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                  Refugees Caught in Tide of European History

   by Jamie Dettmer

   Syrian and Iraqi war refugees are sleeping by railroad tracks in
   northern Greece hoping to be allowed to travel onward to Germany and
   other northern EU countries. Seventy-three years ago, these tracks were
   traversed by another group heading to Germany for a completely
   different future: the Nazi death camps.

   North was not a direction the Jews wanted to be heading. Packed into
   death trains by the SS, their journey ended in the gas chambers of the
   Third Reich, where 98 percent of the total Jewish population of
   Thessaloniki died.

   Europeans escaping Nazi tyranny in the Balkans and parts of Central
   Europe, were heading in opposite directions from Thessaloniki's Jews,
   some southeast for Turkey, the country contemporary Syrians and Iraqis
   are traveling through to flee the regime of President Bashar al-Assad
   and the jihadists of the Islamic State and al Qaida affiliate Jabhat al
   Nusra.

   Poignant, cruel historical ironies and injustices abound in the turmoil
   of the current refugee crisis roiling Europe and the Middle East --
   ghostly echoes of a past Europeans thought they had long ago exorcised
   that is panicking their politicians.

   Located at a major crossroads between mainland Europe and the Mideast,
   Greece and its Balkan neighbors - now throwing up coils of razor-sharp
   wire on their frontiers and militarizing their borders to stop
   asylum-seekers - are no strangers to huge flows of war refugees
   searching for a firm footing nor to forcible displacements.

   ''Shifting plates

   The turmoil that has come in the wake of these mass migrations has
   shaken countries to their roots and foreshadowed era-changing politics.

   It is almost as if the European continent is built on political
   tectonic plates. With each chafing and grinding, the lives of hundreds
   of thousands, sometimes millions, are shattered. Individuals, rich and
   poor alike, are caught up in consequences beyond their control.

   From the 19th century until the end of the 20th century, an estimated
   10 million ethnic Turks, Albanians, Bosniaks, Circassians, Tatars and
   Pomaks trudged towards Turkey, emigrating to the heartland of the
   Ottoman Empire, Anatolia.

   Most did so during the Balkan War of 1912-13 and the Great War - World
   War I - as the Ottomans saw their territory shrink and independence
   grabbed by vassal states. In 1915 those refugees passed Armenians
   coming the other way when about 80,000 survivors of the Armenian
   Genocide fled to Greece.

   There was more to come with the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922, the
   Greek occupation of the port of Smyrna, now known as Izmir, the
   launching point for many fleeing Syrians and Iraqis today. The war was
   concluded with a forcible mass exchange of populations that saw the
   expulsions of Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece and of Muslims
   from Greece to Turkey.

   The Aegean Sea, now being passaged by Syrians and Iraqis desperate to
   reach safety, figured prominently then as well.

   The population exchange -- "the great uprooting" -- involved more than
   two million people.

   ''When friends become foes...

   "Can't we go back to Syria now," is a plea many Syrian parents at
   Idomeni have heard from their children. The same look of bewilderment,
   the same faux courage is on the faces of Syrian and Iraqi kids as they
   are captured for posterity in the faces of Greek and Turkish children
   in black-and-white photographs taken during the great uprooting.

   "My mother only took a few spare clothes because she thought she would
   be coming back. And then the boat came and took us away," an aged
   Despoina Christopulou, a Greek Christian survivor, recalled in a 2012
   BBC documentary exploring the devastating consequences of the Greek
   invasion of Turkey and the refugee crisis it created on both sides of
   the Aegean.

   Remembering how life was before, Christopulou says: "There would be a
   Greek house and then a Turkish house -- they would all live well
   together. They ate and drank together. They would come to yours; you
   would go to theirs." War put a finish to that. When the Greek army
   retreated, Greek Christians fled in its wake pursued by vengeful Turks
   determined to punish the terrible devastation wrought on their towns by
   the Greek military. Christopulou talks in the documentary about the
   disappearance of her father, wiping tears away as though it were
   yesterday.

   Today, Sunni Muslims, Kurds, Yezidis and Christians are flooding out of
   the Mideast in the biggest mass movement of people Europe has seen
   since the Second World War. And their oral histories, what they are
   struggling with emotionally, what they are enduring now, are, for all
   of the technological differences, the same.

   "We stayed because we thought the war would stop, but then we realized
   the war will never stop," says Shermini, a 19-year-old Yezidi, who with
   her parents, a brother and his wife left their village near the Iraqi
   town of Dohuk at the beginning of February.

   She and her family decided also to leave because they started to fear
   their Sunni Muslim neighbors, people they had once called friends. "We
   thought if Daesh came, they would quickly become Daesh themselves," she
   says, using the Arab acronym for the Islamic State.

   ''Starting over

   About the same time Shermini and her family left, so did Waad Alnaimee,
   a Sunni Muslim from Baghdad and a former director in Iraq's Ministry of
   Culture. He fled the Iraqi capital after his eldest daughter was
   kidnapped -- she was freed by the police -- and his car was crumpled in
   a bombing, an assassination attempt on him.

   "In the new Iranian-controlled Iraq there is no place for Sunni
   Muslims," he says.

   He was at Idomeni for two weeks with his wife, two grown-up daughters
   and his ten-year-old son but has now agreed to enter a relocation
   scheme that should get him and his family placed somewhere in Europe,
   although they are not allowed to choose the country.

   "We left everything behind," he laments.

   Like most refugees he is trapped in nostalgia and struggling to
   maintain his self-identity. He flicks through photographs on his mobile
   of his office and of him greeting well-known artists. "I loved my work;
   I loved my job," he says.

   He will have to try to recreate himself -- or part of himself -- in
   Europe. He seems destined to get the chance. Others may not, if those
   opposed to admitting more asylum-seekers into Europe get their way.
   Force is already being used -- Afghans were kicked into Athens-bound
   buses last week by Macedonian border guards after they had been denied
   further entry into the Balkans, according to relief workers.

   NATO warships are starting to patrol the Aegean to help Turkish coast
   guards turn back the little, unseaworthy boats ferrying refugees.
   European leaders say the mission is to rescue refugees, to ensure they
   don't drown. The refugees see the objective as forcible interdiction.

   History can be hard to escape.
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   [1]http://www.voanews.com/content/refugees-caught-in-tide-of-european-h
   istory-/3225810.html

References

   1. http://www.voanews.com/content/refugees-caught-in-tide-of-european-history-/3225810.html