The Road Before Me Weeps

by Nick Thorpe

  The statistics and costs are hard to tie down but offer a certain insight into the processes at work. Around 3.7 million people claimed asylum in Europe during the four-year period addressed in this book.13 EU governments spent €2 billion either to keep them out or reduce the flow – €1,000 for each person on the move.14 While most East European countries excelled in the rhetoric of anti-migrant xenophobia, many West European countries quietly built their own walls. New fences went up, or older fences were reinforced, on sections of the Greece–Turkey, Bulgaria–Turkey, Greece–Macedonia, Hungary–Serbia, Hungary–Croatia, Slovenia–Croatia, Austria–Slovenia, Austria–Italy, Latvia–Russia and Russia–Estonia borders, and along the entrances to the ferry and Channel Tunnel on the France–UK border. By 2018, the 828-kilometre wall built by Turkey on its border with Syria was the most effective of all.15

  The old Iron Curtain was built by Communist regimes to stop their own populations fleeing to the West. The new Iron Curtains are designed to stop the influx into Europe (that northerly continent) of the poor and the oppressed of the global South, and of refugees from the war-ravaged East.

  Confusion over who is coming to Europe and why has added to the confusion over who to let in and who to keep out. The Common European Asylum System (CEAS) in 2005 was an attempt to make sure that all EU member states protected the rights of asylum seekers and refugees, with a set of minimum procedural standards. A cornerstone of the CEAS was the so-called Dublin procedures, revised in 2013, under which a person must seek asylum in the first EU country in which they arrive. This worked relatively well when the numbers were comparatively small, as transit countries turned a blind eye to those traipsing through their fields in the hope that they would soon leave, and target countries either absorbed the new arrivals – or sent them back under the Dublin procedures.

  From 2014 the system became unworkable – hundreds of thousands of people did not want to stay in Greece or Italy, nor be deported there if they reached their goal. Instead, the system fell apart, and each country came up with its own, more closed or open solutions, often improvised from one day to the next, with little or no consultation with neighbouring countries. What has emerged since is the beginnings of an agreement, to redistribute those recognised as genuine refugees more fairly, and absorb only as many ‘economic migrants’ as a country needs. During this same period, from 2014 to 2018, EU countries also spent around €20 billion rescuing refugees from the sea, feeding and housing them in transit on land, sheltering them, and beginning the integration process.16

  Parallel to, and often in contrast to the approach of state institutions, tens of thousands of volunteers devoted months of their lives to help the new arrivals. Aid agencies led by the UNHCR, the International Organization for Migration, the Red Cross, Save the Children, Médecins Sans Frontières, Médicins du Monde, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Oxfam, and numerous church-related and secular groups mobilised their resources to soften the pain and suffering of the journeys. And, hidden from view, thousands of smugglers made billions of euros – an estimated €6 billion in 2015 alone – guiding the refugees across one border after another, despite the ever-increasing security.17 Without them, there could have been no journey, no influx. Over four years, 2 million people paid smugglers €8–10 billion – four to five times as much as was spent on all the walls, fences, surveillance equipment erected in their path. By any calculation, that was a huge waste of precious resources. If the new arrivals could have reached Europe with even part of that money in their pockets – as the Russians fleeing Bolshevism did – their integration could have got off to a better start.

  In response to the influx, the EU has also spent around €16 billion on funds for Turkey, Syria and African countries, to keep potential refugees from setting out from their shores. EU countries have spent close to €30 billion processing and integrating the new arrivals. Whatever one calls it, this is a complex and contradictory process.

  The way Europeans reacted to the new arrivals was strongly influenced by their experience of the wider issue of migration, and immigration. This helps explain the hostility to refugees in Eastern Europe, where few people have experience of meeting, let alone living with strangers from other cultures. Only 1.6 per cent of Hungarians were born outside their own country, compared to an EU average of over 8 per cent. It was easy for politicians to turn that genuine concern into fear.

  According to the German immigration authority, in 2014 there were 16.3 million people with an immigration background living in Germany, one in five of a population of 80 million.18 More than 8 million did not have German citizenship. Most were of Turkish, East European or Southern European background. Yet Germany continued to allow people in, both to fill vacancies in the labour market and for humanitarian reasons. In 2016, there were 20.7 million people with non-EU citizenship living across the EU, in a continent of over 500 million – 4 per cent of the population. A further 16 million EU citizens lived in another member state.19

  In Eastern Europe one frequently comes across the argument that migrants represent some kind of a threat to ‘Christian Europe’. This ignores the universal nature of Christianity, preaching not to one tribe or nation, but to all humanity. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan, who is not just a stranger but also an enemy of the Jew who lies wounded in the ditch, is the only one who comes to his aid. The point here is not that we have to help the stranger, but that we have the freedom to help him or her. And when we walk by, on the other side of the road, we are impoverished as human beings as a result. In Eastern Europe, where the churches played a central role in the creation of nation-states in the nineteenth century, and their survival through the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, that universalist tradition was diluted or lost.

  ‘What it comes down to is this,’ Michael Ignatieff told an audience at the University of Toronto in October 2016, ‘Come in. I, the citizen, give you this gift of hospitality.’20 In return, the citizen expects the newcomer to acknowledge that gift and be grateful for it. The Canadian refugee experience has been so successful because it is framed in these terms, of local hospitality, rather than the language of universal human rights. My own conclusions are much the same as those of William Shakespeare, 500 years ago:

  Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleas’d

  To find a nation of such barbarous temper,

  That, breaking out in hideous violence,

  Would not afford you an abode on earth,

  Whet their detested knives against your throats.

  Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

  Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements

  Were not all appropriate to your comforts,

  But chartered unto them? What would you think

  To be thus us’d? This is the strangers’ case;

  And this your mountainish inhumanity.

  CHAPTER ONE

  NEW YEAR 2015

  To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted and tortured by one’s fellow countrymen. But to emigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.

  John Berger1

  ‘Today many people are once again coming onto the streets on Mondays, and shouting: “Wir sind das Volk” – “We are the people,”’ German chancellor Angela Merkel said in her 2015 New Year address. ‘But what they really mean is: you are not one of us, because of your skin colour or your religion.’2

  The new round of Monday evening demonstrations was organised by the Pegida movement, founded in the East German city of Dresden in October 2014.3 Pegida stands for ‘Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West’. Patriotic Europeans, not patriotic Germans. The founders wanted to underline their idea of their European identity. Of the continent, not of the Fatherland. For many Germans since the Second World War, Germany was a difficult concept to belong to. Europe had become a substitute for their allegiance, and since Germa
n reunification that Europe was modelled and centred on Germany.

  A week before Christmas, 20,000 Pegida supporters marched through Dresden demanding a stop to immigration. Twenty-six years earlier, in the autumn of 1989, opponents of the Communist Party marched through the streets of East German cities each Monday, chanting ‘We are the People’. Pegida picked the same day of the week and the same chant. As an East German herself, and the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, Angela Merkel understood this very well, and was deeply affronted.

  East European societies under Communism were largely homogeneous. Socialist man and woman lived in regimented societies where they earned the same money, wore the same clothes, ate the same food and learnt the same version of history at school. There were few people from other cultures apart from the North African and Middle Eastern students at the medical or engineering faculties of the universities. That was a big contrast to Western Europe where hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrived from former colonies in the wake of the Second World War, as in Britain or France. Or where large numbers of Turkish or Yugoslav Gastarbeiter arrived from 1961 onwards, as in West Germany. Those influxes had considerably changed the complexion of those societies by the end of the twentieth century. When Germany was reunified in October 1990, many East Germans were shocked to find so many people from other cultures and faiths in their country. That made them natural allies of nationalists in West Germany or France or Belgium, who resented their continent’s physical openness to the rest of the globe. The fact that the newcomers or their children were doing menial jobs which other Germans no longer wanted to do, cleaning the streets, driving the buses, or wheeling the elderly through the corridors of their hospitals, was little consolation.

  By 2014, there were 4.8 million Muslims in Germany, 5.8 per cent of the population. Interestingly, more Turks were returning home by then, than arriving – so-called ‘circular migration’ is often forgotten in the heated debates.4 But there were new waves of immigration, mostly from the wars in the Middle East – in 2014, nearly 300,000 refugees applied for asylum in Germany. Also that year 199 hostels where asylum seekers were living were attacked. German society was ill-prepared for the arrival of more than a million more asylum seekers in 2015. Those who didn’t want them there were prepared, however. In 2015, the number of attacks on hostels increased fivefold, to 1,005. In 2016, it showed a slight decline, but the number of physical attacks on migrants soared to over ten a day.

  As well as the almost uniformly pale skin reflected in the East European early morning mirror, there was another factor which made Eastern Europe different and which would also influence the approach to the new influx of refugees and migrants. National feeling was a central element in all the East European revolutions of 1989. This was ignored or underestimated by those commentators who identified only the ‘embrace of capitalism’ and the ‘Western victory in the Cold War’ in the events which unfolded. But without the outburst of patriotic fervour, long suppressed but never eradicated by four decades of ‘socialist internationalism’, the fall of Communism was unimaginable. The refugee crisis was now to reignite German as well as East European nationalism.

  Like Angela Merkel, French president François Hollande also used his 2015 New Year address to emphasise an inclusive message, aimed at all the different communities of France. ‘When France forgets her principles, she loses herself,’ he said. ‘I am making the fight against racism and anti-Semitism a national priority.’

  The Muslim population of France is 4.7 million, or 7.5 per cent of the population, mostly of North African origin, from the former French colonies in Algeria and Tunisia or from Morocco.5 France also has the largest Jewish population in Europe at around 600,000, or 1 per cent of the population, mostly of Sephardi and Mizrahi origin. Like French Muslims many French Jews came from North Africa when their countries gained independence. In 2014 French police registered 851 incidents of ‘an anti-Semitic nature’, 810 attacks on Christian places of worship or cemeteries, and 199 attacks on Muslims. French Muslims were responsible for many of the anti-Semitic incidents.6

  On 7 January 2015, exactly a week after President Hollande’s appeal, two men born in France of Algerian parentage, the brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi stormed the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, asked for individual journalists by name, and shot them dead in cold blood. Eleven people died in or just outside the newspaper offices in the Rue Nicolas-Appert, including a receptionist, a bodyguard and nine journalists.

  The perpetrators got back into their black Citroën and drove off. A policeman on foot patrol on the Boulevard Richard Lenoir, forty-two-year-old Ahmed Merabet, pulled out his service pistol and tried to confront them. They stopped their car, shot him once in the groin, then walked up to him as he lay helpless on the pavement and shot him again at point blank range in the head. Like them he was a Muslim, born in France to parents of Algerian origin.

  As the Twitter hashtag ‘Je suis Charlie’ went viral, in solidarity with the newspaper journalists killed for posting cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad, others tweeted a ‘Je suis Ahmed’ hashtag, in solidarity with the policeman. ‘I am not Charlie, I am Ahmed the dead cop. Charlie ridiculed my faith and culture and I died defending his right to do so,’ @Aboujahjah, posted.

  On the Saturday after the attacks Ahmed’s brother Malek gave a press conference. ‘I address all the racists, Islamophobes and anti-Semites. Do not mix the extremists with Muslims. Stop confusing them, stop unleashing wars, stop burning mosques and synagogues, stop attacking people. That will not give us back our dead, and will not comfort our families.’7

  The following day 2 million people gathered for a peace march through the streets of Paris. Forty heads of state and prime ministers from around the world attended. Among them was Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister. After the march he gave an interview to Hungarian state television, MTV.

  We must make very clear that we will never allow Hungary to become a target country for immigrants, at least as long as I am prime minister and as long as this government is in place. We do not want to see significantly sized minorities with different cultural characteristics and backgrounds among us. We want to keep Hungary as Hungary.8

  Mr Orbán had mentioned his aversion to immigration in previous speeches. The previous August, at the annual gathering of Hungarian ambassadors in the Foreign Ministry building at Bem Square, Péter Szabadhegy, the Hungarian ambassador to London, asked him whether he saw immigration as one of the solutions to falling population.

  Hungary’s attitude to immigration should be ‘as hard as stone’, the prime minister told his diplomats, ‘because it sees no value in breaking up a homogenous society’. The immigration policy of the EU, Orbán continued, was ‘hypocritical, lacking moral foundations, and purposeless’.

  During the hour he spoke, 1,800 people were forced from their homes around the world – 42,500 a day, according to the UNHCR. During the whole of 2014, 43,000 people were detected crossing the Hungarian-Serbian border, according to Frontex, making it the third most popular route into the EU after the central Mediterranean (170,000) and the eastern Mediterranean (51,000).

  ‘We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before,’ the UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres wrote. ‘It is terrifying that on the one hand there is more and more impunity for those starting conflicts, and on the other there is a seeming utter inability of the international community to work together to stop wars and build and preserve peace.’9

  After the Charlie Hebdo attack, Orbán and his advisers discovered the political value of migrants, or rather the fear of them. Elected in 2010 with a landslide victory, his party Fidesz, won a second two-thirds majority in May 2014. Since then Fidesz had lost a million voters, and several by-elections. Although it was still the largest party in parliament by far, it no longer had a two-thirds m
ajority. Many centre-right voters had lost their faith in Fidesz, gravitating to Hungary’s weak and disintegrated liberal or centrist parties, or towards the radically nationalist Jobbik. Now Orbán had found what would prove to be the magic weapon to get them back on board his ship.

  His ploy was all the more remarkable as next to none of the migrants beginning to embark in Europe wanted to stay in Hungary anyway. Orbán’s speechwriters solved that problem by saying that the prime minister wanted to defend Europe. Another peculiarity was that the Hungarians themselves, at their particular crossroads of Europe, were a mixed bunch themselves. One of the most common surnames is Németh, meaning German, another is Tóth meaning Slovak, and Horváth – Croat. At times over the years to come, as Orbán whipped up then played on the public fear of refugees and migrants, he came close to portraying his people as ethnically pure. At other times, he was the first to admit that to be Hungarian was a matter of language and commitment, rather than race.

  The new government message was underlined the day after Orbán returned to Budapest from Paris by Antal Rogán, leader of the Fidesz parliamentary faction. Muslim communities, he said, were already demolishing the internal order of Christian countries in Western Europe. ‘It is not in Hungary’s interest to accept “economic migrants” with traditions completely different from Hungarian ones.’