The Ministry for the Future

35

We came into Switzerland on a train from Austria. Austria was sending closed trains from Italy through to Switzerland, and in St. Gallen the Swiss stopped them and required passengers to get off and go through a registration process. That happened to us. Most of the people on our train were from Algeria or Tunisia, boat people who had landed in Italy hoping to get to France or Suisse Romande, where we would speak the language. Getting into Switzerland would be a big step on the way.

We were herded through rooms in a giant building, like immigration control buildings at airports, but older. We were interrogated in French, and then we were separated into men and women, which caused a lot of distress and anger. No one understood it until we were led into smaller examination rooms and given a cursory physical that included stripping to the waist and submitting to a chest X-ray. Apparently they were looking for signs of tuberculosis. That was offensive and disturbing enough that when we were dressed again and reunited with the women, and we found they had been forced to undergo the same process, which had been administered by women when it came to the X-rays, but run by men in the other parts of the process, we got mad. The whole thing was dehumanizing, and of course this was not the first time it had happened, refugees are by definition less than human, having lost their homes, but perhaps it was some kind of last straw. Something about being in Switzerland, which had a reputation as a clean orderly lawful place, and then being treated like animals, made us mad. Of course the irony was not lost on some of us that it was only because we were in Switzerland and expecting to be treated well that such behavior was offensive; in Egypt or Italy such demeaning treatment would have been expected and thus submitted to. Worse things had happened to us already. Howsoever that may be, we were mad, and when guards marched us back to the trains and we were led to the more southerly tracks, which seemed to be heading back into Austria, many cried out to object, and nothing the guards could say comforted us. We refused to get on trains set on those tracks, because it made no sense to us; we had seen other trains using the southern tracks to head east, and we were sure our train would head that direction too. And being herded onto trains has a very bad feel to it, of course.

Reinforcements appeared to help the guards herd us, and these had long rifles slung over their shoulders. We shouted at them too, and when they started to unsling their rifles and shift them into firing position, some of the young people charged them and the rest of us followed. It had been seven months since leaving Tunisia, and something had snapped in us.

None of the Swiss soldiers fired at us, but as we left the railroad sidings and rushed the buildings in a mass, many more soldiers appeared, and suddenly the air was filled with tear gas. Some of us fled, some charged the police line, and in front of the building the fighting got intense. It seemed clear the police had orders not to shoot us, so we went at them hard, and somehow a gang of young men got one policeman down and got his rifle from him, and one of them shot at the police and then everything changed. Then it was war, except our side had only that one rifle. We started going down left right and center, screaming. Then someone said They’re rubber bullets, they’re just rubber! And we charged again, and in all the confusion a group of us got inside the building. It was the safest place to be given what was happening outside. But by that time we had lost our minds, we had seen our people shot down, rubber bullets notwithstanding, so we thrashed everyone we caught in that building, and someone found something flammable and torched the big receiving room, and though it was a small blaze, by no means was the building on fire, still there was a lot of smoke, not as painful as the tear gas but probably worse for one’s health over the long haul. We didn’t know, we had no idea, we were just lashing out, trying to keep the police out of the building at the same time we were trying to set it on fire, even with us inside it. I suppose at that point we were on a kind of suicide mission. None of us cared at that point. I will never forget that feeling, of lashing out irregardless, of not caring whether I lived or died, of just wanting to maximize damage whatever way I could. If I got killed doing it that was fine, as long as there was damage. I wanted the world to suffer like we had.

Finally there was nothing to do but lie on the concrete floor and try to get under the smoke. That worked for most of us, but it meant they could come in and scoop us up and carry us off trussed like sheep for slaughter.

Later, after the inquiry, we were sent through to France. We were reunited with our families, and ultimately we found that only six people died in that riot, none of them Swiss. And damage to the facility was minimal. What remained was that feeling. Oh I will never forget it. When you lose all hope and all fear, then you become something not quite human. Whether better or worse than human I can’t say. But for an hour I was not a human being.