The Game on the closed Balkan Route

The Balkan Route was declared closed in 2016 after that European States signed a deal with Turkey to stop those people coming to Greece. During the previous year around 1 million refugees flooded into Europe through Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary and Croatia. The deal was signed and the migrants’ routes and media focus shifted to Mediterranean sea, while the Balkans and the people stuck along European borders disappeared on the media headlines. According to the agency Frontex, in 2016 the number of migrants on the Balkan Route dropped to just 122.779 but thousands are still forbidden to reach their destination in the Western Europe due to border patrols.

But who are those still trapped there? How is their daily life? Which are their desires and hopes? “In Serbia there are several camps for refugees which are ruled by the government and few other organizations” wrote Valentina, a young Italian who spent there three months volunteering in a structure for refugees. Most of the people she met were Afghans who left their country to get to Western Europe. Most of them are young men but there are families too. Nevertheless, everyone has just one dream and it is simply called Europe.

“Some of the guys told me they tried and tried to play The Game but each time they were pushed back by the border patrols” Valentina recalled, explaining what The Game is: “youngsters pay the smugglers in order to show them a hidden way to the borders and through the forests they try to enter in Hungary or Croatia.” Most of them are caught by the police, often beaten and then are sent back to the starting point. It’s a kind of continue cat-and-mouse game between the migrants and the policemen. “In Afghanistan my life is in danger and so I can’t go back. I don’t care about violence and expulsion. I just want to go on” Samiullah explained briefly and clearly to Valentina why several times he joined The Game.

During the time spent at the “Integration House for vulnerable categories of refugees” ruled by JRS (Jesuit Refugee Service Southeast Europe), Valentina listened to several stories of young migrants as Samiullah, stuck in Belgrade for months or years. First in the barracks, empty buildings close to the main station squatted by the refugees, then allocated in the seventeen reception centres provided by the Serbian government and managed by the NGOs. Western and Serbian volunteers join associations and groups, like No name Kitchen, Miksalište, InfoPark, PIN, BelgrAid to help and to support the refugees, providing clothes, cooking meals, teaching English. Those activities can help to survive but to live means something else: for most of the migrants it means Europe. But Serbia is not Europe yet and The Game is there to be played.