Transcriber: Aliki Pinto Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Like many others in 2015,
I started volunteering in the context of the so-called European refugee crisis.
And of the many things I learned during that time,
I think for me personally the most striking was this:
that holding a German passport is an incredible privilege.
And I think this privilege is illustrated very well here.
This is a passport index from the website passportindex.org,
and it ranks the world's passports
based on how many countries you can travel to freely,
that is without needing a visa.
And as you can see, Germany is the second place,
and almost all the other European Union countries are following very closely.
By contrast, at the bottom of the ranking,
there are countries
like Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Somalia.
So of course, these are the countries
that make up the biggest part of the refugee population,
especially those coming to Europe.
So, if you've actually compared the numbers -
with the German passport,
you can travel to 83% of the world's countries without a visa.
With an Afghan passport, it's 15%.
That really shows the incredible privilege that the passport brings with it.
But while I was kind of always aware of this privilege,
it never really felt real.
So it became very real to me
only when I actually experienced it first-hand.
And to me, this happened in 2016 when I was on the Greek island of Chios,
and you can see here on the left is the shoreline of Chios,
and that's one of the arrival islands.
So every night there were ten or twenty refugees.
The refugee boats landing,
and they were coming from Turkey,
which you can see in the background and on the right.
So what really surprised me when I was there
is that there's a regular ferry service between Chios and Turkey.
It only takes 30 minutes or so.
So once when I was going back from Chios to Germany,
I booked a flight from Izmir because it was cheaper.
So I took a ferry from Chios, and it was just a normal ferry ride,
and it's usually quite enjoyable.
We sat on the sundeck, and what happened was that, along the way,
we saw a refugee boat that was going the other direction.
So it was starting on some beach in Turkey,
and it was heading towards Chios.
So while to me, crossing that border between Greece and Turkey,
it was quite an ordinary thing, and I did it for a very ordinary reason -
just to save some money, and it didn't really mean much to me.
But by contrast, to the people on that boat it meant a lot more.
They had put all their lives' savings into paying the smuggler,
and they had put almost all their lives' belongings
into one small bag they could put on the boat.
And of course, they were on an unseaworthy, overcrowded boat.
And many of them couldn't even swim.
So for them, it was a matter of life and death,
and for me, it wasn't really anything special.
But that experience, to me,
really made real that difference in privilege,
and I think one thing we should regularly remind ourselves of
is that we have this privilege,
and another thing is,
and maybe more importantly,
is to ask ourselves what we want to do with this privilege.
And that's exactly what happened in 2015
when a lot of people saw that there was a humanitarian crisis in Europe,
and they didn't want to accept it.
So they just used their privilege or put their privilege to good use,
and they went to those places to help.
And being part of that movement, we soon realized two things:
And the first thing is -
The question is,
"OK, why is there a humanitarian crisis in Europe in the first place?"
And we saw that governments and big aid agencies
were just too inflexible to respond to the quickly-changing situation.
And the second thing is,
what also came kind of as a surprise,
is that we can actually make a big difference -
we, as ordinary people.
So we realized
that this civil society humanitarianism was very valuable,
and we wanted it to continue,
and we realized that we needed a platform for that.
So we started an organization here in Munich,
InterEuropean Human Aid Association.
And the name is a bit complicated,
as you said,
but I think the idea of InterEuropean is really crucial to it.
So there is a question that we sometimes get asked,
and I think it's a fair question,
“Why do you think you can do a better job than professional aid agencies?"
And I think that's a fair question,
and for us, we saw a lot of flaws in the official response
over the past few years,
and that's exactly what we want to do better.
And big organizations, they have a lot of bureaucracy attached to it, of course,
and they have funding constraints.
So they have funding cycles and their funding is very limited
to very specific projects and so on.
So, we wanted to do,
not the opposite maybe,
but we wanted to do those things better
because we were just smaller and more agile.
So we wanted to have flexible funding,
and we wanted to be able to respond quickly
and try a different approach.
So that flexibility was really needed a lot,
and I think that was obvious in 2015.
As you can remember, probably, from the media coverage,
the borders and the routes changed almost on a weekly basis.
So the flexibility really was key back then.
But what about now?
So it seems like, especially if you think
there's a lot of tension on the Central Mediterranean,
but looking at the Balkans or at Greece,
it seems like if there is anything in the media,
it's like, yeah, the situation is managed, the situation is under control.
So we are actually working on the ground in Greece
since two-and-a-half years,
and this is not quite the case.
So what actually happened this year
is that a lot of people,
a lot of refugees started crossing the Evros river,
which is on the border -
so this is the map -
which is on the land border between Turkey and Greece
as you can see it here in the north.
And you can see there are a number of crossing points
where people are crossing that land border.
And so in spring this year for the first time,
a lot of people, 3600 in April alone,
were crossing that land border.
And it was, for the first time,
more people crossing the land border than the sea border on the Greek islands,
which you can see further south.
So what this meant
is that most reception and registration centers,
all of these facilities which were built in the context of the crisis,
are located on these islands.
In the north, on the land border, there's only one very small facility.
So when for the first time a lot of people arrived there,
what happened is that this facility was quickly overwhelmed,
they couldn't get people registered in time,
and so it didn't really work.
And what happened
is that people started moving on their own,
and they started moving into various camps in northern Greece,
which you can see a few are listed here as well.
And the problem now is this:
They moved into these camps on their own, unmanaged,
and they just started setting up there, living in tents,
and the camp management, they accepted this, they tolerated it,
but they could not support them.
And that's because these camps have very limited capacities
and the NGOs that are there,
they have service contracts which allow them to provide services
to those who are there officially,
and those are the official residents.
But they couldn't really support these new arrivals
with accommodation,
with all the services they are offering.
So, this is where we tried to really make a difference,
and we have a humanitarian warehouse in northern Greece
that stocks relief supplies,
so what we could do is just to redirect our resources
to those thousands of unregistered refugees
that were living unofficially in those camps.
And we were able to do this
exactly because we are not bound by service contracts,
and we have volunteers working with us,
and we have a big support network that enabled this effort.
So I think this shows that, once again,
even if the situation was apparently under control,
flexibility and agility were key qualities
that were needed for humanitarian response in Greece.
So it has often been pointed out
that we are not really dealing with a refugee crisis in Europe
but actually with a crisis of European solidarity.
I think that we see this definitely on a political level,
and it can be really quite frustrating
that we seem to be able to do very little about it politically.
But I think what I was trying to show today
is that as European citizens, as members of civil society,
we can actually do something about it.
We can use our time, our skills, our network, and, of course, our money
to help where help is actually needed the most in Europe,
and that is countries at the moment like Greece, Italy and Spain.
So our goal as an organization is to make this possible
and to realize the potential that lies in civil society humanitarianism.
And the idea is that anybody really
can become part of this network and contribute in one way or another.
So what I invite you to think about
is how you can use your privilege that comes with your European passport.
And because today, really as we saw,
it is not a big problem, it's really easy,
it is easier than ever before,
and that's because for us with the privilege of a European passport,
Europe is basically borderless.
Thank you.
(Applause)