The Road Before Me Weeps
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THE ROAD BEFORE ME WEEPS
Copyright © 2019 Nick Thorpe
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is for M’baye
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction The Faces at the Fence
1 New Year 2015
2 A Time of Fear
3 Viktor Orbán’s Jihad
4 The Dog’s Breakfast
5 A Refugee Victory
6 The Closing of the Curtain
7 Three Savage Frontiers
8 A Warehouse of Souls
9 The EU–Turkey Deal
10 The Street of Four Winds
11 Keep Calm and Think of England
12 The Women of Adaševci
13 A Slow and Painful Europe
14 Borderlands
15 Wish You Were Here
Afterword Seven Levels of Despair
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the hundreds of men, women and children who shared their stories with me during some of the most difficult moments of their lives. Many of their names appear in the text, others preferred to remain anonymous. The courage of those who set out into the unknown is matched only by the courage of those who stay at home, come what may. This book is dedicated to M’baye, wherever he may be, who rescued my sister and I when we were lost and afraid, long ago, on our first night in Dakar.
I want also to thank the many volunteers, aid workers, translators, government officials, police and border guards who gave information, permissions, tea or advice in many countries. In particular, staff of the United Nations refugee agency, the International Organisation for Migration, Médecins Sans Frontières, the Hungarian and Bulgarian Helsinki Committees, Frontex and numerous volunteer groups and activists were generous with their time and help.
My work for the BBC gave me the opportunity to spend many months along the borders of the Balkans. My thanks to commissioning editors and colleagues too numerous to mention for their interest in the story and their companionship.
In Budapest Bálint Ablonczy, Suzanna Zsohár and Michael Ignatieff, and in London Xandra Bingley and the anonymous readers at Yale, read early drafts of the book and offered valuable suggestions. Gerald Knaus magnanimously shared with me his recollections of the gestation and birth of the EU–Turkey deal.
Huge thanks are due to my Hungarian publishers, Scolar Kiadó, and in particular Nándor Érsek and Andrea Illés for encouraging me to write the book in the first place. At Yale University Press, Robert Baldock, Rachael Lonsdale, Julian Loose, Marika Lysandrou, Clarissa Sutherland and many others worked assiduously to produce this beautiful edition. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Andrea and my sons Jack, Caspar, Daniel, Matthew and Sam, my mother Janet, my sister Mish and my brother Dom, for tolerating my long absences, and for all their love and support.
ILLUSTRATIONS
All photos taken by the author.
1 Afghan boys by the roadside near Ásotthalom, Hungary, June 2015.
2 Eric Özeme, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, near Ásotthalom, Hungary, June 2015.
3 Refugees queue for the buses at the Röszke cornfield that will take them to a registration centre, Hungary, September 2015.
4 A field of tents at Röszke, Hungary, September 2015.
5 A Syrian boy holds up his new design for the flag of his country, East Station, Budapest, September 2015.
6 Hungarian police, East Station, Budapest, September 2015.
7 Yazidi refugees, Dimitrovgrad, Serbia, November 2015.
8 A volunteer serves food to Afghan refugees beside the police registration point at Dimitrovgrad, Serbia, November 2015.
9 A sister and brother at the One Stop Centre refugee camp, Subotica, Serbia, September 2016.
10 Refugee women cooking supper on the Serbian side of the Hungarian border at Kelebia, September 2016.
11 Women at the water tap, Horgoš illegal encampment, Serbia, September 2016.
12 Lunchtime at the Horgoš illegal encampment, Serbia, September 2016.
13 A young Somali at Adaševci, with the lists of those queuing to get into the Hungarian Transit Zones, September 2016.
14 A Hungarian soldier on guard duty at the Röszke Transit zone, September 2016.
15 Haneen on the train from Lübeck to Bargteheide, June 2017.
16 Safaa outside the hospital in Szeged, Hungary, March 2018.
17 Aidi beside the River Danube in Regensburg, Germany, March 2018.
INTRODUCTION
THE FACES AT THE FENCE
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation . . .
William Shakespeare, The Book of Sir Thomas More1
On a world scale emigration has become the principal means of survival.
John Berger2
This is a book about refugees and migrants along what became known as the western Balkan route, from Turkey to Western Europe, from 2014 to 2018. This is just one of the five main routes into Europe, but in 2015 and the start of 2016, it was the most trodden.
‘Migration is like a balloon,’ an official of Frontex, the European border control agency told me, ‘you squeeze it in one place, it grows bigger somewhere else.’ The deals done in distant capitals, the walls and fences built, and the detection equipment installed have had a certain deterrent and delaying effect. But those who are determined enough will always find a way through. All the means taken to stop them simply increase their suffering, the cost of the journey and their dependence on the criminal underworld which facilitates their movement.
Much changed in the world while I was writing this book. What began as a chronicle of a mass influx turned gradually into detective work, tracing individuals from the mid-point to the end-point of their journeys. Such is the fragility of their status, some of the characters may be in other countries by the time you read these words. Some may have struggled gladly or reluctantly home.
It is my hope that this book, as a chronicle of an age-old phenomenon during a certain short period in modern European history, will remain a useful reference for readers many years from now. The book raises questions of human freedom and hospitality, of rights and obligations which are of crucial importance in any age.
From my home in Budapest, I returned over a four-year period to the same tracks across fields and forests, and to the same villages and towns where people rested on their journeys or were temporarily incarcerated. When the fence on the Hungarian-Serbian border was completed in September 2015, I traced the flow of people through Croatia and Slovenia. When the trickle of people over and through the Hungarian fence fell almost to zero, in the autumn of 2017, I traced people across Romania into Hungary, through Slovakia and the Czech Republic
into Germany. Others took the route through Albania or Bosnia, into Croatia, Slovenia and Italy. Since their arrival in Western Europe, I have continued to follow the fate of several dozen people. Some of their stories conclude this book.
This is also the story of the help and hostility they met on their way, and when they arrived. My adopted homeland of Hungary produced the fiercest political opposition, in the form of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government, to both refugees and migrants. My familiarity with the Hungarian prime minister – I have known him since 1988 – gave me a useful perspective from which to follow the refugee phenomenon across Europe and the world. Though I write in the shadow of his fence, my privileged status as a BBC correspondent gave me the opportunity to zig-zag through it at will, and to speak to whomsoever I wished.
I place the experiences of those along the route in the wider context of European and global migration, and the growing fear of terrorism. And in conversations at the end of the book, with some of those who are now accepted in Germany, France and Switzerland, I explore the successes and setbacks of integration.
The title, The Road Before Me Weeps, was first suggested to me by my friend Balázs ‘Dongó’ Szokolay, a brilliant Hungarian musician and master of all manner of flutes, saxophones, bagpipes and other wind instruments. It is taken from a folk song of the Szekler people, first recorded by the collector and composer László Lajtha in the village of Bözöd in Transylvania in what is now Romania, on the eve of the First World War.3 There are several versions of the text. In the best-known, a man walks down the village street, so sad that even the road weeps before him, to visit the girl he loves, who has forsaken him for another man. No door opens to him.
In 1987, the Hungarian film-maker Sándor Sára gave the same title to a series of four films about the plight of the Szeklers of Bukovina, forced from their villages as refugees during the Second World War, never to return.4 In yet another version, sung by the Vízöntö (Aquarius) rock band in the 1990s, a Hungarian is far away across the seas, an emigrant, and his family don’t even know if he is dead or alive.5
While I was writing, the people of Britain voted to leave the European Union (EU) and Donald Trump was elected forty-fifth president of the United States. Both outcomes were strongly influenced by the desire of the electorate to ‘regain control’ of their countries from those portrayed as political and business elites who favour globalisation. Both the champions of Brexit and Donald Trump’s campaign leaned heavily on public concern about immigration. It is ironic that while East European governments opposed ‘migrants’ from outside Europe, many people in Britain were swayed to leave the EU because they resented the influx of East Europeans to their own countries. New business elites came to power in many countries, and stayed in power in others, because they were better able to speak ‘the language of the people’.
‘Real greatness is able to give and accept, to be national and international at the same time,’ László Lajtha, the musician to whom I owe the title of this book, once commented in a radio interview. ‘It widens the boundaries of national culture, accepts every trend of the universal human coming his way and does not know the narrow, secluded animosity mocked as national.’6
That ‘narrow, secluded animosity’ however, rarely runs very deep. People everywhere prefer what is ‘local’ – including local Gypsies, local Syrians, Latinos or Kurds, once they get to know them. It is easy, on the other hand, to demonise newcomers and strangers, especially those who arrive overnight. Another of the ironies of the influx is that many of the newcomers were from the educated middle classes. They could otherwise never have scraped together the funds for the journey. The poorest and most vulnerable had few ways out. The final irony is that relatively few came to Europe, despite all the fuss – 1 million Syrians, for example, compared to 5 million who stayed in neighbouring countries.
The education and skills of the new arrivals will work to the advantage of the economies of the countries which welcomed them. But it will be a disaster for Syria and Iraq if their teachers, doctors, engineers and construction workers never go home. This can also be used as an argument against integration – ‘Please don’t settle down here, you will soon be sorely needed at home.’
The arrival of so many asylum seekers provoked a political backlash in many countries. Nationalist governments were elected in Austria (2017) and Italy (2018), and reelected in Hungary (2018). In Germany, Angela Merkel hung on to power, but with a reduced majority as the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) with its fierce anti-immigrant rhetoric, robbed her Christian Democrats of votes (2017). Elsewhere in Europe, centrist parties grew tougher on immigration, in an attempt to reduce the growth of far-right parties.
In the summer of 2015, I watched Hungarian police gaze in bewilderment at petrol stations beside the motorway from Serbia, unable to distinguish between 1 million Turks returning legally from their holidays to their jobs and homes in Germany, and the hundreds of thousands of people who traipsed, irregularly, across the same border in the same direction. Similarly, a million Moroccans and other North Africans travel legally to and from France each year through Spain.
In an age of migration and climate change, of changing work patterns, demographic decline and population explosions, and of falling travel costs to Europe, it is impossible to draw a sharp line between migrants, refugees and the temporarily displaced. The word ‘refugee’ was originally applied to the French Protestants, known as Huguenots, who fled to Britain, the Netherlands and other countries after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The ‘wretched strangers’ referred to by William Shakespeare at the beginning of this chapter, refers to earlier arrivals – ‘wealthy Lombard bankers and Flemish labourers’ – attacked by a mob in London on May Day 1517. Thomas More was deputy sheriff of the city and attempted to calm the crowd.
Immediately after the First World War, what is regarded as the first ‘refugee crisis’ of modern times took place, as up to 2 million Russians fled the Bolshevik Revolution, and hundreds of thousands of Armenians, Greeks and Balkan peoples were forced from their homes. The Norwegian Arctic explorer and diplomat Fridtjof Nansen, as the first High Commissioner for Refugees of the League of Nations, worked tirelessly to enable their freedom of movement. The idea of redistributing asylum seekers from the country of first arrival, Greece or Italy, to other countries in Europe, can be traced back to the ‘Nansen passports’ issued under his authority in the 1920s. These were subsequently adapted to give the bearer more rights – including that of being allowed to travel on to another European country, in search of shelter and work. To that extent, the Nansen passport was more advanced than current European legislation, which requires that those granted protection stay where they are.7
During the Second World War, an estimated 60 million people fled their homes. Today over 68.5 million are displaced, of whom some 23 million are regarded as refugees.8 When the United Nations Refugee Convention was agreed in 1951 there were still a million refugees in Europe. Refugee camps, and international law, evolved to address refugee crises during the Cold War. The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), alongside national governments, is now struggling to adapt its practices to a world in which refugees remain refugees much longer, and where civil wars, rather than wars between separate countries, often force them out. Climate change, and the refugee waves it is expected to produce, is another challenge. Drought in north-eastern Syria, and the subsequent influx from affected rural districts to the cities, is regarded as one of the contributing factors to the civil war.9
‘For the first time, the rights of individuals have been recognised by the international state system,’ writes Michael Ignatieff. ‘No other language of the human good has proved so influential, in large part because the language used addresses every single human being alive as a sovereign individual.’10 As I stood on the railway track from Serbia into Hungary early one morning in September 2015, I asked a Syrian man with a broken leg, in a suit and tie, supported on both sides by hi
s nephews, who he was.
‘I am, Sir, a sovereign man,’ was his reply. In an age when national sovereignty is once again being trumpeted from the rooftops, it is well to remember the value of individual sovereignty.
As the average length of ‘refugee-hood’ is now over ten years, refugee camps hardly offer a sustainable solution. The alternative, a precarious, semi-legal or illegal existence in a nearby city is what most choose in preference to the enforced idleness of a camp, deprived of meaningful economic activity, dependent on handouts.
In their book Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System, Alexander Betts and Paul Collier explain the need to turn refugee flows from a humanitarian issue into a development one.11 Only if those who flee are given the opportunity to find work, education for their children, and proper health care, will they stay in the countries where they first arrive, like Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, which would be their first choice. But they will stay there only if the international community helps those countries enough to restore their autonomy and dignity.
There are far more ‘displaced’ people in the world than refugees. The displaced are motivated by the simple human desire to stay as close to home as possible, in the hope that they can soon go back. If this is a ‘crisis’ at all, it is a ‘crisis of the displaced’ rather than a refugee or migrant crisis. A displaced person becomes a refugee at the point where they flee their country. In Syria by the end of 2017, of a pre-war population of 23 million, 6 million were displaced within the country’s borders, 5 million were refugees in neighbouring countries, 1 million had come to Europe and approximately half a million had been killed. The Syrian refugee crisis began with the crushing of the peaceful protests against President Bashar Assad’s rule, in 2011.
More often than not the words used for those ‘on the move’ are political definitions. A government, political party or media organisation which dislikes ‘aliens’, sees them wherever it looks. The humanity of those fleeing the horrors of war in Aleppo, Mosul or Sinjar is devalued with the disdainful epithet of ‘economic migrant’. The failure of the international community to do enough to help the refugees, and the host countries, where they first arrived, created the problem of secondary ‘migration’ as asylum seekers hurried from countries neighbouring Syria, towards Western Europe. They were compelled first and foremost by the information that it was about to get harder – Viktor Orbán’s fence initially acted as a magnet, rather than a barrier. By the time that Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germany had suspended deportations of Syrians to the first country of entry, many were already on the move.12