, had declared that his party would support the candidate with the best credentials in terms of Islam. Afreesh Ali then, rather than Abdulla Yameen, the current president.
But one evening, on his way home, Afrasheem Ali was killed.
Apart from reintroducing the death-penalty, the new criminal code, for the first time, a year ago, officialised the sharia. But here in the Maldives Islam has always been political, not just a religion. When Gayoom came to power, the Maldives were an archipelago of fishermen in the wild. Because in actual fact, they are not at all a paradise; they don’t even have a freshwater spring. Gayoom had done his studies at al-Azhar university in Cairo: at the time, his word for the Maldives was less that of a president than the word of God. It was Gayoom who had the idea of creating resorts, tourism at $5,000 a night. It was a way of modernizing the country: but also of controlling it. By concentrating the population in Male – and, above all, preventing any contact with other cultures. Only 199 of the 1192 islands are inhabited and 111 are resorts: but there’s no interaction between them. Not even within the resorts themselves. Once finished their shift, employees are forbidden from hanging around. Moreover, the resorts have been built by foreign entrepreneurs. The law stipulates that they must be in partnership with a Maldivian; a Maldivian who is obviously – in general – a friend of a politician. Or a politician himself. In the Maldives 5% of the population owns 95% of the wealth.
Moreover, every opponent is no mere opponent: he is an infidel. As the 38 year-old Shahindha Ismail, head of Democracy Network, the main human rights organization, says: ‘They have politicized religion and sacralised politics’.
Even the tsunami in 2004 was interpreted as God’s punishment. Many videos are shown in which the water washes away everything in its path on an island – except for the mosque.
The result is that today many young lads, very many of them, are like Iyaas. On their way to Syria. Iyaas is a thin 22 year-old, humble-looking, almost ascetic, in flip-flops, jeans and a mandarin-collar shirt that looks a bit like a tunic. And with a beard three or four centimeters long. A quiet, shy lad. But prepared: he has saved up almost $3,000 for the journey – by selling hashish. He’s never been outside the Maldives. Now though he has a portable with all the maps of Turkey and knows everything about the front. Less about Syria: its complexity, the clashes between rebels, the looting and smuggling – even if it’s not really Syria he’s going to: as he tells you: “I am going to paradise”. What do you expect to find there? I ask him. He has no doubt about that: “Brotherhood”. A new life. A different life. “A society in which we are all men and not vultures and carrion like here, where everyone takes advantage of each other. Why do you think you don’t believe in anything” he tells me, “in fact you do believe, you believe in the world as it is. You believe as much as I do”.
When it comes to the Islamic state in which he would like to live, more than anything he knows what it should not be. But Aiham laughs when I tell him that back home it’s said that foreign fighters do not know what Islam really is. When I tell him about the English boy who bought himself an ABC of the sharia at the airport: “No Muslim, unless he is an imam, would ever define himself as an expert on Islam”, he says. “But the Koran begins with the words: ‘Study…’. Then he looks at me and says: “Like Kant, no? Sapere aude.” He is 20 years old and looks what he is: a student, a brilliant one too: jeans, a T-shirt and a shoulder-bag. Sharia faculty. “Islam is justice. We could be like Switzerland, but instead here everything is a question of favours. If you fall ill, you knock on the president’s door and they’ll pay for you to get treatment abroad. Which is the reason for nobody rebelling. That’s how everybody settles their problems here. “We are not citizens, but beggars”. So why not, I ask him, start with the Maldives? “We are Muslims. We are a single community. And Syria is simply the top priority. It would be strange if it were otherwise – that with 500,000 dead we should start thinking more about ourselves than Syria”. His role-model, after Mohammed, is Malcolm X.
That said, in the Maldives he would have his work cut out for him. Only Muslims here can be citizens, at school Islam is the main subject, and five times a day the shops close for prayers: even if the employees stay inside drinking coffee. They don’t go to the mosque. Ditto with alcohol: it’s forbidden, but sold at the Island Hotel bar, next to the airport. All you need is the money to pay for it. Even a judge of the Supreme Court was filmed inside with two prostitutes.
However, if you’re a woman, any woman for that matter, and have extra-marital sex, you will be whipped in public before the court.
None of this, however, happens to tourists. Not even those who choose the guesthouse option, a recent idea of Mohamed Nasheed, who in 2008 succeeded Gayoom in the first democratic elections in the history of the Maldives. Unlike the resorts, the guesthouses are located on the inhabited islands. So they not only bring in a bit of income, but break with cultural isolation: the guesthouse option means that in theory you are living alongside the Maldivians. The first one opened on Maafushi, a two-hour ferry ride from Male. Four lost-looking Neapolitans are wandering around what the signs call “bikini beach”, the beach for foreigners. They’ve been here since yesterday, two separated businessmen, one with his two twenty-year old sons. They had no idea that the Maldives were a Muslim country. And a den for ISIS, I tell them. ‘Jesus!’ Andrea exclaims, opening his eyes wide. Then he says to his friend: “Guagliò, did you hear that? ISIS is here. Not a single woman to be had”.
Picture: Tommaso Bonaventura
In point of fact there is nothing on Maafushi, nothing at all. In 2012 Nasheed was ruined by a coup d’état, and this is the way the present government tries to make life difficult for the guesthouses: they levy the same taxes as in the resorts in which a double room costs not $100, but $1000 a night, with zero investment in the islands. Apart from the beach, Maafushi has only a couple of cafés. “The evening’s only entertainment is the crab-race”, says a disconsolate Andrea. You pay for the brand and that’s it. Just to say you’ve been to the Maldives”. At sundown, one of the two boys, wanders bare-chested around the minimarket checking out every bottle of fruit-juice in a desperate search for beer. He hasn’t discovered yet that in fact there is beer: there’s a boat moored off the coast which sells alcohol. But on Maafushi no-one sells it: there the Koran is respected. We are in front of the mosque. The men glower at him. He understands what I’m thinking, “It’s hot”, he says. “And I’ve got salt all over my skin. My T-shirt sticks to me”. A woman in a niqab comes past, embarrassed. “Blimey, you’re as ugly as sin”, he says. “Who would want you?”. Her husband looks on. “Tinatill”.
Very many women wear the niqab. Completely covered and completely in black. “You know”, Mariyath Mohamed, a thirty year-old journalist tells me, “this type of Islam, so extreme, is not traditional, it’s an innovation”. Same as in Gaza and Baghdad. Thirty years ago nobody was veiled”. Here in the Maldives, Islam was grafted onto Buddhism. Even though there was an assault on the national museum in 2012 and its statues were demolished by hammer-blows, all you have to do is go into one of the older mosques. They used to be temples: the position of Mecca was put there on the floor afterwards, installed diagonally. But then Gayoom came along. And not only him. “A couple of years after that, all those who, after 1967, after the Six Day War and the defeat of Nasser – the secular Arabs who had gone to study in Saudi Arabia – came along too. They were a danger to Gayoom and his ideological monopoly. So they ended up in prison. They were tortured and killed – and turned into heroes. To many they represented not Islam, but opposition to the regime.” Then, he continued, came the tsunami. And now, “this other tsunami – which is Syria”.
But for the government, fundamentalism does not exist. At the news of the first two Maldivians killed in Syria in 2014, President Yameen rejected any responsibility. “We have always urged our compatriots abroad to behave themselves”, he declared.
“The government tries to avoid clashes, but actually shares certain ideas. Like everyone else”, says a young lawyer I’ll call Anaan. He is one of the most renown human rights activists of the Maldives. But he is also Iyaas’ best friend.
And they are very close. Even so, he’s not trying to stop him. “I can’t judge his choice. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a lost battle”, he says. It is not, that is, a wrong war in itself: for Aneen it is wrong only because it is doomed to defeat. He is looking to do a PhD in Europe. “You can’t study here in the Maldives. Quite literally, the tourists have a whole island to themselves and yet we don’t have a single quiet corner to concentrate on a book. Then, every so often, they turn up in front of your house and photograph your poverty, calling it folklore. Just look where we are”, he says. We are standing on Male beach, which is artificial, and poisoned, moreover, by hospital waste. “We don’t even have the sea left. What alternatives do we have? If you come from a rich family, you go and study abroad. Otherwise you go to Syria.”
Kinaan is still ready to leave. To assist the oppressed, he clarifies. Not to exterminate the infidel. “One of the gangs is called Bosnia. I wonder how many, one day, will be called Aleppo”.