Upon closing his student visa, Clinton Yebga boarded a Turkish Airlines flight in his native Cameroon, changed planes in Istanbul and landed smoothly in northern Cyprus.
But instead of heading to his university in the north controlled by Turkey, he addressed the so-called green line, a nominal barrier that divides the island, and the Republic of Cyprus, a part of the European Union.
Today, awaiting a decision on his asylum application, he lives in the orderly Kofinou refugee camp, where his Syrians, Palestinians and other Cameroonians are his neighbors.
Yebga and the others are among the more than 11,200 people who last year discovered a tortuous route to the European Union that has left this small island with the largest number of asylum seekers per capita in Europe.
“The simplest way is to think that northern Cyprus is the largest airport transit hall in the world,” said James Ker-Lindsay, principal investigator at the London School of Economics who specializes in politics in southeastern Europe.
“You have landed in the territory of the Republic of Cyprus, but it is not until you pass the border control on the green line, which is not a border in itself, that you are officially in the Republic of Cyprus,” he said.
More asylum seekers are doing exactly that, presenting Cyprus, with a population of 850,000 inhabitants, a budding migration crisis that much of the rest of the European Union has left behind. Most migrants, Cypriot authorities said, arrived by land from the north.