This article is from the source 'bbc' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34582382
The article has changed 7 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| Searching for Azam: Where I first met him | |
| (1 day later) | |
| John Sweeney is searching for five-year-old Azam, believed to be Syrian, who featured in a BBC report from Serbia last month. Azam, thought to be one of the thousands of Syrians on the move across Europe, had been badly injured when Sweeney first met him. Since then, he has disappeared, and people across the continent have been using a Twitter hashtag to try and find him. | |
| 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. | |
| 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." | |
| Poster | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | 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. | 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. | 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. | 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. | 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. | 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'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. | 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. | 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. | 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. | 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 | 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. | 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. | 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. | 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. | 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. | 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. | 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. | But these people weren't so hard to find because they wanted to be found, to tell their stories. |
| 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. | 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 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 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. | 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. | 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. | 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. | 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. |