Hostile welcome for migrants after long journey to promised land in Germany

Maten Amad, a 21-year-old former video game streamer from Duhok in Iraqi Kurdistan, counts himself as one of the lucky ones. Unlike the thousands of other migrants still trapped on the Belarusian side of the Polish border, he managed to cross over into the promised land; was able to set foot at last on EU soil.

He did not waste a moment, immediately pressing on to Germany. He has found refuge in the small town of Eisenhüttenstadt, the state of Brandenburg’s primary hub for newly arrived asylum seekers.

Over the past three months 9,329 migrants, chiefly from the Middle East and north Africa, have faced down starvation, hypothermia and violent Belarusian soldiers on the dangerous new route from Minsk to Germany.

  About 1,500 have completed the journey over the past fortnight alone and the authorities estimate that another hundred or so are arriving every day.

A surge of migrants trying to cross the border is expected tomorrow after rumours began circulating that Germany would be sending buses to collect them, with Poland’s permission. Stanislaw Zaryn, a spokesman for the Polish security services, denied the “dangerous” rumours, which he said were started by those hoping to encourage migrants to storm the border.

These numbers are in no way comparable to the 1.2 million people who headed for Germany during the 2015 migration crisis, but they are large enough to have rattled right-wing groups and even the union representing German border guards, which has warned that history could repeat itself without checkpoints on the German-Polish border.

Horst Seehofer, 72, Germany’s interior minister, has accused Russia and Turkey of deliberately using the migrants to “destabilise the West”.

Far-right leaders are seeking to capitalise on the crisis. In the border town of Guben, ten miles south of the migrant reception centre in Eisenhüttenstadt, police had to break up a 50-strong “citizens’ militia” armed with machetes and bayonets.

On Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, far-right groups warn of “an army of Islamists who will kill us all”.

Amad, wearing a shiny black puffer jacket over a Nike tracksuit and chain jewellery, looks more like a rapper than a murderous Islamist, but he already has grey hairs on his head despite his youth. “There has been war ever since I was little,” he said.

In his native country Amad’s video game streams attracted 60,000 Instagram followers, but he sold the account to help him finance his long-held dream of a better life in Germany. With word spreading that Belarus was paving an easy path to the Polish border, Amad’s father chipped in £1,500 for a flight from Istanbul to Minsk, and the young man’s odyssey got under way.

He spent two nights in an old hotel in Minsk, then he and 24 others — Belarusians, Arabs and Kurds — were taken by bus to a spot next to the Polish border and abandoned there. Refused entry at the Polish border crossing, he spent the next three nights sleeping rough in the dark forest, hungry and terrified.

 “It was so difficult,” he said. “We saw our deaths. There was no food and it was very cold. We wanted to return [to Minsk] because we were dying of hunger.”

Instead he was pushed away by Belarusian soldiers, who beat him with their rifle butts and forced him back towards the Polish border fence. This time, however, he was able to slip across under cover of darkness. From there it was another 400 miles to the Poland-Germany border, but Amad had no complaints.

“I’m very happy to be here,” Amad said. “I love Germany so much. People here have rights and can earn a lot of money. If I had been here before, I could have been a footballer. Now, I want to study.”

Eisenhüttenstadt, formerly known as Stalinstadt, is a model east German town; clean, quiet, and full of beautiful but gradually emptying Soviet-style housing blocks. Its population has halved since the fall of the Berlin wall but now it is taking in so many arrivals that a tent village has been erected at the reception centre to accommodate them all.

Despite the hardships and the less-than-luxurious quarters, Amad and a new friend Narwan, 23, another Iraqi Kurd who took the Belarus route, are urging their friends to follow them. But not all the new arrivals feel the same way: Abdul Harraq, who says he is 26 but looks much younger, arrived in Germany only a few days ago but already wants to go home.

He flew from Saudi Arabia via Qatar to Istanbul and then on to Minsk. He said he had not expected things to be so tough in Europe: he was knocked back and forth between the Polish and Belarusian sides “like ping-pong”, then finally chased across the border by the Belarusian guards screaming at him: “Go”. From there he walked 14 hours a day for seven days, his white socks seeped through with blood, to reach Germany.

He refused to quarantine at the migrant centre, where a gruff guard at the gate told him bluntly: “no quarantine, no entry”. He stormed off to find the police, thinking they might help him get home to Jeddah, but in vain.

Harraq said he was fed up with the treatment he had received in Germany. His phone was taken by the authorities and he was given “only bread rolls” to eat. He complains about the way the locals look at him, and he misses mosques and the sound of the call to prayer.

 “It is nice to visit, they have nice cars, but I don’t want to live here,” he said. “The people are rude. I thought it would be like paradise.”