By Salwa Nakhoul Carmichael
During his quest that began 25 years ago when people traffickers took him from Turkey to Romania, Zeki found the obstacles so daunting that at one point he set himself on fire and on another occasion went on a hunger strike.
Zeki, who has deep burn scars on his legs, also suspects he was once mysteriously drugged in Germany and deported to Turkey, which forced him to spend thousands more euros to hire traffickers again to return to Europe.
“If these migrants attempting to get to Europe have to die doing so, then maybe it is not worth,” Zeki, a tall and an intense man, said in an interview with Rudaw in Brussels. He said that was because “settling here is so difficult.”
He spoke as an unprecedented wave of new migrants flee war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa to enter Europe by land and by sea, with thousands drowning in recent months making the dangerous crossing from Libya to Italy.
Some 300 Iraqi Kurds are leaving every day in search of better lives in the West, the Iraqi Federation of Refugees says, reporting migration numbers unseen since the 1990s.
The federation’s Kurdish branch says that most of those who leave are young men, as Kurdish authorities struggle to try and advise against the flow.
Zeki, who is the subject of a documentary and a play, said receiving papers two decades ago could have fulfilled some of his dreams like buying a house, but it is much more difficult to do so as a middle-aged man.
Zeki, who now works in the warehouse of the Colruyt supermarket, did however get married to a woman from his home village after receiving his residence papers in 2009, but they have no children.
He decided to leave Turkey after performing his military service when he said he was insulted and discriminated against by his superiors for being an Alawite Kurd from Mamiki village, which is known today as Kulan Dersim Tunceli.
According to Zeki, some 70,000 people were massacred by the Turks in his village between 1937 and 1938. And in the 1990s, many people disappeared after being arrested by police.
Zeki, who was also arrested once, said: “I know that if I stayed I would not be alive today.”
In June 1990, Zeki paid a network of traffickers 7,000 Deutsch marks to take him to Europe. But they took him with others in a bus to Romania -- which only entered the European Union in 2007 -- and left him there.
Zeki stayed in Romania for seven months, during which he met a Turk from Diyarbakir who used his political clout to make the clandestine network fulfill its side of the deal and take Zeki to an EU country.
Zeki remembers the time when an Afghan refugee drowned while the travelling party of 35 Afghans and two Kurds swam across a river on the borders of Yugoslavia.
After crossing into Austria, Zeki and the other Kurd took a train to Vienna, where an Assyrian Turk contacted Zeki’s uncle in Germany, who transferred money to this man’s account and allowed Zeki to pay traffickers 2,000 euros to get him to Germany.
In winter snows, the traffickers took him and others in a small car to the Austrian-German border, where they crossed on foot to enter another awaiting car.
When Zeki arrived in Nuremberg, his brother in law drove more than 600 kilometers from Oldenburg to pick him up.
“I did not have shoes on, and when I finally saw my sister she did not recognize me,” he recalled.
Zeki then applied for political asylum. And while his case was being examined, he obtained a residence card that allowed him to work in a string of jobs, some of full-time and part-time jobs.
When he went to renew his residence in 1996, he was surprisingly granted five years. Upon the advice of his brother-in-law, he returned to the authorities to find out why only to have his papers and residence annulled.
Six months later, Zeki returned to the police station to extend his stay and was instead put in prison for seven months for having stayed illegally in Germany.
One day in December 1996, he woke up mysteriously on the streets of Istanbul.
“Everyone around me was speaking Turkish but I was speaking German, thinking I was still in Germany,” Zeki said.
To this day, Zeki remains unsure of what happened, but he believes he was drugged and deported by German authorities.
In January 1997, Zeki paid 7,000 euros he had saved while working in Germany to another network of human traffickers who took him and others on fake passports on a flight to Bosnia, before hiding them in trucks from Tirana that eventually took them to Germany.
Once in Germany, Zeki applied for a new residence permit. But when he sensed the German authorities would deport him, he travelled to Frankfurt, where he lived clandestinely until 2004.
After 13 years in Germany Zeki finally took a train to the Belgian capital Brussels, where he applied for political asylum before going to stay in the “Petit Chateau” or “Little Castle,” the reception center for immigrants where residents can avoid arrest and deportation while their claims are processed. He remembers sleeping there with 12 people in one room.
During this time, he fell into a depression when one of his brothers and a niece died and his father became seriously ill but he could not go to their funerals or visit his father because he did not have papers.
“I could not put some soil on their grave. I could not pour a spoon of water on their grave.” Zeki lamented.
Then, on September 17, 2004, just one month after his arrival in Belgium, he left the “Petit Chateau” and went to the foreigners’ bureau, where he had asked for political asylum, poured gasoline on himself and set himself on fire.
Zeki spent three months in the hospital where he was six weeks in a coma.
“I did not have anyone and no one from my family knew what had happened to me,“ said Zeki.
There are no signs of burns on his face and hands, but he said he suffered deep burns on his legs and cannot bend his left knee and is in constant pain.
After six weeks in a coma during a total of three months in the hospital, he went back to the “Petit Château” where 1,500 people of all nationalities live.
After a series of hunger strikes, first alone then with other inmates also impatient with the long wait for asylum papers, his case began receiving attention.
On the 45th day of the hunger strike, with Zeki and others barely alive, a human rights lawyers working on the case arrived with a written promise from then interior minister Patrick Dewael, promising residence papers – a move that ended the hunger strike.
The hunger strike prompted Belgium’s Benedicte Lienard to write a play about Zeki’s life and French filmmaker Karine Bergé to direct a 32-minute documentary about him. Both are entitled “Zeki,” and the play won first prize in the Liège festival in Belgium.
After the premiere of the film in Brussels in June, Emilie, a French photographer in her thirties, told Rudaw that it“touched her deeply”to see what Zeki had to endure.
She added that as a French citizen she does not know what to do to help, although she said one of her male friends joined the Peshmergain their fight against ISIS.
As for Zeki, he said: “I wish for a world of no wars and no borders.”
