The news that Husam Bibars had been dreading reached him on the evening of September 24. Majd, his son, had gone missing, he learned. He also found out that the other Syrian refugees his son had been traveling had been forced to leave the 27-year-old on his own. Somewhere in a forest. Somewhere in Bulgaria.
Bibars, 53, a deliberate man with graying hair, is talking about that day in a sparsely furnished apartment in the center of Nakskov, a small town in southern Denmark. He has piled up tangerines, bananas and apples on plates on the living room table. A photo of Majd is hanging above him on the white wall. It shows a young man in a shirt and vest with a neatly trimmed beard, the eyes reminiscent of his father's.
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Husam Bibars in Nakskov
Foto: Patrick Brown / DER SPIEGELMajd’s journey to the European Union began in the north of Turkey. His daughter Hanaa and his pregnant wife Fatima stayed behind in Istanbul, says Bibars, with Majd planning to bring them to Europe later. In 2015, when his father and older brother made it to Denmark from Turkey, Majd had just come of age. And as an adult, he was ineligible for family reunification. That is why Majd wanted to set off on the Balkan route.
On the evening of September 24, Bibars recounts, he felt as though the world was collapsing around him. Within a matter of hours, he was able to find the name of the trafficker to whom Majd apparently paid 7,000 euros. The trafficker told him not to worry, saying that he had left his son in the forest near a lake, and that Majd had no longer been able to walk because of severe stomach pains. But, the trafficker noted, it was only one kilometer to the next main road.
Bibas posted Majd’s photo in Facebook and WhatsApp groups. He then instructed a lawyer to inquire with Turkish refugee camps and prisons. Perhaps Majd had been taken back there by border guards? He also sent Majd’s former boss out to look for him. Bibars says he hardly slept during those weeks.
Twenty-two days after the call, Bibars decided to fly to Bulgaria himself. Even then, he suspected he might not ever see his son again.
The Balkan route is thousands of kilometers long. In the summer of 2015, when the Germans famously welcomed the newcomers with open arms, the route was fairly straightforward through southeastern Europe. Most asylum seekers came to Greece and Serbia via Turkey. From Budapest, they traveled on to Munich by train.
In the years since, however, the EU has erected fences and built walls. When border guards apprehend migrants, they often push them back to the other side of the border. The use of force and the border installations have changed the Balkan route. It now resembles an intricate system of secret pathways. Many people spend months, or even years, trying to navigate it.
For many, the route now often begins in Bulgaria, with asylum seekers eager to avoid Greek border guards, who are known for being particularly harsh. From there, it leads via Serbia or Bosnia and Herzegovina to Croatia. Month after month, some paths are blocked while new ones open up. For those seeking asylum, the routes generally grow continuously longer. And more dangerous.
There are no precise figures available for the number of migrants who die on the Balkan route. There is, however, much to suggest that more have lost their lives this year than in previous years. Six select morgues along the route have registered 92 dead migrants this year, significantly more than in previous years.
The refugees die in remote forests, drown in unpredictable rivers or freeze to death in snowstorms. But who even takes notice of what is happening? And who makes sure that people like Husum Bibars have a way of finding their loved ones and burying them with dignity?
Journalists at DER SPIEGEL conducted joint reporting on the Balkan Route together with the non-profit investigative organization Lighthouse Reports, ARD, the radio station RFEL/RL Sofia, the British newspaper i and the Greek online outlet Solomon. They spoke to relatives, activists and public prosecutors, visited forensic experts and explored cemeteries.
The research shows that the hostility faced by asylum-seekers at European borders continues even after their death. Countries like Bulgaria, Serbia or Bosnia and Herzegovina make little effort to identify the dead. There is no database and no central portal where relatives can search. The dead decompose in fields, fill mortuaries and are buried in anonymous graves, sometimes within a few days.
Fathers like Husam Bibars, mothers, brothers and sisters often don’t know which country their relatives died in. Hundreds of families are searching for their loved ones in chat groups, with many encountering a wall of bureaucracy, disinterest and open racism. But there are people who help them even though they don’t have to. They fill the gaps left by Europe’s authorities.
The Search
Husam Bibars is from Aleppo in northern Syria, not far from the Turkish border. Until the outbreak of the civil war in 2011, in a different time, he ran a rug company on the outskirts of the city. He says he had four machines and 20 employees. In Istanbul, on the first leg of his escape, he had to weave the rugs himself. Now, in the Danish town of Nakskov, a small village where he doesn’t feel at home because he barely knows anyone, Bibars delivers pizza.
He paid 700 euros for the trip from Copenhagen to Sofia to look for his son, money he otherwise would have wired to his landlord. And even when Bibars arrived in Bulgaria, the pressure was significant. It was clear that he wouldn't be able to stay long.
The Strandzha Mountains on the Black Sea are dissected by the EU’s external border. In the hilly forests, the refugees sneak from Turkish into Bulgarian territory along the unmarked paths. They then continue westward across the wide fields of the Thracian Plain. Bodies have repeatedly been found here. NGO workers refer to it as the "Route of Death."
Early one afternoon, Bibars drives up to Bumantsi, a village located near the Sofia airport. He has teamed up with another Syrian who is also searching for his son. A reporter from the media outlets reporting this story accompanies them. Barbed wire lines the high walls of the camp here, and Bibars learns from officials that there is no one here registered under Majd’s name. But transliteration of Arabic names can be difficult. One wrong letter and the computer won’t produce any results. No one here wants to see the photo of his son he has brought along with him.
In the open refugee home in Sofia, Bibars’ next stop, he goes from floor to floor, searching seven stories. None of the residents knows Majd and they say that no one has seen him. One official tells Bibars that he must provide Majd’s registration number, that he can’t search by his name. But Bibars doesn’t have a registration number. "I tried to make it clear to him that I just wanted to know whether my son was alive or dead," he says. He says he didn't make any progress at all.
Word has long since gotten around among the families of refugees that the authorities are rarely of any help. One morgue in Burgas is particularly notorious. Four refugees told DER SPIEGEL that they had to bribe employees so that they could look at the dead. The management of the mortuary claims to have no knowledge of such practices, but many NGOs in the region have heard the same. "We keep receiving such reports," says Georgi Voynov of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, a human rights organization that many refugees turn to for help. The families report that they were exploited at every step of their search for their loved ones.
That evening, a heartbroken Bibars is lying in his hotel bed. He says he would have received more support from the authorities in Aleppo. But he doesn’t want to think about the fact that Majd might be dead.
Help
You can’t begin to mourn until you know whether your loved one is alive or not. In technical terms, this is known as an "ambiguous loss." The uncertainty is profoundly demoralizing, makes people sick and even dividing families. In Argentina, where thousands disappeared silently during the dictatorship, it is widely viewed as a form of torture.
As such, informal networks of locals and activists are often established along the refugee routes. They are familiar with the area, maintain contacts with the authorities and keep records of unidentified dead bodies. It is still too early for such an approach in Bulgaria. But in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there is Vidak Simić.
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Vidak Simić: "I have a crazy idea."
Foto: Aleksandar MilanovićSimić, a small, roundish 65-year-old with a friendly gaze, is walking through the graves of the town cemetery in Bijeljina, a few kilometers west of the Serbian border. Hundreds of marble gravestones stand in long rows, one behind the other. The names of the deceased and their dates of birth and death are neatly engraved. But in the back corner of the cemetery, someone has rammed 19 wooden posts into the ground. For the date of death, only the year is noted, and many of them read "2023," along with "HH," the Cyrillic version of the Latin abbreviation "NN," or "name unknown." Here, under freshly heaped mounds of earth, lie the nameless bodies of the dead.
Simić has investigated all of their deaths. As a forensic pathologist, he is responsible for the section where the Drina marks the border with Serbia. The river is treacherous, says Simić. It looks harmless in the summer, like a stream. But it gets deep quickly, and the rapid current ends in a whirlpool. All of the migrants in the cemetery drowned, with the exception of one. Simić has lit a candle for each of them in the church. "They all have families somewhere who care about them," he says, "people who are looking for them."
Simić estimates that around half of the asylum-seekers who drown in the Drina are never found. The others end up on his autopsy table. This year alone, he has performed autopsies on 28 refugees, compared to just five in 2022 and three in the previous year.
Simić takes a bone sample from every single body – he doesn’t like the term corpse – so that the relatives can later have it matched with DNA traces from a hair or an item of clothing belonging to the deceased. That’s the only way left to identify them beyond a doubt.
Together with an activist, Simić has become the last hope for relatives. He talks to relatives and embassy staff, looks for tattoos or scars on the bodies of the dead and checks whether the date of their disappearance matches his files. Once, after a successful identification, a family sent him a photo of the grave in Afghanistan as a thank you. It was sad, of course, Simić says, but he adds that he was grateful to receive the photo.
Simić says that apart from him, few are making any efforts to help families find relatives who have drowned. The tracing system operated by the understaffed Red Cross also doesn't work. But it actually ought to be pretty simple, he says, adding that he has a crazy idea.
He has stored 40 bone samples in his freezer. A DNA test only costs around 130 euros these days. If someone were to analyze all his samples and publish the results, the costs would hardly be more than 5,000 euros. Family members in Algeria, Morocco or Afghanistan could have a test done in their home country, says Simić. They wouldn’t need a visa, and they wouldn’t have to spend weeks searching.
The "right to truth" also applies to people who don’t come from Europe, Dunja Mijatović, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote in 2022. Her report was also an appeal. She wrote that a Europe-wide system is needed to enable relatives of refugees to search for their relatives.
A similar system already exists in the Western Balkans, where the DNA of the 40,000 victims of the Balkan wars has been collected in a database. Around 70 percent of the missing have been identified as a result. But hardly anyone feels responsible for the people who disappear at Europe’s borders.
Certainty
Husam Bibar’s search ends in Elkhovo, a small town with barely 9,000 inhabitants on the Thracian Plain. It’s the location data that the trafficker sent using WhatsApp that led Bibars here. At the police station, an officer scrolls through the photos on his personal mobile phone. He has recently photographed three corpses of migrants. When the second photo comes up, Bibars clutches his head. "That’s my son," he gasps, before bursting into tears.
Majd was found by a farmer in his field on the morning of September 25, Bibars learns. No signs of violence were found on his body. Four days later, he was officially buried without the presence of his family or friends.
That has now become the norm in parts of Bulgaria. It is difficult to identify someone who comes from the other side of the world, says Public Prosecutor Milen Bozidarov, and space in the mortuaries is limited. That’s why the migrants are buried as quickly as possible. In Majd’s case, it quickly became clear that he wasn’t from Bulgaria.
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Burial plots in Elhovo: No gravestones, no names, no date of death
Foto: Lighthouse ReportsMajd’s wife has since given birth to a son in Turkey, who has been named Husam after his grandfather. Bibars says she hasn’t yet been able to register him with the authorities. To do that, she first needs Majd’s death certificate, which she hasn’t yet received. The result of the DNA test also isn’t available yet.
Bibars says he doesn’t know how Fatima will manage on her own in Turkey. He sends money every now and then and would love to bring them to Europe. Hanaa, his granddaughter, regularly sends him voice messages. She says she prays that daddy will come back soon. Bibars cries as he plays the message.
Majd’s grave is located in a Christian cemetery on the outskirts of Elkhovo and has no gravestone, no name and no date of death. Someone has laid artificial flowers on the mound. Majd wasn’t washed before the funeral, as is the Islamic custom. His grave isn’t facing Mecca. "It breaks my heart," says Bibars. "I don’t even know if my son is really lying there."
If Bibars could, he probably would have buried Majd somewhere else, according to Islamic ritual, possibly in Turkey with his family. But the Bulgarian authorities won’t allow that – exhumation isn’t possible for legal reasons, they say. Two days after his arrival, Bibars departs again. Without his son's body.
With additional reporting by Thom Davies, Arshad Isakjee and Jelena Obradović