The No.1 Refugee
large group of refugees were approaching through a forest close to where we were. We hurried to a high ridge and put up our tent. We kept a lookout. I flagged it to the newsdesk as breaking news and prepared for a live position. We hoped to catch on camera the first of the refugees who had travelled by foot all the way from Greece. My phone rang. It was the newsdesk asking about the footage we were expecting. “You will be held responsible for the breaking news we flashed,” they told me. I reassured them and turned to the cameraman, who was panning left and right with the camera. I tried to kill the time by smoking; one cigarette followed by another. Then, all of a sudden, the cameraman shouted: “Aissa, look! A caravan.” “It is no time to joke,” I replied. But he repeated himself, his tone serious. I looked through the camera and couldn’t believe what I saw. “Sehr gut (very good),” I shouted. “Now, the real hard work begins,” I told him. “We record for history the arrival of the number one refugee into Austria.”
The No.1 Refugee Aissa Taibi | Al Jazeera Correspondent - Germany
My phone rang, waking me up. It was 4am and I could barely see the caller’s number but assumed it would be the usual: the newsdesk. I had a feeling that something big was happening. It was the end of August 2015 and I was in the Austrian capital, Vienna. “Good morning, Aissa,” the caller said. I replied with a heavy voice, once described by a colleague as sounding like “the Big Bang.”
“Move to the Austrian-Hungarian border immediately,” said the news editor. “We were tipped off that the first wave of refugees heading to Germany are approaching Austria.” “Right away,” I responded. I assembled the team and within a few hours we were at the border. But the border is long and looking for the first refugees along it was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
We spoke to a border patrol. They expected the refugees to enter through the forests, far from any border checkpoints, they told us. It was a convincing argument, but one that still wouldn’t help us to find them. Days went by and none of the refugees we had expected turned up. Then my phone rang again. This time it was an Austrian policeman I had become acquainted with during the weeks of our coverage. He told me that a
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