The Road Before Me Weeps

by Nick Thorpe

  ‘We see the Kosovo Albanians as our own citizens,’ explained the Serbian police chief, Milorad Vejović, ‘we have to give them travel documents if they ask for them, according to the Brussels agreement with the EU.’ Nevertheless, the Serbian authorities were looking into ways to stem what he called ‘an explosion’ in the numbers of those coming. Four gangs of traffickers in the border area were broken up in 2014, thanks to cooperation with the Hungarian police. One particularly notorious hub for the smugglers, the Hotel Lira in Palić on the main road into Subotica, had been bought by an Albanian the previous summer. It had recently been raided by police and closed down.

  I spent a day at the east railway station in Budapest to find out how the migrants were travelling on to Western Europe. Chaos reigned in the waiting room beside platform 9. Some Albanian families had been living there for ten days. The Hungarian police were preventing them from boarding trains to Vienna, they complained. They had no money left, not even to pay the toilet attendants to use the bathrooms. One woman told me she would go back to Kosovo immediately if she just knew how. ‘Bitte zurück Kosovo oder bitte raus Germania!’ she shouted into my camera.

  ‘All of us here are from Kosovo,’ another man told me, in a quieter, cleaner waiting room further up the platform, where they had been grouped by Hungarian police. ‘All we want is a better life, to go forward, to work and make something with our lives. We have no work, no money, no prospects in Kosovo. And we’ve been here for four days and four nights without sleeping even a minute.’

  Would he consider going home to Kosovo? I asked.

  ‘Maybe we can’t go home. The Serbians wouldn’t let us. That is their policy,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I have family members in Germany, and Austria . . . everywhere. They will help me.’

  A white Hungarian prison bus pulled up outside. Names were read out. The men filed obediently along the platform, beneath loudspeakers announcing the next train to all the places they were being denied – Vienna, Linz, Munich. A dark red Siemens intercity train slid elegantly into the platform beside them. They kept their eyes lowered, to avoid seeing it. They were led in silence out onto the station forecourt and into the waiting buses. They would be taken to the OIN to be registered, and to launch their asylum claims, if they had not done so already. Then they would be put in open camps, I knew, and would be free to continue their westward journeys.

  On 22 February, an eighteen-month-old Kosovar baby with Down syndrome died of pneumonia at the refugee reception centre at Vámosszabadi, probably contracted in the damp woods at Ásotthalom. She was the youngest of a family of six who arrived in Hungary on 9 February.13 By then, there were 160 asylum seekers at the open reception centre. According to a statement from the UNHCR, by mid-February 22,394 Kosovars had applied for international protection in Hungary, 85 per cent of applicants.

  ‘It is also important to remember that 72 per cent of the asylum seekers in Hungary who are not Kosovars come from Syria and Afghanistan, two countries plagued by war, insecurity and instability,’ said Montserrat Feixas Vihé, regional representative of the UNHCR in Budapest.14

  ‘This is a kind of invasion of refugees or rather economic refugees, coming mostly from Kosovo, but also from Afghanistan and Syria and other parts of world, so it is increasingly difficult to cope,’ Zoltán Kovács, the government spokesman told me.

  I wouldn’t say we are overwhelmed, but we are facing new challenges, such as finding new shelters. We also have to rethink the legal framework, which is becoming insufficient. We are keeping our obligations under the Schengen treaty, the Geneva Convention and other European rules. What is missing is an overall European strategy for handling this issue.

  The interview took place in the wind and rain in Kossuth Square, in front of the Hungarian parliament. As we spoke, an uncharacteristic tear ran down the government spokesman’s face. We repeated his answer to that question, to avoid the false impression that he was crying. What did he think of László Toroczkai’s idea of building a fence? I asked.

  ‘We would most definitely like to avoid as much as possible the introduction of any kind of fence or wall. We have bad memories of that from the Cold War, and most definitely we don’t think this is going to be the solution,’ Zoltán Kovács explained.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A TIME OF FEAR

  The world is a bridge, across which the way of the king and the poor man passes.

  Inscription on the bridge over the River Harmanli, Bulgaria

  The most frustrating thing about life there was the waiting. After all, in spite of the ‘advantages’ you have there, you are a prisoner. You just sit and wait, and your whole life is waiting.

  Former inmate, Busmantsi detention centre, Bulgaria1

  The old red locomotive had round windows along the side, like portholes on a ship. I laughed when I saw the number on the front: 007. James Bond. It was March 2015, and I was waiting on the platform at Belgrade railway station for the night-train to Sofia, to investigate reports of Europeans going to fight for Islamic State (IS). One route led across Bulgaria, so they could keep below the radar of Western intelligence on their way to and from Syria. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the Hungarian government was determined to paint the migrants and the terrorists with the same brush. I wanted to find out if there was any basis for that claim.

  Though the engine looked powerful, the carriages were falling apart. Painted dark blue long ago, they seemed held together now by layers of swirling graffiti. Thins1 was painted just beneath my window, in yellow, red and green curls, in contrast to the block capitals of LIEGEWAGEN, which suggested German second-class comfort, designed for students with Inter-rail tickets in the 1970s.

  I paced the platform like a trainspotter, taking photographs of the scene. From the compartment next to mine, a young man leant out, watching me suspiciously. In the photographs he has a square, Slavic jaw. In the early spring night the station looked like a film set. Puddles of orange light spilling from the windows, drowning in the gloom of tracks and platforms, the facade of the station, crowned with Cyrillic letters, lit up in Habsburg yellow.

  I had a six-person sleeping compartment all to myself. This delighted me until I realised that the lights didn’t work. Maybe they would come on when the train started? They didn’t. A quick inspection of the other empty compartments proved that mine was the rule, not the exception. After a while a grumpy attendant passed through with a pile of starched white sheets, ironed thin as paper.

  I made my bed with the rough, musty-smelling blankets I found on the bunk above me and was finally glad I couldn’t see into the filthy corners of the compartment. What was I doing, dragging myself across the Balkans in late winter, on a wild goose chase? I cursed myself for not paying extra for a comfortable Austrian Airways flight from Budapest to Sofia via Vienna.

  When I awoke it was still dark, but the train was motionless. I heard knocking on the compartments, one after another, doors sliding open, and gruff male voices. We had reached the Bulgarian border at Dragoman. I unlocked the door, pulled my ragged bedclothes around me to present a modicum of dignity, took my passport out from under the pillow, and waited.

  The voices reached the next compartment to mine where my square-faced fellow traveller was sleeping. The door slid open. Barked instructions. A silence. Then a single sentence. ‘So, you’ve been in Syria?’ The question was in English. I sat up sharply. Strained to hear the reply but couldn’t decipher it. Soon the border guards were in my compartment. They studied my own passport, stamped it, then were gone. I mulled over what to do about my widely travelled companion. My search for people of his ilk was, after all, the reason I had chosen this route. It was three o’clock in the morning. Light snowflakes had just started drifting past the windows as the train moved sluggishly off again. He could have been a construction worker there. An engineer. A security guard. A soldier even, in Bulgaria’s NATO contingent in Iraq. The train was due into Sofia station at 07.30. I resolved to strike up a conversatio
n with him as we got off the train together.

  Standing behind him in the corridor in the slowly dissipating gloom of the Sofia morning, I noticed he had no luggage. He wore a grey hoodie with the name of some non-existent university or sports team. Once we were down on the platform, I thought, I would make some passing comment about the discomfort of the journey. But the moment his foot touched the ground, he started running. He jumped down onto the tracks and sprinted across the wooden sleepers towards the exit. It all happened so fast, I hardly had time to consider, and reject, the idea of running after him.

  Later that morning I sat down with Nikolai. An agent of DANS, the Bulgarian counter-intelligence service, until a few months earlier, he had agreed to our meeting surprisingly easily. After a coffee in my hotel we went for a walk, Cold War-style, in a nearby park. He promised to make enquiries about my fellow traveller, and in the meantime told me stories from his own time in the service.

  ‘There was a foreigner in Bulgaria whom we suspected. As a West European citizen, he could travel freely. We placed him under surveillance. But it took a whole month to get the information we needed from the secret services in his home country. Can you imagine? Not hours, but weeks!’ By that time the bird, like my flighty fellow at the railway station, had flown.

  Nikolai compared tracking down potential terrorists to making a cake. You assemble all the ingredients in your kitchen, then discover that one is missing. Vanilla, for example. But you planned a vanilla cake! So you go to the shop. But it’s closed. It’s Sunday night. If Bulgarian intelligence asks its partners for a specific piece of information, it is given, in due course, he explained. But only that. Not all the other background, connected to that person, that might provide the missing clue, the missing ingredient. His or her friends, relations, network. There’s a sort of patriotism within secret services, he suggested, about sharing sensitive information about their own citizens. It is as though they don’t want their own people to carry the can, or at least, no more of the can than they actually deserve. The services are also jealous of one another and reluctant to share information which has often been gathered in illegal or semi-legal ways.

  A French citizen of Haitian origin, Fritz-Joly Joachin was arrested at the Kapitan Andreevo border crossing from Bulgaria to Turkey on 1 January 2015, six days before the Charlie Hebdo attack. He was on a bus bound for Istanbul with his three-year-old son. The initial European Arrest Warrant was filed in Paris by police acting on information provided by his wife, who thought he might take the boy to Syria. Fritz-Joly was already sitting in a Bulgarian police cell when the Charlie Hebdo attacks happened. Another warrant was issued after the French police discovered that he was in regular contact with Chérif Kouachi, one of the men who attacked the Charlie Hebdo journalists. After three weeks in detention in Bulgaria he was extradited to France.2

  One of Nikolai’s jobs in counter-intelligence was to interview asylum seekers at the Elhovo and Harmanli refugee camps close to the Turkish border. ‘I can say with full confidence that 99 per cent of all those I spoke to were genuine refugees, tortured people fleeing to safety, often with their families,’ he said. The problem might lie with the remaining 1 per cent, usually from the Maghreb countries of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Each case was handled in a room with three or four officials present: himself, another officer, and an interpreter. Questions were based on knowledge about the place the person claimed to come from, the different dialects spoken there, even the layout of that particular town. Interviewees might even be asked the names of teachers who taught at the school where they said they had studied.

  The interview lasted fifteen minutes. When a person was judged suspicious, he or she – there were some women among the refugees – was sent to the asylum detention camp at Busmantsi, near Sofia. There they could be held for up to twelve months legally, up to eighteen months in practice, while more information was gathered about them. If no link to a terrorist organisation could be proved, as happened in about 90 per cent of cases, they were then set free to continue their journey, Nikolai explained. Those judged to be a serious security threat, a mere handful, were extradited to their countries of origin, provided the country accepted them.

  The refugee influx into Europe was being carefully monitored, and in some cases assisted, for political reasons, by the Turkish intelligence service MIT, Nikolai told me. He gave as an example the sudden influx of about 10,000 migrants over a 50-kilometre stretch of the mutual border in November and December 2013. At that time Turkey and the EU were locked in talks about eventual Turkish membership, and the Turkish government clearly wanted to increase the pressure. The border police managed to stop one group of 150 migrants from entering the country at their first attempt. Several hours later, the same group reappeared inside Bulgarian territory. Someone had reorganised, and transported them to another place, very efficiently.

  ‘The MIT has been able to establish relations with many other intelligence organizations in accordance with the interests of Turkey,’ reads the entry on international cooperation in the ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ section of the organisation’s website.3

  I made contact with a Syrian who had recently been released from the high-security detention facility at Busmantsi, where Nikolai’s dodgy characters, who failed the questions at the interview, were sent. ‘The guards tried to impose discipline, as it was a prison-like institution, but they treated us with respect and care. It was like a prison, but without the abuse. If it was in our country, it would have been really different in a bad way,’ he told me, in written answers to my questions.

  What kind of people did he meet there? I asked.

  ‘Mostly refugees, trying to escape to Western Europe via Bulgaria, but unfortunately caught at the border.’ He had not heard of anyone who was a real security threat. Some of the inmates had been there as long as eighteen months. Some didn’t even want to leave, because at least they had food and shelter, and were safe from the dangers of the outside world.

  Most of the conversations between the inmates were just small talk, he said, about their families, or about their relatives, waiting for them in other European countries. They often watched television, played cards, smoked or drank coffee together, ‘but that switch for concealing the truth is on all the time’.

  The most frustrating thing about life there was the waiting. After all, in spite of the ‘advantages’ you have there, you are a prisoner. You just sit and wait, and your whole life is waiting. You know there will be an end to all this and one day you will be out, but at this moment you have nothing to do but wait. While waiting, some of the inmates became angry because of the slow procedures, because of the suspense and the uncertainty and the vague future out there. Most of the people there just want a better life for themselves and their families.

  Back in the park, Nikolai reverted from the image of the chef in his kitchen, to the older one of finding a needle in a haystack. ‘Finding the needle is only the first step, though it’s hard enough. Most important is what you do after that. How to react, because of the lack of time, the lack of information.’

  I interviewed Philip Gunev, deputy interior minister of Bulgaria, in Sofia. He stressed that Bulgaria was doing all it could, and that whenever a tip-off arrived the Bulgarian services acted swiftly and effectively. Three Moroccan and Brazilian citizens, allegedly planning a bomb attack in Barcelona, were arrested in Bulgaria the previous December and extradited to Spain. Imran Khawajah, a British man convicted of terrorist offences, passed through Bulgaria on his way home in summer 2014, after faking his own death in Syria.4 ‘If a future terrorist attack takes place somewhere in Europe,’ Philip Gunev told me, ‘and the perpetrator passed through Bulgaria, then that would be a failure of security services across Europe to identify such an individual and to notify us, rather than our failure for not stopping him.’

  *

  In May 2015, the Hungarian government launched its National Consultation on Immigration and Terrorism.5 This was a follow-up to
Viktor Orbán’s interview on state television in Paris, after the Charlie Hebdo attack – an attempt by the government to consolidate the link in voters’ minds between migration and terrorism. A single A4 page with twelve questions was sent to all 8 million Hungarian voters. The questions prompted the desired answers. Each was followed by a choice of three boxes to tick. An envelope was provided for the completed form, with pre-paid postage. The questions included:

  Do you agree that mistaken immigration policies contribute to the spread of terrorism?

  Do you agree with the opinion that economic immigrants endanger the jobs and livelihoods of the Hungarian people?

  In your opinion have Brussels’ policies on immigration and terrorism failed?

  Would you support the government in its efforts to introduce stricter immigration regulations in opposition to Brussels?

  Would you support a new regulation that would allow the government to place immigrants who illegally entered the country into internment camps?

  Do you agree with the government that instead of allocating funds to immigration we should support Hungarian families and those children not yet born?

  It was not a questionnaire in the classic sense of trying to find out what the population thinks, the government spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, cheerfully admitted. It was a ‘political’ questionnaire, he explained, intended to seek support for the government’s own stance, that immigration and terrorism were tightly interwoven. And it was a classic example of the Fidesz government’s governing methods and style, which a small group of communications experts were perfecting. You tell people who to fear one day, and you ask them the next day who they are afraid of. And you store their data carefully, so that at the next election, you know who to address, and who to encourage to vote – nationwide. This was the third such campaign, all with an anti-migrant theme, organised by the government between the elections in 2010 and 2018.