West Africa to Greece via Iran: Two football players get their big chance, are detained through no fault of their own, and escape the harrowing ordeal.
Written by: The Journeys Project
Jean and Jerome came together in Greece. Though their country of origin is in West Africa, they never met in their home country. They met halfway, in Iran. While there are many West Africans in Greece, we are withholding their specific country of origin. We begin with Jean's interview.
Jean: "I arrived here in September of 2016. I had big problems back home. Family problems. My mother died when I was very young. My dad got married again, and then he died. My stepmother wanted to kill me. She killed my twin sister. My sister got breast surgery, and my stepmother gave her poison instead of medicine after her surgery."
Jean showed me pictures of his sister after her surgery. She is almost naked. She does look exactly like him.
"My stepmother accused me and took me to the police—she had friends there. And they put me in jail. She did all this because she wanted all of my father's money. I stayed in jail for a month and a half, and then I called a friend to bail me out. It's not my friend who paid. It was an adult whom I didn't know. When I got out of jail, it was the first time I saw him [the adult]. He told me I should leave the country. He paid for everything. He gave me a passport and a two-month visa. He arranged my whole trip to Iran. He gave me some money to stay in a hotel. He said I could play football there and have a good life.
"When I arrived in Tehran, I looked for football clubs. I found a Turkish man who helped me play for an Iranian team and paid for a hotel room for me. That's where Jerome and I met. We became good friends because we were the only ones from our country of origin."
I asked Jerome to tell me about what happened that led him to meet Jean in Iran. I told them that once I knew Jerome's past, they could then tell me together how they made it to Greece, as they had done the trip together.
Jerome: "I didn't have a mother either, and in 2008 my father died during the coup because he was a policeman. Militias killed him, and then they threatened the rest of our family. I have many brothers, but I don't know where they are now. We lost contact because each of us had to flee. One of them is maybe in Tunisia, but I'm not sure. I think one of my sisters is in Germany.
"We all tried to leave very quickly because we weren't safe without our father protecting us. My oldest sister took care of dividing the inheritance. We had a lot of cash in the house. My sister gave €3,500–4,000 (about $4,000 - $4,500) to each one of us depending on our age.
"Between 2011 and 2016, I was always traveling between Mali and Senegal with my national identity card. I was making money by playing football here and there and winning games—about 1 million CFA [about $1,600] per game every month. I was saving up to go to Europe.
"I was told that from Iran I could easily go to Europe. A friend helped me get a passport and tourist visa for €2,500. I had to pay him €1,200 extra for my flight ticket. When I arrived in Iran, I met a Turkish man who said he would help me play football for the Iranian team. I told him I wasn't in Iran to play football and that I wanted to leave. He said that if I played for the team, I would be able to get legal papers in Iran and go with them to Europe easily. I said okay. And he asked me for €1,700 to arrange for the hotel and bus. I gave him the money. All my money I stored in a little pannier that I always kept with me except to play football."
On his phone, Jerome showed me pictures and videos of him playing with Jean, other Africans, and Iranians. "The Turkish man asked for our passports to register us at the immigration center and start the process for us to get legal papers—that's what he said. We did. We all trusted him. All was going well.
"After a month, the Turkish man suddenly told us we had to change hotels. We learned later that he hadn't paid the hotel and owed the owner $15,000. He had been keeping all of the money we gave him at the beginning. We got in a van, and he took us to a village called Karaj. The hotel where we were living was very bad, and we hated living there. Tensions were rising.
"During the weekend, the neighbors called the cops and said there were illegal migrants in the hotel. The cops came and asked for our passports. We told them to speak to our Turkish coach as he had them all. They called him. The Iranian police put us in a van."
Jean showed a video of them in the van and of the Iranian "white men" who arrested them.
Jean: "They met the Turkish man and saw our passports. But they also saw that our visas had expired. They didn't give us back our passports. They took us to a small sort of detention center. We stayed there for 45 days. They took our clothes and forced us to wear 'tatana zaha ['blue suit' in Farsi]. They treated us very badly, like slaves. It was terrible. We became very close to a man from Cameroon. We became very good friends." Jerome called him "mon vieux" or "my old man" in French, an affectionate nickname for French Africans.
"He had given us the number of another West African man that owed him a lot of money, he said, in case we left the jail and wanted to go to Turkey. The Iranians asked us for money to let us out. But after two months, they saw we had no money, and they got us out anyway. They threw us at the border between Turkey and Iran. We were with other Africans, Syrians, and Afghans. We were 11. They left us there at the border without anything. It was snowing. We walked for ten days. A guy from Tanzania died of the cold."
Jean showed me videos of Jerome and him walking through the snowy mountains towards Turkey. "It was so cold, so long, so difficult." He showed me his cut and bruised feet.
Jerome: "When we reached a small village in Turkey. We begged villagers to take us in. They asked for money, but they saw we had nothing and pitied us. Once we had rested a little, we called the Senegalese smuggler that our Old Man from Cameroon told us to call if we needed to get to Istanbul. He arranged for our trip to Istanbul and took us into his house there. He introduced us to a Turkish man there who employed us to work 'kabutchabu' [construction work in Turkish] from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day. After three weeks, we had enough money to go to Greece.
📝 This article was originally published in a collection of biographies by the Henry J. Leir Institute at The Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy and Tufts University.
You can Download the original collection below ⬇️