Journalists cannot walk into an asylum seekers’ centre unexpectedly to see what really happens here, who lives there and what the atmosphere is like. However, every now and then there is an open day: you can talk to the selected refugees and get an information story. If you want to know the real story, you have to be creative, like our reporter was at AZC Budel in the Netherlands.
” I Had to Pay a Few Thousand Euros and so I was Allowed to Hang Under and Behind Several Trucks”
So the reporter waited with a frikadel and a Coke Zero on a drizzly autumn day in a new small eatery located at the railway station in Maarheeze. The little joint is a half-hour walk from the asylum seekers’ centre in Budel. Several residents of the infamous AZC come here every day. On this chilly Tuesday, Mohammed, a 19-year-old Syrian who recently exhausted all legal remedies and received a Dutch residence permit, stands in the chip shop and crams a hot shoarma dish into his Nike backpack. He is wearing a clean black hoody and jeans with holes. The Syrian now lives with some friends in a rented family home in Amersfoort, which has been assigned to him.
Before this, he had lived in the AZC in Budel for a few years while his procedure was ongoing. Yesterday, his uncle arrived in Budel, whom he met only once before in Turkey. The young migrant has an extra phone left and comes to give it to his uncle. “Do you know when the bus to the asylum seekers’ centre runs?” the boy asks one of the cooks who is just wiping his hands on his apron. “They no longer drive past the AZC,” replies the owner of the eatery. The reporter sees her chance and offers a lift to the AZC in exchange for being allowed inside. The Syrian thinks it is a great plan: it is still raining outside. Besides, he enjoys giving a tour of the centre where he has spent a long time and takes his new task dead serious. “Say you’re my coach,” he suggests as he sits in the front of the car with his rucksack on his lap.
On the way to Budel, the boy explains how he came to the Netherlands. “I had been living in Turkey for more than 10 years, well before the war in Syria broke out. There I was saving for the crossing. I had to pay a few thousand euros and so I was allowed to hang under and behind several trucks.” With his hands, he makes a gesture as if hanging under a car and holding something above his head to avoid clattering on the highway. “At car parks, I kept having to switch trucks. Until I finally arrived in the Netherlands.”
Sounds like a very unsafe journey. Why didn’t he just take a plane from Istanbul to Amsterdam? Then he would be at the same destination for less than 200 euros, without having to risk his life? The boy shakes his head. “That’s not possible,” he explains. “If I fly from Istanbul to the Netherlands, my passport says I am from Turkey and Turkish because that’s where I lived for 10 years. Then I am an illegal refugee and eventually I have to go back to Turkey where I came from.” But, it’s safe there, right? The boy laughs. “There you earn five euros a day. Now I work in the Kruidvat warehouse for 15 euros an hour, you know.”
“300 to 350 New People Come in Here Every Day”
We park in the soggy grass next to a row of other cars parked in front of the AZC in Budel and walk to the entrance where we are met by a security guard who checks whether we can enter. Without any hesitation, Mohammed abruptly takes the floor: “I have an appointment here today with my uncle. And this is my coach, Mariska,” he says, nodding at the reporter. A lady from reception looks up the appointment and calls Mohammed’s uncle to come and pick us up. Meanwhile, we have time to question the guard. He doesn’t remember Mohammed; even though he has lived here for over a year. “Over 300 to 350 new people come in here every day. I hardly know anyone. So many new faces,” the guard clarifies. He sighs deeply. “It’s getting worse and worse. Lately, even Poles and Belgians have been reporting here to seek asylum.” What? Fellow Europeans, surely they can just come here. “Yes, they must want free shelter and food,” the guard gushes. “They travel to Ukraine first and then they come here through the war zone without passports and pretend to be refugees from Ukraine. Hoping for a year of free shelter and then a free house and benefits. Incredible. And what do the politicians do? Who presses his moustache, resigns and leaves us here with the mess.”
Once the receptionist has checked the passports of Mohammed and the reporter, the Syrian’s uncle approaches at his leisure. As if he happened to stroll past the counter. He has only been here for one day but utter boredom and aimlessness already seem to radiate from his body language. When he sees his nephew, a big smile appears on the blank face.
They give each other a big hug and Mohammed removes the crumpled dish of shoarma from his rucksack and generously gives it to his relative.
Then the three stroll deafly through the huge compound along a path of wet sand, mud and puddles of water.
COA has been hosting up to ,500 asylum seekers on the site of the former Nassau-Dietz Barracks in Budel since 2014. AZC Budel is the largest asylum seekers’ centre in the Netherlands after Ter Apel. It is also one of the most notorious asylum seekers’ centres in the Netherlands.
“We Only Brought Summer Clothes”
Today, it looks quiet on the site. Workers are using cranes to remove old buildings that will soon be replaced by new homes. Iron fences are everywhere in front of the buildings being renovated. Although it has finally stopped raining, the brightly coloured playgrounds look childless. Only a few groups of mostly African young men hang around by the playground equipment. “There’s the kitchen,” Mohammed shouts enthusiastically and walks towards a 1970s building. In the large soup kitchen stands a young African couple: a man with dreadlocks in shorts with a T-shirt and a slim woman wearing a summer dress. They are freezing cold. “We only brought summer clothes,” the African man explains while his wife takes exotic vegetables out of a white bag to cut them up.” They have a toddler sleeping in their room. Meanwhile, the parents are preparing an African dish together. “We didn’t think at all that it was so cold here,” says the man as he rubs his arms warm with his hands.
Then Mohammed shows another 1970s building, where there is a large shower room similar to a dingy shower block of a cheap French campsite from the 1990s. White budget tiles on the walls, budget sinks hang in a long row. An old squeegee, to wipe the brown and beige mottled tile floor dry, stands patiently waiting to be used. Rust spots and mould stains mar the extinct shower stalls. The laundry room, where dozens of Miele washing machines stand in two rows facing each other with tumble dryers on each one, is also lonely deserted. The Syrian hurries to the next building, where he once stayed. In one of the rooms, a man with a big bunch of curly hair and a thick moustache and his hands tucked into blue plastic gloves is cleaning his room so thoroughly that it seems he fears the plague has broken out again. The floor of the small room has turned into a baby pool.
The man stands in a layer of over three inches of water with bleach, a puddle covering the entire room floor. All belongings have been moved to safety: a couple of backpacks lie on the two narrow single beds, a cheap hand sweeper and tin can on a plastic dustbin and a translucent white bag hangs from the wooden coat rack. While dancing, he scrubs the floor with a squeegee. Everything he seems to want to disinfect meticulously. In the next building is a large hall with a round table near the window and worn-out chairs. “When people are angry because they don’t get a permit, for example, residents start smashing these chairs,” Mohammed explains, pointing to the damage to the cheap furniture. “They can sometimes really get rowdy, the residents who are not allowed to stay in the Netherlands.”
When passing asylum seekers look strangely at the blonde reporter, Mohammed suggests going to his uncle’s room. Six Syrians live there. The room is about 20 square metres.
Three Tall Iron Lockers
On the floor is a green linoleum floor often used in schools. Two narrow bunk beds and two narrow single beds stand against the walls with thin blue blankets on them. The curtains and plastic chairs in front of the small table by the window are also blue. On one side of the room are three tall iron lockers with a simple padlock attached and on the other side three more. “You have to put everything of value in these,” Mohammed warns. “Anything you leave lying around, you lose. They really do steal everything.”
His uncle puts the shoarma dish, which has cooled by now, under his chair and walks to the windowsill by the window. There, he turns on the kettle and meanwhile he ladles some instant coffee into cups. Another man grabs a pack of stroopwafels and hands them out. He is in his 20s, wearing a light-coloured hoody and comfortable jogging trousers. “Sorry,” he excuses himself. “I’ve only just woken up.” It is almost 3PM. “We all don’t get up here until around 2 or 3 in the afternoon,” the twenty-something says in a tone as if he has yet to wake up. “There is nothing to do here anyway, why should we get up? We go to bed late and sleep as long as possible to kill time.”
Like Mohammed, the uncle and the twenty-something appear to be Syrians who have lived in Turkey well before the war, more than a decade. The other roomers who are ‘officially’ from Syria also emigrated to Turkey well before the war started in Syria. Here, they saved up for the trip to the Netherlands. Mohammed’s uncle fled by boat to Greece and travelled to the Netherlands from there. The journey to the Netherlands cost the uncle €8,000. Why didn’t he take his wife and children with him? “That is too expensive and most importantly, the journey is too dangerous for them,” he said.
The journey from the Middle East to the West is apparently more dangerous than the war zone itself from which they are escaping. “Yes, definitely”.
“I went via the Balkans. I had to climb two flights of stairs over a high fence in Hungary,” the twenty-something explains. All three of us guess how much the young Syrian had to pay to the people smugglers. We all guess too low. “No, 12 000 euros in total, for everything,” the young man sighs. “That’s a lot, but my family helped me. I would like to study here, marketing or something. In the West, I have more opportunities.”
Shrugs and Wasted Time
He, like Mohammed’s uncle and his roommates, does not speak English, German, French or Dutch. Only Arabic. Not useful when you start building a life in the Netherlands where the native population speaks virtually no Arabic, you might think. Wouldn’t it be wiser to spend this time usefully, learning Dutch and/or English, for example, the reporter asks. Then the men could get straight to work when they get a residence permit in a year’s time. Now the roommates only speak the language of the Middle East; of course, you cannot easily find a good job that way. The residents look at the reporter in deadly boredom as Mohammed translates the question for the immigrants. One shrugs his shoulders. The other sighs once and looks into his cup of coffee. “You are six Syrians in one room. Motivate each other! Get up on time every day together, start learning for six hours a day. Examine each other, encourage each other. Make one of you the mentor.” Again, the two residents sighed and looked around the room with a blank stare.
“I also completely wasted my time when I was here for over a year,” Mohammed starts to motivate the men too. “I was in bed every night after midnight and slept until deep in the afternoon. I wasn’t doing anything, in retrospect. Bits of sleeping, getting bored. Whereas I could have just used that year to learn Dutch.”
Sleepily, the young man who wants to study marketing stumbles to the kettle to make another cup of coffee. The boy with residence permit continues his story drily. “I only started learning Dutch after I got my residence permit a year later. I could do nothing for another year, just learn the language. If I hadn’t wasted my time here, I could have started working and earning money right away.”
The boy who wants to study marketing sits down with his fresh cup of coffee in his hand. “Yes, there is something like a library here where we can take Dutch classes and there are textbooks,” he suggests. He has already lost a lot of time. In Turkey, he spent years in prison. “For nothing. It’s so corrupt there,” he claims. “That’s what’s so nice about the Netherlands. There is no corruption here. Everything is done fairly.”
The reporter laughs. “Surely there is corruption everywhere, only here it is perhaps less visible.” The Syrians look suspicious as Mohammed translates the words into Arabic. “Tell me, how did I get in here? Honestly, as a journalist? Or as Mohammed’s so-called coach?”
The men roar with laughter. They give the reporter a boxing hand. “You are one of us,” they laugh.
This article was originally published in Dutch in quarterly magazine Epoque’s Spring 2024 issue.
