The Washington Post - 09.11.2019

A10 eZ re THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAy, NOVEMbER 9 , 2019

to return home, and they line up

every morning outside the Iom

headquarters in Athens to apply.

While awaiting their travel

documents, those without m oney

are allowed to stay at a shelter in

central Athens — a facility run by

the Iom and converted from an

abandoned office building —

where the mahours from Iran

stayed in room 108, and the

mahmoods from Iraqi Kurdistan

stayed in room 106.

“It’s going to be a long day,”

Kamal mahmood told his chil-

dren on their last m orning in that

room. They arrived at the Athens

airport with four duffel bags, two

worn suitcases, a stroller and a

grocery bag packed with belong-

ings.

As they waited to check in,

Chrakhan mahmood, 19, scrolled

through facebook, looking at

photos of fighting in Kurdish

areas of Syria, across the border

from Iraq.

“Look,” she said, holding up a

photo of dead bodies.

As far as Kamal mahmood was

concerned, Kurds had always

been in limbo. He didn’t think

war would come to his part of

Iraq. But Syrian refugees, he said,

would probably arrive. That was

just one of the variables. How

would his children adjust? Would

he get his old job back?

“If I could find something for

my children here, I would stay,”

he said. “But I can’t. So maybe

going back is better.”

He held up his phone, like a

seesaw, as if weighing Greece on

one end, Iraqi Kurdistan on the

other.

“It is bad on both sides,” he

said, and soon his family was at

the gate and in the air, arriving at

2:35 a.m. to restart their lives in

Iraqi Kurdistan — a place that,

for now, seemed slightly less bad

than Greece.

[email protected]

elinda labropoulou contributed to

this report.

government data. In September

at the largest island camp —

moria, a former military barracks

— a fire killed a woman from

Afghanistan and led to rioting

and demonstrations, with protest

signs reading, “moria is hell.”

It is at those camps, and at

other, better-equipped facilities

for migrants on the Greek main-

land, where the Iom tries to

spread the word about the possi-

bility of going home.

Some people, based on U.N.

guidelines, are ineligible for the

program; migrants aren’t re-

turned to Syria, Palestinian terri-

tories, Yemen, or other regions or

countries deemed too dangerous.

In Greece, people from those

parts of the world almost always

win asylum anyway. It is the

others — from Afghanistan, Iraq

and Pakistan — who are likelier

come. We are very tired here in

Greece.”

Among E.U. nations, Greece

perhaps best illustrates what

le aves migrants feeling stuck.

The country is the purported

gateway to Europe for those flee-

ing through Turkey; few who

arrive actually want to stay in

Greece. At the height of the conti-

nent’s migration surge in 2015,

asylum seekers who arrived in

Greece quickly moved north,

crossing through Balkan coun-

tries toward wealthier nations

such as Germany and Sweden.

But Greece’s neighbors have

since clamped down, closing

routes that once provided pas-

sageway out of the country. more

than 1 million migrants have

arrived in Greece since 2015.

During that same period,

240,000 have applied for asylum.

one option for Greece is send-

ing migrants back to Turkey. A

6 billion euro deal in 2016 be-

tween the E.U. and Turkey was

supposed to open the door for

massive returns — but it hasn’t

worked out. Vulnerable migrants

still have the right to seek asylum

in Greece, meaning they can stay

in the country during a multiyear

process. Since the deal was

reached, more than 100,000 mi-

grants have arrived from Turkey

to Greece. fewer than 2,000 have

been returned.

Greece’s new conservative gov-

ernment says it intends to step up

pressure on Turkey. Prime minis-

ter Kyriakos mitsotakis says most

of the people now coming to

Greece have “the profile of eco-

nomic migrants, not refugees”

who merit protection.

Whatever their status, the ar-

riving migrants languish in what

is widely viewed as the most fetid

conditions in Europe. Asylum

seekers are housed in tents and

shipping containers on island

centers, surrounded by overflow-

ing garbage and sewage. Advo-

cates say Greece has had plenty of

time to improve the camps but

for migrants, who are given travel
documents, commercial plane
tickets and several hundred eu-
ros in cash — plus, for some,
another 1,500 euros they can use
for job placement or to start
businesses back home.
But the decision to leave also
highlights Europe’s failure to ac-
commodate those who came
seeking refuge or opportunity —
a group that includes the mah-
moods, who opted to return to
the Iraqi region of Kurdistan
even before the conclusion of
their asylum case.
Kamal mahmood slept for two
hours on his last night in Europe,
thinking about the many reasons
they’d come to Greece in the first
place. Their eldest son had died
of leukemia — a loss mahmood
blamed partly on Iraq’s health-
care system. In the aftermath,
mahmood’s wife, heartsick, rare-
ly left their home. Around the
same time, mahmood was de-
moted from manager at the hos-
pital where he worked, because of
what he described as a strained
relationship with the Kurdish
political party that influenced
management decisions.
The family figured Europe
would be a fresh start.
“It was a way to forget the
pain,” mahmood said.
What they hadn’t known was
that their new home in Greece
would be an isolated camp, away
from easy job access, where knife
fights sometimes broke out at
night. once or twice the family
had to relocate their tent outside
the gates for safety.
The children could attend
school, but only in the afternoon,
after the Greek kids had left, in
foreigners-only classrooms that
grouped together many ages and
languages.
returning home, mahmood
ca me to believe, was the one way
his children wouldn’t miss out on
another year of adequate educa-
tion — though he had concerns
about being back in Iraqi Kurdis-
tan, as well.
many of those in the pipeline
to go home, including the mah-
moods, had arrived in Europe
illegally and struggled without
documents.
Sheharyar Sultan, 24, a phar-
macist in Pakistan, found himself
in Greece picking oranges for 20
euros per day.
mamdouh Awad, 24, of moroc-
co, spent the bulk of his time in
Greece at a migrant camp on the
island of Lesbos, where he said
people drank alcohol during win-
ter nights “just to stay warm.”
The mahour family from Iran
twice tried to move farther north
through Europe with fake pass-
ports; they were stopped both
times and then rejected for asy-
lum in Greece. Their 17-year-old
daughter, who’d become a
t heater performer in Athens,
has tattoos and piercings. Their
11 / 2 -year-old son, born in Greece,
has a Western name, Nelson.
They bridled at the idea of re-
turning to a more restrictive
country where they could face
persecution for their atheist be-
liefs.
“When I go b ack to Iran, I don’t
know if I’ll be fired or in prison,”
said Habib mahour, 42, a pony-
tailed construction worker. “But I
know I can’t get papers here. I
prefer to face whatever may

greece from A

Migrants

volunteer

to leave

Greece

Arrivals from Turkey a re again on

the rise, and 31,000 migrants are

being housed in facilities de-

signed for 6,000, according to

has refused to do so, as a way to

deter people from making the

trip.

But deterrence hasn’t worked.

Source: International Organization for Migration THE WASHINGTON POST

Per United Nations guidelines, the IOM does not return people to several

countries and regions, including Syria and Yemen.

The migrants leaving Greece

The countries people are returning to via the International Organization for

Migration’s voluntar y program

Pakistan

26.3%

Iraq

Georgia

25

11.8 8

Algeria

14

Other

Afghanistan

8

Iran

7

P HoTos By MyrTo PAPAdoPoUlos For THe WAsHINgToN PosT

Some families living in refu gee camps have planted vegetables like okra, left, to supplement their diets. Nazzanin Mahour, right, acquired her tattoos in refugee camps in

greece. After trying twice to move farther north in europe, the 17 -year-old and her family decided to return to Iran through a voluntary deportation program.

Mu hammad Zubair, 28, waits for someone to take him to his departure gate at the Athens airport.

BY KEVIN SIEFF

LA MORA, MexicO — The con-
crete foundation for William
Langford’s dream home was fin-
ished. He could picture the view
from the living room window,
over the foothills of the Sierra
madre and onto the tiny village
where he’d been raised, a colony
of American mormons in the So-
noran desert.
This week, he stopped con-
struction. for Langford and many
of his neighbors here, the massa-
cre of nine women and children
on monday has prompted exis-
tential questions about La mora’s
future. maybe it was proof that
their decades-old community of
fundamentalist mormons should
no longer exist, they thought —

that they were no longer welcome

in mexico.

“It won’t be easy to walk away

from here,” Langford said outside

the funeral Thursday of rhonita

miller and her four children.

“This is our home. But you need to

do what you need to do to stay

safe.”

for generations, the several

hundred residents of La mora

lived safely here in northern mex-

ico, even as the presence of drug

cartels around them grew, even-

tually outnumbering the police

and soldiers. They kept their

doors unlocked. They let their

children play unattended. The

town felt like their own secret, a

place they would never leave.

The bilingual U.S.-mexican cit-

izens of La mora became activists

here. They became some of the

region’s most prominent farmers.

They ran for public office.

“Until this week, I thought I

would die here,” s aid Loretta mill-

er, 53, rhonita’s mother-in-law.

“Now I don’t feel safe.”

A communal decision to give

up on mexico would reflect the

specific calculus of one of the

country’s most isolated and un-

usual communities. Ye t it would

also reflect mexico’s descent into

mass violence — a canary in the

coal mine, a community that has

survived through dark days here

but saw the present moment as

much darker.

In the hours after the commu-

nity recovered the bodies of the

three mothers and six children

shot to death in a succession of

attacks outside town on monday

— several charred after their vehi-

cle was set on fire — some families

began huddled conversations

about leaving.

David Langford, whose wife,

Dawna, and two children were

killed, spoke of buying property

in the United States.

Joe Darger, whose daughter

had married into the La mora

community, told her that he no

longer felt safe visiting her here.

His son-in-law agreed. “Home

sweet home, but not so sweet

anymore,” he told Darger.

“That innocence is broken,”

Darger said. “When you don’t feel

safe, that’s your primary need as a

human being.”

But within the community, a

division has emerged between

those ready to leave and those

who want to stay and fight for

justice. That rift was on display

during some of Thursday’s funer-

al eulogies.

“La mora i sn’t t he best place for

us to live. It’s the only place,” s aid

Adrian LeBaron, rhonita’s father.

He spoke literally and meta-

phorically about the dirt road

where his daughter was killed,

urging the community to remain.

“That road should become the

safest place for us to cross,” he

said. “So that we are free.”

In recent years, the communi-

ty’s young have increasingly left

to work in the United States,

many in oil and gas in North

Dakota. Young men such as Wil-

liam Langford used their Ameri-

can salaries to build large, subur-

ban-style homes in La mora’s

foothills.

But when they came back to

visit, they noticed that the town

was becoming more tense. They

were accustomed to cartel check-

points, which they passed easily,

as soon as the armed cartel mem-

bers recognized them. But those

checkpoints grew more threaten-

ing, with more unfamiliar men.

“more heated,” William Lang-

ford said. “We were used to them

just leaving us alone. But that was

changing.”

As he spoke, another member

of the family, Adam Langford,

vehemently disagreed with Wil-

liam’s calculus.

“I’m not leaving,” he said.

“What can you do? Do you run?

That doesn’t fix anything.”

Adam Langford, who has twice

served as mayor of the municipal-

ity, said the community of La

mora could help push for a solu-

tion to the region’s violence. He is

acutely aware that because the

victims of the tragedy were Amer-

ican, the attack is receiving a

disproportionate amount of at-

tention — a spotlight on which he

would like to capitalize.

“With all this attention on us,

maybe that will pressure the mex-

ican government to do some-

thing,” he said.

But as the eulogies continued

into Thursday evening, services

protected by mexico’s national

guard, the commitment to stay in

La mora was overshadowed by a

pervasive sense of fear.

When Corina LeBaron began

to eulogize rhonita miller, her

sister, she acknowledged how dif-

ficult it was for the mourners to

show up.

“Thank you for coming,” she

said. “I know it was scary to

come.”

k [email protected]

After massacre, Mormons of La Mora weigh whether to remain in Mexico

Killings prompt huddled

debates about the future