Shafiq decided to flee Afghanistan when a man showed up at his workshop and threatened to kill them all if the family did not give him their daughter, who was only thirteen, to repay a family debt. The family travelled to Turkey then crossed the sea to Greece before trying to travel onwards. It was then that the family began yet another ordeal as they were separated while trying to cross the border.
The family of five was part of a group crammed into two vans by smugglers as they traveled at night to Greece’s northern border with the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in July this year. They were almost at the border when a police patrol stopped the vans and everyone ran into the nearby woods. In the confusion, the family’s older children, Mozhdah, 13, and Mangal, 8, thought they were running behind their parents, only to later realise they had lost sight of them. Scared and disoriented, the children joined another Afghan family and crossed the border before making their way to Serbia.
For nearly two weeks, Shafiq and his wife Ghazal knew nothing about the whereabouts of their children. UNHCR protection monitors came across Mozhdah and Mangal, exhausted and terrified, in the north Serbian town of Subotica, close to the border with Hungary. The children were assisted with the appointment of a legal guardian and were referred to one of the four facilities for accommodation of unaccompanied and separated children in Serbia.
A few days later, Shafiq and Ghazal and the youngest child arrived at a refugee aid point in Belgrade where they told a UNHCR partner what had happened. “When we saw their personal information and that of their children, we quickly realized it was the children encountered in Subotica by other partners in the UNHCR network,” said a UNHCR Child Protection Assistant. UNHCR and partners, in cooperation with Serbian authorities took steps to reunify the family.
For Ghazal, the memory still hurts. “We knew nothing of them for nearly two weeks,” she recalls, “I felt I was drowning in despair.” “It’s all right,” Shafiq assures her, “We are all back together now.”
The family is now accommodated in an Asylum Centre near Belgrade where Mozhdah and Mangal have started to recuperate from the shock of separation and now attend language and art lessons.
* Names changed for protection reasons
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