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So this right here
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is the tiny village of Elle, close to Lista.
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It's right at the southernmost tip of Norway.
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And on January 2 this year,
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an elderly guy who lives in the village,
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he went out to see what was cast ashore
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during a recent storm.
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And on a patch of grass right next to the water's edge,
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he found a wetsuit.
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It was grey and black, and he thought it looked cheap.
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Out of each leg of the wetsuit
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there were sticking two white bones.
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It was clearly the remains of a human being.
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And usually, in Norway, dead people are identified quickly.
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So the police started searching
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through missing reports from the local area,
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national missing reports,
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and looked for accidents with a possible connection.
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They found nothing.
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So they ran a DNA profile,
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and they started searching internationally through Interpol.
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Nothing.
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This was a person that nobody seemed to be missing.
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It was an invisible life heading for a nameless grave.
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But then, after a month,
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the police in Norway got a message from the police in the Netherlands.
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A couple of months earlier, they had found a body,
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in an identical wetsuit, and they had no idea who this person was.
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But the police in the Netherlands managed to trace the wetsuit
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by an RFID chip that was sewn in the suit.
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So they were then able to tell
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that both wetsuits were bought by the same customer at the same time,
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October 7, 2014,
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in the French city of Calais by the English Channel.
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But this was all they were able to figure out.
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The customer paid cash.
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There was no surveillance footage from the shop.
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So it became a cold case.
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We heard this story,
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and it triggered me and my colleague, photographer Tomm Christiansen,
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and we of course had the obvious question: who were these people?
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At the time, I'd barely heard about Calais,
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but it took about two or three seconds to figure out
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Calais is basically known for two things.
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It's the spot in continental Europe closest to Britain,
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and a lot of migrants and refugees are staying in this camp
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and are trying desperately to cross over to Britain.
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And right there was a plausible theory about the identity of the two people,
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and the police made this theory as well.
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Because if you or I or anybody else with a firm connection to Europe
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goes missing off the coast of France, people would just know.
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Your friends or family would report you missing,
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the police would come search for you, the media would know,
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and there would be pictures of you on lampposts.
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It's difficult to disappear without a trace.
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But if you just fled the war in Syria,
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and your family, if you have any family left,
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don't necessarily know where you are,
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and you're staying here illegally
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amongst thousands of others who come and go every day.
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Well, if you disappear one day, nobody will notice.
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The police won't come search for you because nobody knows you're gone.
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And this is what happened to Shadi Omar Kataf
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and Mouaz Al Balkhi from Syria.
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Me and Tomm went to Calais for the first time in April this year,
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and after three months of investigation, we were able to tell the story
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about how these two young men fled the war in Syria,
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ended up stuck in Calais,
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bought wetsuits and drowned in what seems to have been an attempt
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to swim across the English Channel in order to reach England.
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It is a story about the fact that everybody has a name,
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everybody has a story, everybody is someone.
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But it is also a story about what it's like to be a refugee in Europe today.
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So this is where we started our search.
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This is in Calais.
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Right now, between 3,500 and 5,000 people are living here
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under horrible conditions.
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It has been dubbed the worst refugee camp in Europe.
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Limited access to food, limited access to water,
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limited access to health care.
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Disease and infections are widespread.
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And they're all stuck here because they're trying to get to England
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in order to claim asylum.
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And they do that by hiding in the back of trucks headed for the ferry,
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or the Eurotunnel,
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or they sneak inside the tunnel terminal at night
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to try to hide on the trains.
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Most want to go to Britain because they know the language,
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and so they figure it would be easier to restart their lives from there.
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They want to work, they want to study,
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they want to be able to continue their lives.
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A lot of these people are highly educated and skilled workers.
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If you go to Calais and talk to refugees, you'll meet lawyers, politicians,
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engineers, graphic designers, farmers, soldiers.
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You've got the whole spectrum.
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But who all of these people are
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usually gets lost in the way we talk about refugees and migrants,
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because we usually do that in statistics.
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So you have 60 million refugees globally.
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About half a million have made the crossing
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over the Mediterranean into Europe so far this year,
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and roughly 4,000 are staying in Calais.
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But these are numbers,
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and the numbers don't say anything about who these people are,
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where they came from, or why they're here.
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And first, I want to tell you about one of them.
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This is 22-year-old Mouaz Al Balkhi from Syria.
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We first heard about him after being in Calais the first time
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looking for answers to the theory of the two dead bodies.
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And after a while, we heard this story
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about a Syrian man who was living in Bradford in England,
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and had been desperately searching for his nephew Mouaz for months.
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And it turned out the last time anybody had heard anything from Mouaz
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was October 7, 2014.
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That was the same date the wetsuits were bought.
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So we flew over there and we met the uncle
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and we did DNA samples of him,
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and later on got additional DNA samples from Mouaz's closest relative
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who now lives in Jordan.
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The analysis concluded
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the body who was found in a wetsuit on a beach in the Netherlands
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was actually Mouaz Al Balkhi.
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And while we were doing all this investigation,
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we got to know Mouaz's story.
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He was born in the Syrian capital of Damascus in 1991.
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He was raised in a middle class family,
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and his father in the middle there is a chemical engineer
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who spent 11 years in prison for belonging to the political opposition in Syria.
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While his father was in prison,
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Mouaz took responsibility and he cared for his three sisters.
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They said he was that kind of guy.
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Mouaz studied to become an electrical engineer
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at the University of Damascus.
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So a couple of years into the Syrian war,
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the family fled Damascus and went to the neighboring country, Jordan.
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Their father had problems finding work in Jordan,
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and Mouaz could not continue his studies,
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so he figured, "OK, the best thing I can do to help my family
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would be to go somewhere where I can finish my studies
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and find work."
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So he goes to Turkey.
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In Turkey, he's not accepted at a university,
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and once he had left Jordan as a refugee, he was not allowed to reenter.
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So then he decides to head for the UK,
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where his uncle lives.
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He makes it into Algeria, walks into Libya,
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pays a people smuggler to help him with the crossing into Italy by boat,
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and from there on he heads to Dunkirk,
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the city right next to Calais by the English Channel.
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We know he made at least 12 failed attempts to cross the English Channel
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by hiding in a truck.
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But at some point, he must have given up all hope.
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The last night we know he was alive,
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he spent at a cheap hotel close to the train station in Dunkirk.
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We found his name in the records, and he seems to have stayed there alone.
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The day after, he went into Calais, entered a sports shop
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a couple of minutes before 8 o'clock in the evening,
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along with Shadi Kataf.
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They both bought wetsuits,
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and the woman in the shop
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was the last person we know of to have seen them alive.
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We have tried to figure out where Shadi met Mouaz,
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but we weren't able to do that.
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But they do have a similar story.
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We first heard about Shadi after a cousin of his, living in Germany,
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had read an Arabic translation of the story made of Mouaz on Facebook.
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So we got in touch with him.
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Shadi, a couple of years older than Mouaz,
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was also raised in Damascus.
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He was a working kind of guy.
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He ran a tire repair shop and later worked in a printing company.
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He lived with his extended family,
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but their house got bombed early in the war.
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So the family fled to an area of Damascus known as Camp Yarmouk.
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Yarmouk is being described as the worst place to live
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on planet Earth.
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They've been bombed by the military, they've been besieged,
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they've been stormed by ISIS
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and they've been cut off from supplies for years.
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There was a UN official who visited last year,
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and he said, "They ate all the grass so there was no grass left."
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Out of a population of 150,000,
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only 18,000 are believed to still be left in Yarmouk.
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Shadi and his sisters got out.
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The parents are still stuck inside.
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So Shadi and one of his sisters, they fled to Libya.
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This was after the fall of Gaddafi,
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but before Libya turned into full-blown civil war.
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And in this last remaining sort of stability in Libya,
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Shadi took up scuba diving, and he seemed to spend most of his time underwater.
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He fell completely in love with the ocean,
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so when he finally decided that he could no longer be in Libya,
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late August 2014,
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he hoped to find work as a diver when he reached Italy.
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Reality was not that easy.
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We don't know much about his travels
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because he had a hard time communicating with his family,
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but we do know that he struggled.
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And by the end of September,
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he was living on the streets somewhere in France.
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On October 7, he calls his cousin in Belgium,
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and explains his situation.
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He said, "I'm in Calais. I need you to come get my backpack and my laptop.
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I can't afford to pay the people smugglers to help me with the crossing to Britain,
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but I will go buy a wetsuit and I will swim."
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His cousin, of course, tried to warn him not to,
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but Shadi's battery on the phone went flat,
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and his phone was never switched on again.
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What was left of Shadi was found nearly three months later,
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800 kilometers away
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in a wetsuit on a beach in Norway.
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He's still waiting for his funeral in Norway,
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and none of his family will be able to attend.
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Many may think that the story about Shadi and Mouaz
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is a story about death,
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but I don't agree.
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To me, this is a story about two questions that I think we all share:
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what is a better life,
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and what am I willing to do to achieve it?
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And to me, and probably a lot of you,
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a better life would mean
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being able to do more of what we think of as meaningful,
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whether that be spending more time with your family and friends,
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travel to an exotic place,
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or just getting money to buy that cool new device
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or a pair of new sneakers.
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And this is all within our reach pretty easily.
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But if you are fleeing a war zone,
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the answers to those two questions are dramatically different.
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A better life is a life in safety.
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It's a life in dignity.
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A better life means not having your house bombed,
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not fearing being kidnapped.
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It means being able to send your children to school,
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go to university,
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or just find work to be able to provide for yourself and the ones you love.
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A better life would be a future of some possibilities
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compared to nearly none,
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and that's a strong motivation.
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And I have no trouble imagining
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that after spending weeks or even months