by Nick Thorpe
Some of the accused divulged little fragments of their backgrounds which they might not have given away so easily to reporters. Aywa was travelling with his brother. They had received the money for the journey from their parents. ‘Three of my brothers were killed in Iraq by Islamic State. One was kidnapped.’ At this point, he started crying. The hearing lasted barely an hour and a half, even with the help of a translator. Suddenly, the Hungarian authorities had enough translators – each paid 20,000 forints – €66 an hour – three times more than the prosecution or defence lawyers. The verdict was word perfect, as predicted by a Szeged lawyer friend a few days earlier: deportation, with a one- or two-year interdiction from Hungarian territory.
While Hungary was plugging the last hole in its fence, the rest of the Balkan route, from beginning to end, was in turmoil. The mayor of the Greek island of Lesbos, one of five where migrants were arriving each day in small boats from the Turkish mainland, announced that there were now 30,000 on the island. So far in 2015, 340,000 refugees had already reached Greece across the sea from Turkey.
On the Austrian-Hungarian border at Nickelsdorf, Austrian railways temporarily cancelled all trains in the direction of Vienna. They cited safety reasons – too many refugees were boarding them. Some Austrian trains continued to Germany, packed with refugees, but the line from Salzburg to Munich was temporarily suspended. No trains crossed the Austrian-Hungarian border. The UNHCR announced emergency relief for 65,000 people in Serbia and Macedonia.15
When Hungary closed the fence across the track at Röszke, the big question was how the refugees would react. There seemed to be two possibilities. Either to break through what was in most places still a pretty flimsy fence, or simply to avoid that border in future.
The worst incident took place at Röszke the day after the fence closed, on 16 September. This was the old road border between the two countries, just to the east of the motorway crossing point. A crowd of several hundred refugees, diverted there when they could no longer enter Hungary along the railway track, built up through the day. Riot police arrived by the busload on the Hungarian side, including TEK counter-terrorism commandos in full uniform. A series of crash barriers was supposed to prevent the refugees getting through. Offers by the UNHCR, who were present with several Arabic-speaking interpreters, were all rejected by the Hungarian authorities. The government wanted to be certain of winning the Battle of Röszke.
The stand-off continued through the afternoon. ‘Open the fence, open the doors,’ the refugees chanted. ‘No one will make any problem to this country, no one will make any problem to the policeman,’ Ahmed Hamed, a man with a megaphone tried to address the closed ranks of riot police. ‘You must understand this. Please let us pass.’
In another message to police, he told them they had until 2 p.m. to open the gates, otherwise the crowd would ‘take matters into its own hands’. This would later be used at his trial to prove that he was personally threatening the forces of law and order with violence. Several other men in the crowd also used megaphones, sometimes inciting the crowd, sometimes trying to calm them. Tyres were set on fire by the refugees, sending black smoke billowing through the crowd and increasing the doomsday feeling.
At one point, frustrated refugees, unable to advance, threw several projectiles over the barrier at the police. The police responded immediately with a barrage of pepper spray. This was the first unnecessarily violent response. The police were well protected with shields and helmets. There was no need to respond in this way.
In the panic which followed, some refugees including women and children were injured as they tried to flee the spray. Many more projectiles were thrown at the police by the retreating crowd. The police then opened up with water-cannon. Some young men tried to retrieve projectiles. Ahmed Hamed, sitting on the shoulders of another, shouted at them through his megaphone not to throw anything at the police. A group of young men then managed to force open the gate.
Blocked by the police on the Hungarian side, we journalists could only see the rising smoke, and the arrival of more police reinforcements. Journalists covering the events from the Serbian side had easier access. ‘I watched one Syrian man come out with a child on his shoulder. The child didn’t look too well, so I followed this man all the way up to where the police were standing. He pleaded with the police to take his daughter and give her medical assistance,’ said Australian photographer Warren Richardson.16 Warren, like me, had been at the border for weeks, but while I retreated each evening to the comfort of a hotel in Szeged, he often spent the night at the border, often in an abandoned watchtower, to get the best shots at first light.
The police took the child, then the phalanx of shields closed again. The father of the child now pleaded with the police to let him through to be with his daughter. ‘I’m human. Let’s be human here. Let’s stop this. I come from Syria, a war-torn country. Why is everyone acting like this?’ At that moment, according to Warren, the TEK counter-terrorism police attacked the crowd, using the regular police as a shield.
All of a sudden I saw the TEK uniforms running towards the border. And in a matter of seconds, it just kicked off where we were. Everything just went crazy. The police behind us just start pushing us, pushing us and pushing us. It didn’t stop.
The TEK guys were just grabbing people, and what they did was place pressure upon the people, squashing them in. All I remember is looking down and seeing that young Syrian girl crying and screaming. I tried to grab hold of her and, just as I tried to grab hold of her, a hand grabbed me by the throat –
On the left-hand side of my body I could feel pain from the baton that was being shoved into my side by an officer. I couldn’t make out who the officer was straight away.
Warren was pushed to ground. ‘When I turned around and told the officer “I am no threat to you. I’m a journalist.” He stopped, looked up and saw his friend. His friend came up behind me and kicked me in the head.’ The police then tried to break Warren’s cameras before pulling him back towards the Hungarian side of the border.
[The police attack] was well-coordinated. When I was dragged into the Hungarian side, I was able to have a good look at what was going on. There was a photographer on the roof of the Hungarian customs office. At the same time I saw a TEK uniform up there on a higher level of that building. I saw another two officers up there as well. What I noticed with the TEK guys is that they were running two-way radio headsets.
I noticed one Syrian man who looked to be in his sixties. He started convulsing and it looked like he was going into cardiac arrest. Immediately, I put my cameras down and started CPR. I was told by a TEK officer to ‘Get the f*ck away from him!’
He stayed by the man’s side and tried to help him. ‘He was foaming at the mouth and his heart rate was just pumping, and I knew something was incredibly wrong with him. An officer again told me to “F*ck off!”’ Eventually, Warren was detained and taken to the police station in Szeged for questioning. He was later released.
The first ‘battle’ between refugees and Hungarian police was over. Eleven refugees had been arrested. Twenty police, as well as an uncertain number of refugees, charity workers and journalists were injured. Twelve months later, Ahmed Hamed, the man with the megaphone, was found guilty of ‘terrorism’ and sentenced to ten years in prison. In April 2017, the Appeals Court overturned that verdict on the grounds that, as the defence argued, important and contradictory evidence had not been given sufficient weight. A retrial was ordered. In January 2018, he was found guilty of ‘assisting an act of terrorism’ and sentenced to seven years in prison. Once again, he appealed.
No country in the world would allow a crowd of angry, sometimes violent people, to storm its border. But the use of the anti-terrorist police was clearly intended to reinforce the government message first issued by Viktor Orbán in January, and rammed home in the so-called National Consultation in May, that migrants were synonymous with terrorists. In this sense, the refugees walked into a trap carefully prepar
ed for them by the Hungarian government for publicity purposes.
Two ‘transit zones’ at Röszke and Kelebia were set up by the OIN. OIN officials told the UNHCR that each of these could process 100 applicants for asylum a day. The one at Röszke, a few hundred metres west of the motorway crossing point, consisted of fifty-four numbered cabins. A steel turnstile allowed access from the Serbian side. But for now, used to travelling fast and impatient to reach Germany, the migrants had little use for such ‘bureaucratic’ solutions. Most now rerouted from Serbia towards Croatia. From there, they were taken by bus and train to the Hungarian-Croatian border, where the fence was not yet completed.
The field at Röszke, a major landmark on the journey of some 200,000 refugees to Europe in 2015, was now transformed into a ghostly landscape. The big tents, which had only gone up a few days earlier, were dismantled. Municipal workers and volunteer activists tried to clear up the worst of the litter. The cornfields where so many people had peed and shat for weeks because of the shortage of toilets, were devastated. Scavengers had a field day. I watched an elderly Hungarian man, on a bicycle, sifting through the piles of clothes, tents and mattresses the refugees left behind, and piling his bicycle high with his treasures.
In the first five days after the closure of Röszke, 30,000 refugees crossed from Serbia into Croatia, defying a plea from the Croatian interior minister Ranko Ostojić to ‘stay in refugee centres in Serbia, Macedonia and Greece’. The Croats closed six road crossing points with Serbia, and attempted to create a train and road corridor across the country towards Slovenia. The Slovenian government claimed this was done without any communication with them and they protested loudly. In the meantime, many found a way north from Croatia into Hungary, at Beremend, and further west, along the River Drava, at Gyékényes. For now, Hungary let them in, even as it worked hard to complete its fence on the Croatian border.
On the diplomatic front, the European Commission pressed ahead with its quota solution to the problem. The key day was Tuesday 22 September.17 Meeting in Brussels, the European Council agreed to Juncker’s legally binding plan to relocate 108,000 asylum seekers, overriding the votes of Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Poland broke ranks with the Visegrád Four countries to vote in favour. Finland abstained. ‘We’ve reached an agreement with a very big majority, bigger than required by treaty. We would have preferred unanimity, and it’s not because we haven’t tried,’ said Luxembourg foreign minister Jean Asselborn. ‘As long as I’m prime minister, mandatory quotas won’t be implemented on Slovak territory,’ said the Slovak leader, Robert Fico, defiantly. Hungary and Slovakia would take the issue to the European Court of Justice.
*
The next day in Brussels, an emergency summit of EU leaders convened. Details of the failure of most EU states to honour commitments to the World Food Programme (WFP) were made public.18 The WFP helps feed 1.3 million of more than 4 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. At camps in Jordan alone, the failure of EU countries to fulfil their financial commitments meant an end to the food aid for 229,000 refugees, who were living on handouts of less than half a dollar a day. Hungary gave a total of $339,000 to the WFP in 2015, while Sweden gave $91.2 million. The summit concluded with a short statement.
Tonight we met to deal with the unprecedented migration and refugee crisis we are facing . . . We all recognised that there are no easy solutions and that we can only manage this challenge by working together, in a spirit of solidarity and responsibility. In the meantime we have all to uphold, apply and implement our existing rules, including the Dublin regulation and the Schengen acquis.
An extra $1 billion was pledged to the WFP and UNHCR. Most assistance was pledged to the Balkan countries, ahead of the western Balkan routes conference set for 8 October, and the Valletta conference in Malta scheduled for 11 November.
In order to ‘tackle the dramatic situation at our external borders and strengthen controls at those borders’ additional resources would be channelled to Frontex, European Asylum Support Office (EASO) and Europol. ‘We are all committed to offer sanctuary,’ Angela Merkel told the press, adding that building fences was not part of any solution she could see. ‘If they don’t like the fence, then we can let the migrants though to Austria and Germany,’ Viktor Orbán replied. And he did, for three weeks more.
At the summit, EU leaders set themselves a deadline of the end of November to establish so-called hotspots in Greece and Italy. These would be holding camps where asylum seekers could be registered and fingerprinted. From among these, according to the theory, those eligible for asylum would be relocated under the quota scheme to the countries to which they were allotted. Those whose asylum applications were rejected would be sent home. The first hotspot already existed in Catania, Sicily. Four more in Italy, and five in Greece, should now be established, on the five islands, and in the port of Piraeus.19
With Röszke closed, I moved to Beremend, south of Pécs on the Hungarian-Croatian border. Each day, coachloads of migrants arrived here and walked through the official crossing point into Hungary. On the Hungarian side, a long line of blue, Budapest buses, transported them to the railway station. From there they were taken directly either to the Austrian border, or to the train station at Zákány-Gyékényes, from where more refugee trains set out for the border. Near Beremend, I watched Hungarian soldiers and civilians on government work schemes unrolling more razor wire. The landscape was gentler here than the flatlands of Röszke and Mórahalom, less wooded and with rolling fields of harvested wheat and old acacia hedges. The September sun was warm and the soldiers cursed as they cut their bare arms occasionally on the sharp wire. I felt sorry for the soldiers, and for the wildlife, witnessing this barrier rise like a deep scar across their landscape.
Just outside the village of Magyarbóly we stumbled on an identical brown railway wagon to the one that was used to plug the point where the track crossed the fence at Röszke. It was waiting to play a similar function here and was fully decorated already, with razor wire around the edges. Along the tracks, we noticed beautiful large white snail shells with perfect spirals, long abandoned by their owners. To while away the sunny afternoon, we decorated the razor wire with them. A local signalman promised to send me a text as soon as there was any sign of the wagon moving.
Brown-eyed Syrian children arrived by bus with their families at the railway station in Magyarbóly. They waved shyly from the windows, used to seeing reporters on this journey as their allies. They were let onto the train in small groups, past soldiers in camouflage uniforms toting machine-guns.
On a Sunday morning, I asked the local priest in Beremend if we could film inside his church and talk to his parishioners after the service. ‘No,’ he replied curtly, on the phone, ‘stay away from my church.’ On the village green in Beremend was a large chunk of limestone rock with a black plaque on it. ‘In memory of the inhabitants of Beremend driven from their homes to the Hortobágy plain, on 23rd June 1950.’
Pale-brown army Humvees with heavy machine-guns mounted in the turrets were parked ostentatiously in Beremend, which the refugees would have to walk past on their way into Hungary. The glass in the tops of the turrets was so new, it still had the instructions in English on it: Strike Face This Side Out. With the locals, nonetheless the police and army presence was largely popular. ‘We thank you for your sacrifice in our defence,’ read a large, hand-drawn sign at Beremend.
We drove to Zákány-Gyékényes, to see the refugees in motion there too. Here, a small gap in the fence which led into the country from Croatia, had been left mysteriously open. The refugees arrived by train from Serbia to the Croatian village of Botovo at irregular intervals, but there was at least one trainload a night, we discovered. As the train disgorged its passengers into the dark, Croatian police and ambulances, their blue lights flashing, showed the refugees the way to Hungary – down the road to a meadow, along a track, and finally to an open field and the gap in the Hungarian fence. By now, H
ungary had given up any pretence of checking their identities. They had ten minutes to board trains – hardly enough time for the Hungarian Caritas charity, or volunteers organised by a Hungarian volunteer from Gyöngyös, Babi, and her Syrian husband, to distribute water and food parcels. Then the train set off. Here again, large numbers of Hungarian police and soldiers lined the track – unnecessarily. There were reports in the Hungarian media that the soldiers had been invited in to the village kindergarten, to meet the children. How much more interesting it would have been for those children to meet little Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan children, I thought. At the entrance to Gyékényes was a giant billboard, left over from the ‘National Consultation on Immigration and Terrorism’ in the spring. The people have decided, the country must be defended.
Back at Magyarbóly, I took an afternoon stroll down to the border at Illocska and fell into step beside an old bloke in a chequered shirt pushing his bicycle, armed with a long pole. He was on his way to a particular clump of walnut trees, he explained. And what did he think of the refugees?
‘These people are fleeing war. They should be made welcome and given hospitality here, until it is safe to return to their own countries,’ István Mihálovics, 73, told me. He stood outside his house and served them water in the heat of summer, as they trooped through Illocska, he said proudly. He had also offered them some of his very own plum brandy, which, to his chagrin, they refused.
On 30 September, Viktor Orbán addressed the General Assembly of the UN in New York. ‘What prevents us from finding an answer, is that there is no consensus about the nature of the challenge. This is not a refugee crisis. This is a mass migratory movement, composed of economic migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and also foreign fighters. This is an uncontrolled and also unregulated process.’ An ‘unlimited number’ of people, he feared, were on their way. They should be ‘given back their homes, and their lives’ he said, not offered one in Europe.20
