Today, on the 4th of September 2012, FRONTEX (the agency for the operational cooperation at the external border of the EU member states) organises another charter flight deportation from Düsseldorf to Serbia. Since the start of this year, there has been on average one FRONTEX charter deportation a month to Serbia and Kosovo, around a hundred people deported each time. Besides these charter deportations, individual deportations are happening almost daily. While it has been impossible to get any official information about the number of people deported to the Belgrade Airport, an estimation of the employee who works at the airport is that there is on average twenty people deported to Serbia every day.

Living in Belgrade, I often took the bus to be present at the Belgrade airport during the charter deportations. Having been denied access to the international arrivals zone, where the deportees are held administratively for some hours after the plane lands, I waited at the exit of the airport. I observed the last traces of the deportation – the despaired and exhausted faces of people trickling out of the airport.

It is relatively easy to recognise the people who have been deported exiting the airport. They differed greatly from the tanned holiday-goers, foreign and Serbian businessmen, and young backpackers who are exiting the airport smilingly, oblivious to the fact that one of the flights that day was a deportation flight.

The people from the deportation flight are mainly Roma, including many children. They mostly look very exhausted. Sometimes they have not slept for two days, some have been detained for weeks prior to the deportation. Many are crying, or look like they have just stopped crying. Some are greeted by their families and the mixed emotions are apparent on their faces – happiness to see their loved ones again and the despair of being in Serbia again – and some find themselves at the airport completely alone, with no idea where to go. An older man, who stood in front of the airport motionless for a very long time, once told me that he left Yugoslavia over 30 years ago – and cannot understand how he ended up in Serbia, a country that did not exist when he left and does not recognise as his.

The deportees often carry with them all of their possessions, or whatever they were able to grab before their arrest. Some are bending under the weight of the over-filled “Gastarbeiter bags”, whose handles and stitches are breaking. Others only have a small cardboard box, or even just a plastic carrier bag with them.

Today, this scene is going to repeat itself, yet again. The well-oiled EU deportation machine spits out the undesirables and in Serbia it is “business as usual”. The violence of the deportations is largely normalised here, masked by the discourse of the value of the readmission agreement in exchange for the visa regime liberalisation, the discourse that justifies deportations by blaming the “false asylum seekers” for leaving in the first place and the obedient pro-EU discourse.