In a dusty field that straddles the Greek-Macedonian border, quite where one country ends and the other begins is not entirely clear.
But several Macedonian soldiers in the area are very certain. “Get back,” one shouts through the darkness, herding hundreds of refugees a couple of metres further south from where they stood a moment ago. “Get back to the Greek border.”
The crowds shuffle briefly backwards, and the soldiers seem satisfied. “Please,” a Syrian mother calls back, a toddler in her arms. “We are a family. Where should we go now?”
It is a filthy spot, filled with the detritus of past travellers. Surrounded by farmland, the only lighting comes from a nearby train-track, and the only bedding is the sand the woman stands on.
“You must sleep here,” comes the Macedonian’s reply.
It is an alarming order – not just for these refugees, who have walked for 40 miles to reach this point, but for the people of the country they have just crossed. Greece has received nearly 80,000 refugees in its islands so far this year, a record figure that has seen it overtake Italy as the primary migrant gateway to Europe.
Migrants are arriving in such high numbers by dinghy from Turkey that the authorities – already battling an economic crisis – cannot feed, house, or process their paperwork fast enough, leading to bottlenecks on the Greek islands.
One factor helping relieve the pressure was the constant stream of refugees out the other side of Greece, near the northern border town of Idomeni, and into Macedonia. But in the past fortnight, the Macedonian government has begun to regulate the flow.
Until a few days ago the route had been blocked for a whole week – raising the spectre of a refugee bottleneck at both ends of Greece, at a time when the country is struggling to support its own citizens, let alone a record wave of refugees.
“At a certain point there were more than 2,000 waiting there,” says Stathis Kyroussis, head of mission for MSF, one of the few aid groups helping migrants in this remote area. “People started getting angry, and big groups of two or three hundred tried to force their way through.” By his account, Macedonian soldiers had to use their truncheons to maintain order, and fired in the air to keep people back.
“This fact of sealing the border,” says Kyroussis, “coupled with the fact that the flows from the island have really exploded, means that we’ve had many more people coming to Idomeni, and not many passing through.”
The crisis is ironically due to a decision that has had a more positive effect within Macedonia itself. The police station in the first Macedonian town after the border recently began issuing migrants with what amounts to three-day transit visas – essentially legalising their stay, and allowing them to use public transport to reach Serbia, the country’s northern neighbour. But after that decision led to long queues outside the police station, soldiers were posted to the border to shift the bottlenecks to the Greek side.
On the night the Guardian visits, a few groups are let through, but soldiers tell the majority that they will have to wait until daybreak to move. Despite the gentle croaks of nearby frogs, and the familiar clicking of crickets, the mood is tense.
An Eritrean woman cries to be let through. Every so often the crowds edge forward, trying to inch the invisible border a few steps further north, and a soldier meets them with a raised truncheon and a bark. “Go back,” he shouts. “If we don’t have silence, we’ll have a problem.”
One of the Macedonians seemingly sees the border in just as fluid terms as the migrants, and goes to drink from a tap on the Greek side. “Sabr,” he says to a lawyer from Aleppo, using the Arabic word for patience. “You Muslims know what that means, right?”
For the lawyer, a Stetson-wearing man called Tariq, it is hardly his worst run-in with an army. Tariq says he was arrested four times by men working for Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator. Then he points at his scarred, discoloured arms.
“You see this?” he asks. “The bombs of Bashar al-Assad did this.” The prospect of a long wait at the Macedonian border, even after a 40-mile walk to get there, is by contrast met with a shrug.
Squatting in the gloam a few metres away, Nour, a teenage student from Syria, is similarly phlegmatic. “We will wait until they let us in,” he smiles, waiting with his sister Lana. “It’s nothing to us. It’s been a tough trip, and we’re strong.”
He’s still in his teens, but he looks and has the detached perspective of someone far older. “You know Tupac? You know his song ‘Thug Life’? That’s us right now,” he laughs. “We’re living the Thug Life – we have sleeping bags, and we sleep on the floor.”
For Syrians fleeing a brutal war, the experience of navigating a country nearing economic collapse has been difficult, but not the worst of their problems. The prospect of crossing Hungary later in their trek, where politicians want to build a wall to stop them, makes them more fearful than anything in Greece.
But the Greek crisis nevertheless affects them disproportionately. Many try not to carry too much cash to Greece – in case they’re robbed, or they lose it in the sea crossing – and so rely on international money transfers to fund their onward journey.
The prospect of a banking collapse recently led the wire company Western Union to ban foreigners without Greek bank accounts from using their services.
“We were really out of money,” says Nour, of the moment when Western Union stopped working, and a week on the streets of Athens seemed likely. “We thought we’d be sleeping outside.” Only the sudden re-discovery of a long-lost €100 note, hidden in the folds of a wallet, helped his group find a cheap hotel.
Herein lies an irony, according to another Syrian waiting at the border. For all the talk of refugees being a strain on Greece in its hour of need, Hamza, a 25-year-old English literature student, argues the migrants collectively offer a vital injection of new cash into the economy at a time when most Greeks aren’t spending much.
“We bring foreign money into Greece,” he says, the lights of Macedonian windmills twinkling over his shoulder in the distance. “Every day a thousand people arrive from Syria and Iraq and they all probably spend 200 dollars here in total – and that’s a lot of money.”
There is something to his claims – many are spending their life savings to get to the countries of Europe. But sitting in limbo between two of them, Hamza says he doesn’t mind because he has lost his own. “Someone without their own country,” he says, as he gets ready to sleep, “hasn’t got anything to lose.”
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