Former military officers are not the only “ghosts”; others who fled over the Evros River, only to be pushed back into Turkey, inhabit the same invisible world.

On April 26, a journalist called Tugba – she does not want to publicise her surname – then pregnant, and her husband, Asim, were among 11 Turkish asylum seekers beaten with truncheons in Greece and shipped back to their country.

“We had heard very nice things about the way Greece welcomes Turkish people fleeing Erdogan; we came here thinking that we would be received with open arms,” she says.

Asim continues the story: “Everything happened very quickly. We got off the boat and, after we rested in a forest, we started walking for about two hours. The moment we were heading to a small village, we saw a police car. We told them we wanted to claim asylum. They asked for our identities and took our cell phones.”

Tugba recalls that the policemen seemed friendly: “They even gave us water.”

They had no idea what was about to follow. After ten minutes, a white van, a Peugeot Boxer, approached and those in it told them to get in, after talking to the other two policemen. The couple tried to explain that they couldn’t get in the van because it was filthy and they had children with them.

But that did not work. With no choice, they followed instructions, still believing they were being taken to a police station. As time passed and the road became rocky, they felt something bad was going to happen.

Asim jumps in: “Then we stopped in a place without knowing where we were exactly, and got out of the van. At that moment, one of the policemen, a middle-aged man with black hair and wearing what looked like a soldier’s uniform, told us in English and broken Turkish: ‘You are a big problem. All of you, you have to go back. You have to go back to the other side. This is the order.’”

Tugba and her husband sternly told the policeman that they were seeking asylum. But their conversation didn’t last long. Four people in plain clothes and masks appeared suddenly from nowhere, from behind trees. They held truncheons and were aggressive. “They screamed that they had to go back,” she recalls.

“They grabbed us and pushed us along the river banks towards a boat. As we tried resist, they became more violent. They hit me in my lower back and my limbs and it was very painful. They didn’t touch the children and the women,” Asim continues.

“The moment engraved in my memory for ever is of the masked men hitting my husband. Can you imagine? I forgot that I was pregnant. I even tried to protect him, getting right in the middle of this situation,” Tugba says in a trembling voice.

After giving a lot of resistance, they decided they had to obey. Another man in the boat was waiting to take the asylum seekers back to Turkey. Asim was the last one to get into the boat.

The couple’s story is not an isolated one. About 82 Turkish asylum seekers were pushed back from Greece over the last half-year, 41 of whom were then arrested by the Turkish police. Some of them ended up in jail.

The Hellenic League for Human Rights reported the first incident of forcible deportation from Greece to Turkey of persons entitled to international protection in 2017. They also highlighted seeming indications that the unofficial and unlawful expulsion was conducted in concert with the Turkish authorities.

On the morning of May 24, 2017, a journalist, Murat Capan, fleeing a long jail sentence of 22.5 years, pronounced in absentia, along with two friends, crossed the Evros and sought asylum at a police station on the Greek side.

At the police station, they came across another Turkish family with three children that had also crossed the Evros. A few hours later they were back in Turkey, having been forced to return at gunpoint. Their end destination was a Turkish prison.

Around that time, both the Hellenic League and the International Federation for Human Rights documented a total of 17 pushbacks of Turkish nationals within just a few weeks. Seven of them were children. The League said the pushbacks followed a specific pattern. The Greek police drove the asylum seekers by van to a meeting point, where they were handed over to masked armed men. These men forced them onto an inflatable boat and sent across the Evros back to Turkey.

The Greek authorities have denied authorising or executing pushbacks. But there has been no official investigation.

In 2018, meanwhile, three different human rights organisations, the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment [in April], the Commission for Human Rights of the Council of Europe ([in November] and Human Rights 360, documented pushbacks taking place on the Evros river in violation of Greek national, EU and International law.

All three reports refer to a similar pattern of execution. Rights activists fear the Greek government has been sending back Turkish asylum seekers as part of a secret agreement with the Turkish government.

They note that when former Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras visited Turkey on February 5-6, 2019, at a joint press conference with President Erdogan, Tsipras said they had discussed way to make cooperation between their two countries more effective. These discussions reportedly addressed security issues and ways to cope with the activities of networks and traffickers or terrorists on their borders.

Tsipras also stated that certain unnamed initiatives had been taken that might bear fruit in future. These statements raised even more concerns about the prior existence of a tacit agreement between the two countries on Turkish dissidents.

Frontex responded to our queries about alleged pushbacks, insisting that no officer deployed in its operations had witnessed any alleged pushbacks, and noting that no complaints had been made against any officers deployed by Frontex in Greece.

The fear of the forced returnees is useful to the Erdogan regime. As long as they are afraid to speak out, and remain invisible, their stories remain unheard, and Erdogan can continue to pose as a democratic ruler

Tugba says she recognised one of the policemen involved in the her own pushback in the police station of Soufli, where they were detained for three days later, after they had crossed the Evros River once again – this time successfully.

But she says she was afraid of accusing anyone, except for the masked men who executed the violent pushback, and didn’t feel like talking further about that man in particular.

‘The night we were pushed back to the Turkish side of the river, we talked a lot about what we were going to do the next morning,” she recalls.

“Did we have any other choice but to try to cross the river again? We thought maybe it was only bad luck, some bad policemen. The other choice was a way to a Turkish prison”, she adds. She did not want to be one of the hundreds of mothers in Turkey now raising children in prison.

Following this interview, she and her husband left for Germany. The question is, whether they can find peace in Germany. Where and when can they, and many others, stop hiding – and have a life?