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Obviously we can't live without borders. Mankind hasn't reached that point yet.
Borders divide different worlds, different countries, sometimes enemies.
Borders secure the peace.
This, for me, is one of the most
important borders of the European Union.
In the last year, tens of thousands of Syrian refugees have attempted the precarious journey to Europe looking for asylum.
This is the story of three of them
It's a smuggler.
How is the route looking?
Is it any good?
There is a route
How much did we discuss?
It was 500.
He says I will get you there safely. Is there a safe road?
Only God can provide that.
Either you make it, you get caught,
you get beaten up, or you die.
It seems we have left one war to enter another.
Bulgaria has ssen a huge increase in Syrian refugees reaching its border with Turkey ever
since neighbouring Greece step up security at its border a year ago.
To cope with its own unprecedented influx, Bulgaria has hastily opened several makeshift
reception centres such as this disused army barracks at Harmanli.
I was granted access just before Christmas.
For most of the time, the only official presence I see is to stop people leaving.
The camp commandant makes a rare appearance to sign in the latest new arrival: a woman with four children.
From there, they are left to fend for themselves.
She's scared. She's alone with four kids, and there isn't space here.
May God protect her.
Sipan, himself a Syrian refugee, takes her off to find somewhere to sleep.
They're saying there are no places here.
There are one, two, three, four rooms here.
Four or five families are sharing each room, there's no place for them.
I don't know what we're going to do.
The tents are all on the ground. The trailers are full.
We looked everywhere, there's no room,
and she's still downstairs.
This is a disaster.
They have to try another building on the other side of the complex.
Sipan and new arrival leave the building and walk off
All the time there are new refugees arriving here,
and there are now more than 1,000 to 1,200 people even though spaces are limited.
Ivan is a local Bulgarian journalist who has taken the plight of the Syrians to heart.
The local camp adminstrators
are forced to accommodate them in tents, in inhumane conditions.
I don't understand when all of this going to stop.
Why do they continue bringing them here
when the living conditions are not suitable?
In the 21st century they are having to keep warm
by burning wood in a falling-down tent with no clean water
for basic hygiene of their children.
This is Yasmin. She has been here for two months now, separated from her husband, heavily
pregnant and alone with her four year old son.
I'm all alone here.
I have to look after my son on my own,
and also the baby in my womb.
I'm in my final month,
and I don't know what's going to happen to us.
Where is your husband?
Istanbul. He's waiting to for the road to open.
He has tried to cross the Bulgaria-Turkey border
three times and they've sent him back.
I'm ready to do anything for them.
I'll try the border however many times it takes.
Look, this is what I carry when I head to the forest.
Spare socks for when they get wet.
Look, it's from the forest.
If you look at me, I look good.
I'm like a rocket.
But inside, I feel completely destroyed, far from my family.
Yasmin's husband Tarek is one of almost a million Syrians who have fled to Turkey. Two
hundred thousand are thought to be in Istanbul alone, living in the margins, and many hoping to move on to Europe.
Aksaray is where you go meet people smugglers in Istanbul.
You go there, get off the bus, and by the metro station ...
You sit there, and they say, 'Hey bro!
Want to go to Bulgaria, Afghanistan, Greece?'
They wink at you.
And so we set off to Edirne.
Edirne is a staging post for smuggling people into Europe. We managed to interview a smuggler on the phone, he's also Syrian.
Each route has its price,
depending on whether people want to go by road or sea.
To get to Bulgaria it costs about $500 [£300].
You are forced to deal with them, and all they care about is money.
They don't care whether you can cope and will make it, or whether you die.
We're not doing this just for money.
But because those people who get out are the same ones who will return and rebuild their country.
And then one of his men drove us somewhere near the border outside Edirne.
They go with you for 15 to 30 minutes, then leave you to it.
You might have to spend a whole day
in the forest, and this weather doesn't help.
It's cold, and there's the river.
This is what we are forced to go through.
You are risking your life just to get to your family.
The road to Bulgaria is difficult at the moment.
In fact you could say it's blocked.
Nobody is allowed to enter here freely, even me.
This is the 'brain centre' of the regional directorate.
This is the place where we collect all the surveillance information.
There are six stationary monitoring posts, which are equipped with day and night cameras and far sighted laser-aided vision systems.
This is the exact border between the two countries.
Every time the sensor line is crossed, the system registers an alarm.
There are two different cases. If we detect
a group in Turkish territory, we inform them ...If it's in Bulgarian territory, then my
colleagues inform the chief of the patrol on duty or the border police.
Its not such an easy thing to cross, the Bulgarian-Turkish border.
Many people are finding this out for themselves.
That's why they're in the distribution centers now, and some are under arrest.
This is Aziz - he seems to be the man to ask if you need a helping hand at Harmanli refugee camp.
Aziz takes on the task of finding space for the new family, who are now getting desperate
Look, how about here?
We can put a curtain up here, and the four of them can sleep there.
I will help. I will help her clear it up.
I believe at the border they have super-modern technologies
They can see 14 km into Turkey, they have helicopters, and all sorts of things.
They've spent loads of money.
and yet they can't even spare a joke sum of say 500, 600 thousand, or
a million Lev [£425,000] to build a decent camp?
They can't spare a million Lev to make a suitable camp site?
They have not travelled 2,000 to 3,000km
to get here to set up businesses or for their leisure.
I saw mothers, children and elderly people with basic, ripped clothing, small amounts of luggage,
and I realised that they are desperate.
It's like a horror film.
I realised that both myself
and my friends are able to help them in the form of clothing, to exchange their currency
and provide them with the most basic things.
One meal a day is now also provided by the UN.
Even though Aziz is always helping everyone else, he is not without his own difficulties
whilst travelling to Germany from Syria, he ran into trouble with the smugglers he was using.
The smugglers deceived us. They said the whole family could come in.
At the border there was an argument.
They started bossing us around, they took some of my family.
But they left me, two daughters and my son behind. They wanted more money.
Like many refugees here, Aziz's most treasured possessions are his documents, in particular
some in German which he believes give him permission to reunite with the rest of his family in Germany.
These are documents from the German lawyer.
Yes, and there are nine documents for legally reuniting our family.
But they're not listening to me here. These are family reunification papers.
It is approval received by the German Embassy here.
They sent the documents back to Germany
because they couldn't find me.
I'm here in prison. How will they find me?
How will the embassy find me?
Lots of refugees here are stuck in this familiar trap. Although European countries are bound
by law to offer asylum to refugees escaping war, European border policy makes it almost impossible for them to get there.
Captain Hristo Stefanov shows some recent interceptions of illegal border crossings.
Usually there are fewer breaches in winter.
Naturally in the spring and summer there are more.
And they think fog makes it harder for us
to detect them, but our sensors are not affected.
Now the numbers.
Officially, there are more than 600,000 illegal immigrants in Turkey.
Unofficially it's around 1.2 million.
These people don't move alone, they move with smugglers.
People-smuggling in Turkey is actually an industry - it's not just a business, but a whole industry.
So our main opponents are the ringleaders of this people-smuggling,
not just the people who physically smuggle them.
Bulgaria has received both pressure, funding, and support from Europe to step up security at its eastern border.
This, for me, is one of the most important borders of the European Union.
Because through this border passes the main flow
of migrants, including from central and northern Africa,
Asia, former Soviet countries, Afghanistan,
Iraq, Iran, and the citizens of Syria.
It's almost the whole world.
In an Istanbul cafe, Tariq and his fellow syrians discuss the limited options for reaching Europe.
I know someone who spent eight days in the forest heading for Sweden.
There was a baby with us the last time.
He fell on the floor and almost died from the cold.
There's no mercy.
- Not if you're Syrian
Syrians are now like the Palestinians in Beirut. We are like the Palestinians now.
If the Arabs don't welcome us,
why should the Europeans?
Tariq and Yasmin wanted to get to Europe because they'd heard it offered greater stability
and rights for Syrian refugees than Turkey.
If you work [in Turkey], you wonder,
will this guy pay me at the end of the month?
Will he sack me?
Will I be sent back to the war I left?
The situation really deteriorated in Syria.
We were comfortably off.
I was a housewife and my husband had work, thanks to God.
We moved to the village, because the villages were safe.
And then the war came to the villages.
Islamists came and kidnapped him for a month.
They broke his jaw.
I told her to go ahead and save herself. She didn't want to, but I insisted they go.
I said, 'I will follow.'
They now wonder if staying in Turkey would have been better
Is there a way back? I would go if there was.
I feel like a criminal here.
We are imprisoned, we can't get out.
I asked her how she manages to keep smiling
Yes, that's how I am, I can't show what's really in my heart
I know they're suffering every day.
We were happy, and comfortable. We used to say 'thanks to God.' Now we can't say anything.
I showed Tarek some video footage of his wife and child in Bulgaria
Look, he's always the best looking one, the leader.
It's almost Christmas, and to raise spirits, Ivan and his friends are decorating a tree.
Merry Christmas. Very good, because the camp is happy
We do the same, like our Christian brothers during Christmas.
We also used to go to the market
and buy a Christmas tree and decorate it, put Santa and little baubles on it,
decorate the rooms, and have a feast.
For two years there have been no celebrations in Syria.
They've forgotten how to smile in Syria
We had Aziz's supposed reunification documents translated, but it turned out to be more application
forms from the embassy, not at all what Aziz hoped for or expected
I wish I could die. I wish that the devil would take our souls.
I left my homeland, my land, my people.
Our family has been separated from me.
Of course I'm upset.
I've lost everything, my life's work.
We got out of the war there and got into a new one here. Tell them.
They know, well enough.
I do feel sorry for the ones who are really escaping war
but not all of them fall into that category.
I can feel only pride to serve at the Bulgaria-Turkey border, one of the most difficult.
We are at the frontline of securing our country.
It's new year's eve in Istanbul.
Tariq is reflecting on his latest attempt to get to his wife and child in Bulgaria, and he is getting desperate.
We were caught by a Bulgarian policeman
We got a good beating, with sticks, on our hand.
I couldn't speak the language,
I tried to explain using sign language
that my wife was pregnant and in Bulgaria.
They didn't understand, and began hitting us
with sticks, saying 'back to Syria'.
She's at the end of her pregnancy.
I don't know what will happen to her.
I'm not eating or drinking.
All I can manage are coffee and cigarettes.
All I can think about is death and suffering.
Hello
Hello!
Hello son, how are you?
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year to you as well,
Yasmin ...I am really feeling the burden.
No, no, no, don't say that...
If I was with my family,
every day would be a celebration but without them, nothing can make me happy.
Whenever I look at a woman I see my wife.
When I look at a boy I see my son.
All I can say is that I wish we
had stayed there and died, together.
But you can never know what fate has in store for you.
Whether they like it or not I will keep trying.
I don't care about their precious borders and national pride.
Wouldn't you do anything, John?
Even if I die on that road ...
And if I die, tell my wife ..
'Tariq tried everything to get to you.'
That's all I ask, to tell her that.
Yasmin's baby is due. She is still in Harmanli. Her husband Tariq is planning another attempt to reach her this week.
Aziz finally got out of Harmanli, and is working with the German Embassy to reunite with his family.