Fight or Flight; Six years on from the 2015 refugee and migrant crisis

After arriving in Belgrade, I shared a train with groups of refugees up to the Serbo-Croat border, before crossing on foot to a town called Tovarnik which had become something of a bottleneck. Thousands of people had crossed into Croatia, and were waiting for transport—trains and buses—to carry them across the country and further into the EU. Travelling by train through Serbia, I approached groups of people and asked if they would allow me to travel with them, and document part of their journey. The atmosphere was serious, but convivial. People shared out food and offered it to fellow travellers as they would have done were they voyaging in easier times, as when I travelled by train to Iran in 2008. One of the first things people had done was to buy a local SIM card to stay in touch with friends and family, and to navigate. WhatsApp groups pinged with the latest news of the best routes to take, and the people I travelled with were glued to Google Maps as the train crawled north. When I joined them, I didn’t know exactly where the journey would take me, and so followed their routes and plans. It was a long night, crossing the border and trudging through fields, until eventually resting at dawn in Croatia, leaning against our bags on the roadside.

During my time living and working in Africa I had often covered stories where huge numbers of people had been forced to abandon their homes and their livelihoods because of violent upheavals; in Libya, DR Congo, Burundi, and Somalia. Yet I was arriving in these places because of these conflicts, and so while I would always have an abstract idea of what they were leaving behind—their homes and way of life—it was rarely places I knew of in peacetime. This time, it was different.

I had spent several months in Syria in 2009-10, a year before the Arab Spring gripped the region. After a month of travelling around the country, I lived in the capital for two months, studying Arabic at the University of Damascus and soaking up the atmosphere of Syrian society. My stay was brief, but it was enough to form bonds and friendships, and when it was time to carry on my journey towards Kenya, I was sure I would return to this hospitable country and its rich culture. (It never occurred to me that that return would be to cover the conflict there, witnessing unimaginable violence in Aleppo in 2012.) That summer of 2015, in contrast to my time documenting similar events across Africa, I had a much more concrete sense of what had been left behind by the people I met — what their lives looked like before being packed into a backpack.

Arriving in Tovarnik the authorities were not interested in any sort of confrontation but simply wanted to move the migrants and refugees on. It was well understood that the vast majority had no interest in remaining in Croatia, this was a transit country, and they wanted to travel on towards France, Germany or Sweden, in many cases reuniting families. Contrary to the scenes of violence on other borders, the police in Tovarnik were largely engaged in mass crowd control, as buses and trains were organised so the new arrivals could continue their journeys further north. The overall sense was one of dogged determination and exhaustion on both sides, rather than confrontation or violence. Solidarity, too, was in evidence, with volunteers handing out food and distributing information. Later, on my return to Berlin, I would see signs hung out of apartments declaring “refugees welcome”.

However, that sense of solidarity was by no means uniform across the continent, and the choice of language quickly became an incredibly important factor as the crisis continued to unfold amid increasing numbers of new arrivals. Right-wing politicians and press began to drive narratives that perpetuated damaging stereotypes about refugees and migrants, seemingly unable to distinguish between these people who had been forced to leave their homes because of conflict and civil war, with underlying concerns around immigration.

Photography is an incredibly powerful tool in the development of any narrative and Tovarnik quickly filled up with photographers for the newswires like Reuters and AP. An underlying principle when I work is that I try to make pictures only if they can add something to the story. With hundreds of images pouring out of the region showing the vastness of the situation that was rapidly sweeping Europe, and the flashpoints of confrontation or desperation, I did not feel the need to add to this.

Instead, I began delving into the stories of individuals — interviewing them about what, and why, they left, and what this journey meant for them — their words accompanying portraits, families, couples, or as individuals. Published in the New Republic, I hoped to portray who these people are, and did not reduce them to a mass group, simply labelled refugees or migrants instead of their own identities of teachers, engineers, fathers, or mothers.