More than one million refugees travelled from the Middle East to the countries of Eastern Europe in 2015. This is the background of the story that British photojournalist Giles Duley tells in his new book "I Can Only Tell You What My Eyes See," a project he undertook for UN Refugee Agency UNHCR beginning in October 2015.
In 2011, Duley stepped on a land mine in Afghanistan and lost both of his legs and an arm, but he continued to work. For the UNHCR project, he travelled for seven months to document the refugee crisis in 14 countries of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, from refugee camps in Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan, to the beaches of Greece. Duley told the story of his journey to Arab daily Gulf News.
'I followed my heart and people's faces'
"The UNHCR gave me the greatest brief ever given to a photographer: just follow your heart," Duley said. "So, rather than try to cover the whole crisis, I tried to cover a few stories within it and that was how I kept my focus," he said, adding that he knew he would have to sacrifice some stories to focus on others, and that is how he arrived at the book's title. Duley's story begins on a beach in Lesbo, in Greece, on a day in autumn 2015 when 5,000 people a day where arriving on the beaches. "I've worked in Angola, Afghanistan, Iraq and have seen some of the worst of humanity, and yet I found myself standing on those beaches in floods of tears. It was hard initially to work out what was different. What was it I was seeing that I hadn't seen before? I've seen a lot of refugee camps, but they are generally static places.
What I've never seen is people moving en masse like that, putting their lives on the line, risking everything for freedom, for safety. To see the fear on their faces, but also the relief that they'd finally made it, was completely overwhelming," he said. Duley said that the myth that photojournalists are indifferent to pain isn't true. "I didn't meet one photographer or journalist who hadn't got involved at some stage, jumping in the water, grabbing people off the boats. I was handing out foil blankets. There were no ambulances or medical teams on that beach. On more than one occasion we had to put hypothermic babies in our car and just turn up the heating," he said.
'Enormous' number of volunteers helping
Duley said that in the refugee camps, most people are just trying to create "normality" for themselves and their families."You see laughter, you see love, you see kids playing, people cooking, and it's so important that photographers reflect that," he said. Thinking back on his work, the photographer remembers not only the migrants, but also many Europeans. "One of the most encouraging things I've seen in the past couple of years is the number of volunteers - people who had no background in humanitarian work, saying 'I want to do something about this'," he said. He told the story of one of the photographs he took, of two women walking on a beach in Lesbos, who would hug the children who arrived on the boats. "When I asked them why, they explained to me that their mothers had been refugees from Turkey and had landed on those same beaches as children. They said, "Whenever we see those children, we see our mothers."(ANSAmed)