By John Sweeney
BBC Newsnight
BBC
Newsnight's John Sweeney is on the refugee trail searching for a young Syrian
boy, Azam. When they met last month in Serbia, Azam had a broken jaw and had
been sent to hospital for treatment. Then he vanished.
Saturday
24 October: We're retracing the steps we think Azam and the man with him might
have taken.
That's
brought us to Berkasovo - the main refugee crossing point on the Serbia-Croatia
border.
Nightfall at the crossing. It's dark, but for
the moon in the sky
A disabled man is carried towards the border
There's a big bottleneck - thousands of
people are backed up, but only
50 are allowed to cross the border at a time
This man is Palestinian and has come from a
refugee camp in Damascus
About a quarter of the people now
crossing
through Serbia are children
This little boy - like many of the people
we've met - is from Syria
But we're still looking for Azam
Friday
23 October: I have fresh information about Azam and what happened after I last
saw him.
I
last saw the little boy get into an ambulance in Belgrade in early September
with a man who told us he was his father, but we suspect was his uncle. Azam
had a black eye and a swollen jaw, possibly broken, which certainly looked
infected. The little boy had been howling in pain, crying "I want my
mummy", as a Serbian medic cleaned his wounds with an antiseptic wipe. The
man with him told us that Azam had been injured in a car accident in Macedonia
and his mother had been left behind in Turkey.
On
Friday, for the first time, we have a pretty accurate picture of what happened
after Azam got into the ambulance. He'd been sent to hospital by Dr Radmila
Kosic, a Belgrade paediatrician who was running a makeshift medical clinic
where the refugees and economic migrants were camping in a park by the bus
station.
First
he went to the children's hospital, then a maxilo-facial clinic where he was
X-rayed - and the X-ray showed his jaw was broken. At that moment we were still
filming in the park and Dr Kosic, informed by her team over the phone, told us
that she expected him to stay in hospital for some days.
A social media campaign has been launched
with the hashtag #FindAzam
Happy
that Azam was being treated, we left Belgrade and headed north towards the
border with Hungary. But what neither Dr Kosic nor we knew was what happened
next. Azam was sent with the man to Belgrade's main accident and emergency
centre to see a neuro-surgeon and to have a CT scan to check for brain
injuries. Azam and the man saw the neurosurgeon - and then they vanished before
the CT scan.
It
was two weeks before we were informed that Azam had disappeared that day - and by
that time Azam and the man had gone north.
So
it's possible that Azam has a brain injury. No-one knows. Dr Kosic is adamant:
"The father or uncle was told that he should bring Azam back to the
maxilo-facial clinic for treatment. It was wrong for him not to do that."
The
head of Serbia's border police, Mitar Djuraskovic, told me: "A hospital is
not a jail. You cannot hold someone without evidence, judges, lawyers. In this
case, by the time we knew what had happened it was too late."
Serbian
police believe that Azam was travelling with a large party of Syrians and that
he entered Hungary next - the logical path for refugees at that time.
One
extra piece of news. We've found out that the name of the man with Azam -
whether he was his father or uncle we still don't know - is Geyeer Aldaham.
The
impossible task got that bit easier. Next, we're heading north to rejoin the
main the refugee track into Croatia, hoping to find someone who might recognise
Azam and know his mother.
Conditions
are grim, there is no electricity, no shelter, and thousands of refugees are
camping out in the cold while the Croatian authorities are letting only a
trickle of people through. One aid worker told us: "It's a humanitarian
catastrophe."
We'll
be reporting live on the story on this blog (you can bookmark the link) and
also on BBC Newsnight's social media accounts - on Snapchat (bbcnewsnight),
Twitter, Facebook and Periscope. John Sweeney's report is due to air on BBC
Newsnight next week.
Thursday,
22 October: Back at the Serb reception centre where I first met Azam with the
man who claimed to be his father.
The
rain, the cold, the herding of immense numbers of people, the babies wailing
gets to you, makes you want to weep and then the task of trying to find one
small boy in this pipeline of humanity flowing from Syria to northern Europe
seems not just impossible, but also absurd and foolish.
One
month ago I met a small boy, Azam, with a bandaged jaw in Preshevo in southern
Serbia, just to the east of the Kosovar mountains. Azam was travelling with 13
men, one of whom claimed to us that he was his father. Azam's mother had been
left behind in Turkey, he said.
The
very next day I met Azam again in Belgrade. He was howling in pain and alone at
a makeshift medical centre. His "father" reappeared and together they
went to hospital in an ambulance where Azam was X-rayed. And then he and the
"father" vanished.
Ten thousand refugees came through the
Preshevo reception centre in one day this week
I'm
trying to find Azam and reconnect him with his mother. I don't where she is or
even her name but she might be on the road, looking for her son.
In
September when we were at Preshevo roughly 3,000 people were coming through the
reception centre - a fancy phrase for chaos in small motion - a day.
Two
days ago 10,000 people came through Preshevo in one day. And the bad news,
according to Seda Kuzucu of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), is
that the majority are families with children.
"The
make-up of people crossing has changed. For a while it was 50:50 young men. Now
it's 60% Syrian families with young children. Conditions are desperate, the
children are suffering from the cold and the rain."
John Sweeney with Dr Radmila Kosic who sent
Azam to hospital
So
while searching for a lost boy, I'm surrounded by children who have lost their
homes, their possessions and even their country.
The
Serbian authorities work hard to process people - the majority of whom are
refugees from Syria, with a large minority of economic migrants from elsewhere
- as quickly as possible so that they can go forward to the next country on the
long road north.
But
the queue into the reception centre is long and mostly out in the open so
people shiver in the driving rain, noses turn blue, babies cry. I'm afraid I
can't convey how grim it is in words.
We've
printed colour posters in English and Arabic showing Azam and the man who took
him out of hospital but to begin with I couldn't bear to ask these poor,
shivering, wretches to help us find one small boy.
Eventually,
I screwed my courage to the sticking place and started handing out the
#FindAzam posters. One young man, an engineering student, originally from
Damascus, who spoke good English, read out the poster in Arabic to the people
standing next to him, every single one of them soaked to the skin.
An
old man, a Syrian Kurd from Qamishli, on the front-line with the so-called
Islamic State (Isis), studied the photograph of Azam, and slowly shook his head
apologetically. None of them recognised Azam but they got it, they saw the
point of what we were trying to do, they gave the problem some attention, and
then the queue shuffled on.
These children are not lost, but they’ve lost
their homes and their lives
Inside
the reception centre proper in a large white tent a Syrian woman, her face numb
with cold, studied the poster intently. She, too, didn't recognise the boy and
apologised to me. "Where are you trying to get to?" 'Sweden,' she
said. I told her to keep the poster and when she gets to Sweden to tell her
friends to look out for Azam: 'I will,' she said.
That's
what got to me. In the middle of this dreadful inhumanity, on the run from a
war between one side that uses chemical weapons and another that chops off
heads in high definition broadcast quality, a refugee pays attention to the
suffering of one small boy.
My
old friend Allan Little, formerly a BBC reporter, used to say of the wars of
former Yugoslavia: "in the worst of times, you see the best of
people." I can't think a better way of summing up Preshevo in the rain.
So,
thanks to people like the engineer, the old man from Qamishli and the woman
bound for Sweden, our search for Azam, impossible, absurd and foolish as it may
feel, continues.
Next
stop, the Belgrade hospital where Azam was last seen.
We'll
be reporting live on the story on this blog (you can bookmark the link) and
also on BBC Newsnight's social media accounts - on Snapchat (bbcnewsnight),
Twitter, Facebook and Periscope. John Sweeney's report is due to air on BBC
Newsnight next week.
Five-year-old Azam was visibly in pain when
he was treated by a medic in September
Wednesday
21 October: Look at the pain in this boy's eyes. His name is Azam, he's five
years old. His mother is still in Turkey and the man who says he is his father
took him from hospital before he could be treated for a broken jaw.
This
is a story about trying to find one small boy who's gone missing in the chaos
of hundreds of thousands running from a pitiless war in Syria that's killed a
quarter of a million people.
I
last saw Azam in early September getting into an ambulance in Belgrade with a
man who told us he was his father. He was going to hospital to get his jaw
treated: it was swollen, bandaged and, we learnt an hour later after an X-ray,
broken.
That
Azam was being treated in hospital made me feel, OK, let's get on with covering
the rest of the long road from the Greek island of Kos to the Austrian border.
But
Azam wasn't treated. That very day after the X-ray had been taken Azam and the
man vanished - a fact I didn't discover for two weeks.
So
for Newsnight I'm going to spend the next week trying to find Azam in Serbia,
Hungary and Germany and anywhere else in northern Europe where he may have
ended up. I want you to help me.
The
report we aired on Panorama at the end of September sparked a social media
campaign to try to find him, using the hashtag #findazam. Since then, it's been
used more than 30,000 times on Twitter and widely shared elsewhere. Facebook
and Twitter accounts have also been set up.
We'll
be reporting live on the story on this blog (you can bookmark the link) and
also on BBC Newsnight's social media accounts - on Snapchat (bbcnewsnight),
Twitter , Facebook and Periscope. Please follow along on the journey, and help
if you can.
We
may never find Azam but at least we're going to try. I want to discover more
about Europe's lost children, how many children get split up from their
families, how much is being done to reconnect them and how, perhaps, more could
be done.
The
climax of the late Denis Healey's military career was being a beachmaster at
Anzio. But as a lowly officer in 1940, I recall, he was once asked to count all
the trains entering and leaving Reading station. The task was so pointless he
made up the numbers and he was sceptical about the value and accuracy of
statistics ever since. Me, too.
No-one
knows for sure how many children have gone missing on the road from the Greek
islands to northern Europe this year because no-one can be sure. The situation
on the ground is chaotic.
But
after I spent two weeks in September making the journey with the refugees and
economic migrants, I came away thinking that within the chaos there was more
communication than I'd expected.
Using
digital
Syria,
before the war, was not a rich country but it was never dirt poor. Many people
have smartphones, just like us. They use Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat,
just like us.
I
met one man who, fed up with the charges and prevarications of the Turkish
people smugglers, swam the whole way from Bodrum to Kos. He wrapped his
smartphone in plastic and used Google Maps to work out how much more he had to
swim. And the $1,200 he saved by swimming? He was going to spend it on
drinking, just like some of us would do.
That
digital connectivity may help us find Azam. But I have no illusions about how
difficult it will be. In my time as a reporter, I've tracked down people who
were hard to find. In Communist Czechoslovakia in 1988, I went undercover to
look for a mother, a Sudeten German, whose son had been murdered in prison.
In
1999 I scoured the length and breadth of Albania, searching for "the man
with the burnt hands" whose friends and families had been machine-gunned
by a Serbian militia in a hay barn. He had hidden under the dead, one hundred
or so.
The
militiamen had set the barn on fire and his hands had burnt until he ran for
it. He survived and later gave evidence at The Hague against the killers.
In
2008 I found a Chinese athlete who'd been run over by a tank in Tiananmen
Square in 1989. Legless, he was refused permission to take part in the Paralympics
and his interview gave some discomfort to our official Chinese minder.
But
these people weren't so hard to find because they wanted to be found, to tell
their stories.
This man was seen carrying Azam in Belgrade.
He later took the little boy away with him
And
the man with Azam, does he want to be found? It's hard to say. We first
encountered Azam on 9 September in southern Serbia at Preshevo. The man
carrying him introduced two men, saying that one was his father and the other
his uncle.
The
next day we met Azam again, at a makeshift medical clinic, in a park by
Belgrade bus station. He was alone, screaming in pain as a medic cleaned his
jaw with an antiseptic wipe and crying for his mummy.
The
doctor treating him, Dr Radmila Kosic, told us that his father had been here a
few minutes before. Our interpreter was worried and found out from Azam that
the man was his uncle, not his father.
The
man returned and said he was the father and had papers to prove it. We were in
no position to prove him wrong.
But
the doctor said Azam was going to hospital and we watched as the man picked up
the little boy and together they got into an ambulance.
That
seemed the very best place for Azam. Now we know the man took him away, that
very day. I don't know where this story ends. But there is nothing to be lost
from trying to shine some light on what happened next to Azam and to find out
more about Europe's lost children.
We'll
be reporting live on the story on this blog (you can bookmark the link) and
also on BBC Newsnight's social media accounts - on Snapchat (bbcnewsnight),
Twitter, Facebook and Periscope. John Sweeney's report is due to air on BBC
Newsnight next week.
