by Nick Thorpe
It was almost dark by now. I took a room in the Pinetree Guesthouse on the corner where the road from Ásotthalom reaches the main road. The boarding house, true to its name, was overhung with pines. This was where the extra police, brought in to catch the Kosovars in February, were quartered. I was the only guest.
The next morning I was up at five. I wanted to witness people at the very moment they entered Hungary. I drove back down the sandy tracks to the same places I found the day before, to the cable strewn bridge and the overgrown canal. Cobwebs glittered gold in the early sunlight. Layers of mist lay on the fields along the border, like fine pastry. The din of the birds and frogs was deafening, but there were no migrants. I was too late – they came at first light. By the time the sun was up, they had reached the road. The first group I met, as yet undiscovered by the police, were eight young Afghan men, hardly more than boys, walking slowly along the road between Ásotthalom and Királyhalom. They hadn’t eaten for four days, they said. I had six melons in the back of the car, three watermelons, three honeydew. The eyes of the Afghans lit up as I unpacked the big fruit. Do you have a knife? One of the boys asked. No? He shrugged, lifted the fat green cylindrical melon into the air, and let it crash onto the tarmac at his feet. It split into five pieces. Soon we were all perched at the roadside, our faces buried in the red, sugar-sweet, black-seeded flesh.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE DOG’S BREAKFAST
The sharing of migrants across member states, the processing of asylum claims, the creation of legal routes into Europe – there should be pan-European coordination of this. Instead, there is a dog’s breakfast of national policies, some more enlightened than others.
Financial Times leader column, 31 December 20151
On 31 July 2015, British prime minister David Cameron announced that he was sending sniffer-dog teams and extra security fencing to France to help reduce the growing chaos in Calais.2 For the past year, informal tent camps of migrants dubbed ‘the Jungle’, close to the motorway which leads to the port area, had grown from 800 to around 5,000 people. Each night they tried to clamber on to the back of, underneath, or into the containers carried on trucks bound for the UK. Most of the migrants were young and desperate enough to risk their lives. Eurotunnel, the company which manages the rail-link under the English Channel which the trucks were queuing to get onto, said they had prevented 37,000 people from entering Britain so far that year. A security fence costing £7 million was already in place. The new fencing was sent to reinforce it.
There was no figure available for the number who had got across, but media reports in Kent, the first county on the far side, suggested over 600 unaccompanied children succeeded in just three months. The numbers were small compared to those funnelling up through the Balkans, but psychologically important. Britain was just a year ahead of a crucial referendum on EU membership. Most people thought of ‘immigrants’ not as Syrians or Iraqis fleeing war, but as East Europeans flooding the country in search of work. The double impact of Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians and Romanians already legally present in the country, and the nightly images of kids from the rest of the world trying to storm lorries at Calais was already fuelling the argument for Britain to leave the EU.
The British prime minister’s choice of the word ‘swarm’ to refer to migrants, was fiercely criticised in Britain:
David Cameron crudely described this flow of migrants as a ‘swarm’ this week, but worse was the Prime Minister’s subsequent decision to send British sniffer dogs to fortify the channel crossing. This is the shallowest gesture politics, a ploy to keep the press sated for a few days. If Mr Cameron lacks vision, so too does the European Union itself.
The solution, the Financial Times leader writers argued, was complex but not impossible for a club with the wealth and diplomatic and military resources of the EU. A quota system for the relocation of asylum seekers from pressure points like Greece and Turkey should be one of the elements – exactly the quota system so fiercely opposed by the East European states. Longer-term measures should include Europe welcoming and streamlining applications from those who had already reached Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. British and French military forces should help impose some order on the North African ports, especially in Libya, from which many African migrants were setting out to cross the Mediterranean. And much more should be done to improve the economic prospects of North and sub-Saharan Africa, to reduce the exodus. And the Financial Times concluded:
Governments invest too much hope in technical fixes: a security measure here, a raid on people-traffickers there. The real problem is structural. As long as chaos reigns close to Europe, people will risk their lives to come here. The solution to the migrant problem lies at the source.
*
A new Hungarian law came into force on 1 August 2015, turning illegal entry into Hungary from a misdemeanour into a criminal offence.3 It also created a unilateral legal provision for Hungary to send migrants back to any country its parliament declared safe. Until that point, Serbia and Hungary had a bilateral agreement allowing for the deportation of up to sixty people a day in either direction. That agreement had been successfully implemented with hundreds of Kosovars in the spring. Upset by the fence, and deeply alarmed at the prospect of tens of thousands of people getting stuck in Serbia when the fence was completed, Serbia announced that it was suspending the deportation agreement. Hungary’s fast-track courts might be able to sentence dozens of people a day to expulsion, Serbia made clear that it would not accept them.
On 4 August reporters were allowed into the old Dunaferr iron works in Dunaújváros, on the River Danube, south of Budapest. We were shown into the vast assembly hall where inmates from four Hungarian prisons were preparing steel rods as stanchions for the new border fence. They wore yellow high-visibility jackets over their grey prison uniforms, blue or orange helmets, and heavy-duty gloves. Many were of Roma origin. Hungarian prison governors privately admit that more than half of all inmates are of Roma ethnic background. Dark-skinned Hungarians were being conscripted into Viktor Orbán’s war against dark-skinned refugees.
The men stacked the steel rods under the watchful, but not unsympathetic, gaze of prison warders in dark trousers and pale blue shirts. Handcuffs glimmered on the back of their belts like Christmas decorations. Other stanchions hung at an angle from the high ceiling on wires, like solar panels. The wires looked from a distance like steel rain, falling in shafts of sunlight across a futuristic industrial landscape.
The men were manufacturing the basic components of the fence itself, not the razor wire which was made at another factory. In the next-door workshop, more inmates, meticulously kitted out in safety gear, used welding torches to cut the steel rods to the right length. In yet another workshop, the steel was galvanised with zinc to increase its resistance to corrosion, and thus lengthen the life of the fence. János Lázár, the head of the prime minister’s office, had commented a few days earlier that the fence was only a temporary, not a permanent measure. The work we observed in Dunaújváros suggested it would be around longer than we would.
The inmates tolerated our intrusive lenses pretty well. The border fence, everyone knew, was a kind of political circus, and we reporters no less than the men building sections of it, or the soldiers unrolling it, fixing it into place and guarding it, were all performing animals. Outside, great rusting drums lay like discarded toilet rolls. Dunaferr is just a shadow of its former self. Dunaújváros was built on the fields around the village of Dunapentele in the mass industrialisation period following the Communist takeover after the Second World War. From 1951 to 1961 it was called Sztálinváros, Stalin-town. The ore melted into steel in the furnaces here was brought across the Black Sea from Ukraine and Russia, then up the Danube in long, flat-bottomed barges.
On 12 August, twenty-year-old Marah El Saeed left the Syrian city of Aleppo with her mother, her sister and two younger brothers, after four years of war.
We always hoped that it will end soon. We t
old ourselves we had to be more patient, although the lack of the water and electricity and everything we needed made life so difficult. The part of the city we were living in was bombed daily for three years. Despite the bombing and the shortages, we tried to lead a normal life. My sister and I were going to university and my brothers to school. But in the final year IS and the other Islamic groups were so close to where we live. They threatened people that they will come in and kill us horribly. They are monsters, and they were our biggest fear and our biggest reason to leave.
From Aleppo we travelled to the Lebanese border. From Beirut we flew to Turkey – this part of the journey we did legally. Then on 20 August, just before sunrise, we boarded a rubber dinghy on the west coast of Turkey. The journey took exactly one hour, across the sea to Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos.
We took the big ship to Athens, then a bus to the Greek-Macedonian border. We walked through the borders at night in a big group and the police were all around us, as though they were guiding us. We crossed Macedonia by train to the Serbian border. The Serbian police tried to stop us from getting in, but there were not so many of them, so we ran past them, into Serbia.
Then we travelled by bus to a region whose name I have forgotten. We paid the smugglers to make us fake papers there, which meant we could reach Belgrade without having to stay in a camp first. From Belgrade we tried to go to Hungary by train, but the Serbian police in the train near the Hungarian border caught us, and we just got off the train.
At night a man persuaded us to let him accompany us, as he was also going to Germany. So we started walking with him. Then we discovered that he had lied. He didn’t have internet or GPS on his phone. I told my mum I thought we should go back. We found a nightclub and they ordered a taxi for us and we went back to Belgrade.
In the morning we took a bus to the Hungarian border. Then we walked across the border. The police in Hungary caught us and told us to sit at the roadside. We waited in the hot sun without any water for more than seven hours. Finally they took us by bus to the camps but in fact they were like prisons. We were treated so badly for two days.
As the numbers of those crossing into EU countries increased, so did the tensions between Hungary and its Balkan and EU neighbours. On 20 July EU leaders accepted a plan to redistribute 32,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy across the block – less than the 40,000 proposed by Jean-Claude Juncker in June, but respectfully close to that number. Most were Syrians and Eritreans. ‘We are almost there,’ Dimitris Avramopoulos, EU home affairs commissioner, said confidently. ‘The remaining 8,000 will be allocated by the end of this year.’
While most other European countries grappled with the question of how many asylum seekers to accept, the Hungarian government stuck to its policy of not accepting a single one. In speech after speech, Orbán insisted that these were not genuine refugees at all, but economic migrants. The government also announced plans to close the two long-established refugee camps at Debrecen and Bicske, and move asylum seekers to tent camps instead.
The Hungarian police, and László Toroczkai’s field rangers, were struggling to cope with the influx at Röszke and Ásotthalom. The blue hangar at Röszke had long since overflowed, with an average of 1,500 people crossing a day, mostly up the railway track from Horgoš to Röszke. Those rounded up by the police were taken there first, for preliminary registration. The field next to the hangar filled with green and white tents. The Hungarian Red Cross put up a white tent at the entrance. It was a closed camp, patrolled by the police, but relatively easy to get into or break out of. On the far side of the road the authorities were building a larger, more secure camp with taller fences.
The people-smugglers were having a field day. The Serbian, Albanian and Romanian traffickers who had been plying their trade from the OMV petrol station beside the motorway at Röszke had begun to be edged out by more home-grown ‘taxi drivers’ – mostly people of Roma origin from Baranya and Borsod counties. Word spread fast that Syrian migrants would pay €200 per person for a ninety-minute ride to Budapest. The stupidity of the situation was that they could have got a bus ticket into Szeged for a couple of euros, then an intercity train ticket for €20.
Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and volunteer groups struggled to step into the huge vacuum the state refused to fill. In Szeged, a Migration Solidarity group set up by local teachers Balázs Szalai and Mark Kékesi had around 200 volunteers. With the permission of the Socialist mayor of Szeged, László Botka, they set up semi-permanent wooden booths in front of the railway station, and distributed leaflets, tea, food, clothes and information about the onward journey. Everywhere the refugees went they left a trail of litter which did little to endear them to the local population. But here in Szeged, a city of 160,000, the volunteers made sure that all litter in the area around the station was cleared almost before it hit the ground. The volunteers even cleaned the station toilets, to the astonishment of the local toilet attendant, who wept with emotion as she told me she had never seen them so clean. Those registered and fingerprinted at one of the Röszke camps, or at the OIN office on the main boulevard in Szeged, or at the new camp at Nagyfa, just to the north of the city, were brought to the railway station by bus, in several convoys a day. Each was issued with a single A4 page, telling them to report to one of the camps at Debrecen, Bicske or Vámosszabadi within seventy-two hours. But little information was provided about how to get there. The volunteers took them over, arranged translators, and gave them the information they actually needed. The volunteers drew maps with instructions in Arabic, Farsi and English, on how to get to the designated camps. They also clashed with some Szeged taxi drivers, who resented the fact that, armed with the information that one could travel so cheaply to Budapest on public transport, many began to shun their expensive offers.
Within the police, there was also a degree of corruption. One local person described how the migrants were taken in groups of three cars, which the police were paid to ignore. I had no way of checking the information, but it tied in with the procedures used by smugglers in Bulgaria. By prior arrangement, the first car would be stopped by police. While they were occupied checking the bona fide identity of the passengers, the second car would sail through, unscathed by the law. A third vehicle would drive along behind, guarding the smugglers’ rear from over-inquisitive police who were not party to the plot. In April, May and June 2015, 3,000 suspected smugglers were arrested across the EU, according to Frontex.
On 22 August I moved down to Szeged, and hardly got home for the next three months. Each morning I drove down to the cornfield at Röszke to do my early reports for the BBC beside the railway track as the sun came up, and long lines of asylum seekers appeared from the fields of maize and sunflowers.
These are the flattest and lowest-lying lands in the whole of Hungary. Not far from the border at Gyálarét near Tiszasziget is the lowest point in the country, just 75 metres above sea-level.4 In the marshland nearby, the Lúdvári Venus was found by archaeologists in the 1960s. A clay figure resembling a woman, estimated at 7,800 years old, she was the product of one of the civilisations which grew up in the lower Danube basin in the late Neolithic and Copper Ages.
The numbers of migrants grew through August, passing 2,000 a day on the 16th and topping 3,000 for the first time on the 25th.5
*
In Germany on Friday, 21 August 2015, a private memo signed by Angela Wenzel, a senior official at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), fell into the hands of a pro-asylum NGO, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) who immediately published it on their website.6 The memo made it clear that Germany had suspended the hitherto obligatory tests for Syrian asylum seekers, which all asylum seekers had to undergo, to establish which country they first entered the EU. That test was the necessary prerequisite to fulfil the Dublin III Regulation. In practice this meant that Syrian refugees need no longer fear deportation to the first country where they were registered after they entered the
EU.
Hungary had already announced on 23 June that it was suspending implementation of the Dublin III regulation, but this was much bigger news. Germany, as the main target country, had made clear that it would not send any Syrians back to the fringes of the EU. The message to Syrians was clear: from now on, you are welcome here.
The Dublin system appeared to work as long as manageable numbers of migrants arrived in Europe. But large numbers rendered it unworkable, as it put an unfair burden on EU countries with borders along the southern and eastern edges of the EU. The German action, even though it was declared as a ‘suspension’ of the Dublin procedures that would be applied only to Syrian refugees, looked very much like the final nail in the Dublin coffin.7
The EU refugee system had long been withering on the vine. In 2014 Germany asked Italy and Greece to take back 35,100 asylum seekers under the Dublin procedures. In practice, only 4,800 of those were actually deported.8 At the same time, German and French leaders called on Greece and Italy to do more to register all migrants in the first place. Greece protested that it did not have enough fingerprinting machines. Frontex complained that member states were not fulfilling their promises to provide more personnel and equipment. The argument went round and round in circles, and illustrated how hard it was for a club of twenty-eight states to coordinate unpopular policies. Meanwhile the UNHCR pointed out that countries neighbouring Syria – Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan – continued to bear the brunt of the refugee crisis, and only a fraction of the funds pledged to make their lives more bearable there had actually arrived. Thus it was little wonder that they continued their journeys to Europe, in search of a less precarious life.
The Pro-Asyl NGO in Germany welcomed the news from BAMF, but called for it to be extended to others. ‘Unfortunately the fiction persists that this only works for Syrians, not other nationalities,’ said the group’s leader, Günther Burkhardt: ‘Now the German Federal government must face up to reality and suspend the system for other refugees too.’ ‘The values of European civilisation are at stake,’ he added. ‘A Europe surrounded by fences will not work.’
