The Road Before Me Weeps

by Nick Thorpe

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THREE SAVAGE FRONTIERS

  My wife and friend, only

  so far away. Three savage frontiers. Slowly

  it is autumn. Will even autumn forget me here?

  Miklós Radnóti1

  On 30 September 2015 Russian military planes took off from the Khmeimim airbase on the shore of the eastern Mediterranean, south-east of Latakia. The targets were both IS rebels and Free Syria Army rebels fighting forces loyal to President Bashar Assad. The news went down badly with Syrian refugees trudging the short road from the Croatian station in Botovo, across the border into Hungary.

  ‘The Americans, the British, the French, the Jordanians and the Saudis all bomb us, and say they are doing it to help us,’ one man told me, as I walked rapidly at his shoulder, trying to keep up. ‘Now the Russians too are bombing us, and they also say it is for our own good!’

  The year 2015 was one of fierce battles in Syria, and of major advances for the forces of the so-called Islamic State. In January Kurdish Peshmerga fighters managed to push IS troops out of Kobani, on the Syrian-Turkish border.2 Kurdish children in the cornfield at Röszke sang me songs about the heroes of Kobani, around their campfires. Their fathers, and sometimes their aunts or older sisters, had stayed behind to fight. The US military provided direct support to ground forces for the first time in the conflict.

  In May IS troops captured the ancient city of Palmyra and blew up many of its most beautiful buildings. Khaled Asaad, an eighty-one-year-old scholar and keeper of the antiquities was publicly executed by IS in August.3 He had cared for the site since 1963. Just before IS troops arrived, he helped with the evacuation of many items from the city to Damascus. ‘Their systematic campaign seeks to take us back into prehistory, but they will not succeed,’ said his son-in-law Khalil Hariri.

  IS didn’t destroy everything. Smaller items, dating back centuries before the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, were looted and sold on the international black market. The biggest demand for them was in Western Europe and the United States. They were taken first to Turkey, I was told by one source, and then by ship to Constanta in Romania, or Varna in Bulgaria. And from there by taxi across Romania, and Hungary to Austria. In the other direction, arms flowed into the hands of IS. ‘Let’s hope there’s not a war soon in Croatia,’ former Croatian president Stipe Mesić said, ‘because we’ve sold all our weapons to the Iraqis.’ Hercules troop carrying planes took off at strange times of the night from the airport in Zagreb, bound for Baghdad. Tens of thousands of Kalashnikovs, left over from the Balkan wars of the early 1990s, were delivered to the Iraqi army, with US mediation. As IS forces advanced, those guns fell into their hands. Barrels which once warmed to the battles in East Slavonia in Croatia or the Krajina in Serbia, next saw action against the Peshmerga around Kobani, Mosul or Sinjar.4

  Each refugee I met told me their reasons for fleeing their country. Many Syrians said they were escaping from IS, but just as many, probably more, said they were fleeing the brutality of President Bashar Assad. Despite the rhetoric of Barack Obama and David Cameron, who described Assad as an evil man who could not be part of any political solution, there was little awareness in Eastern Europe of him as a dictator who had tried to crush what began as a peaceful revolution. According to Amnesty International, 13,000 Syrians were executed in Syrian jails for opposition to Assad, between 2011 and 2017. Perhaps there would have been more sympathy for Syrians in Hungary if Hungarians had seen the parallels with their own failed revolution of 1956.

  Now the Russians had come to his aid, to roll back rebel advances. By the start of 2015, 200,000 Syrians had been killed in four years of civil war. 3.2 million had fled – 1.2 million to Turkey, a similar number to Jordan, and 620,000 to Lebanon.5 A further 7.6 million were displaced inside their country. The pre-war population of Syria was 23 million, including refugees from other conflicts, especially Iraq. The population of the capital, Damascus, was 1.7 million – about the same population as Budapest. Aleppo, the second city, was numerically larger before the war with 2.1 million people.

  During 2015, 100,000 more people died. Syrian government forces still held a wide swathe of land down the Mediterranean coast and along the Lebanese border.6 The Free Syrian Army, led most effectively by the Al-Nusra Front, held the north-west of the country. IS forces held large areas inland, in what appeared on maps like a skull and cross-bones pattern. Kurdish militias held much of the north, along the border with Turkey, in what they dared hope was part of their future state of Kurdistan. US military and diplomatic support for the Kurds seemed to offer them their greatest opportunity for centuries of achieving their own state. Bitter opposition to that dream by Turkey represented the greatest threat.

  June was the bloodiest month of the year, with over 11,000 killed. In July, the number of refugees from Syria passed 4 million, including 1.8 million in Turkey. Due to Russian bombing raids in October, the Syrian forces, backed by Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon and Iran, made major advances. By September 2015, half the Syrian population had been forced to flee their homes, seeking refuge either inside the country, or across the borders.7

  *

  After the Hungarian authorities closed the railway line at Röszke, the refugees were diverted west along the fence towards Croatia. Croatia is shaped like a boomerang, or the arms of the Virgin Mary, hugging Bosnia, the baby Jesus, to her chest. The top arm, resting against Hungary, is about 100 kilometres wide.

  The refugees now began funnelling across that border. Croatia was unprepared. Perhaps her politicians quietly hoped the refugees would break through Hungary’s defences at Röszke. Or perhaps, just a few months before an election, they were trying not to think about the issue at all.

  On 17 September, the Croatian army built a refugee camp at Opatovac, just across the border from the Serbian town of Šid. On the first day, 3,000 arrived; on the second, 11,000. There were 700 beds. Here, as in many places on the route, to be Syrian was gold, any other nationality was suspect. The Afghans, and even the North Africans, tried to pass themselves off as Syrians, to the fury of genuine Syrians. This became one of the main sources of tension between the refugees and there were regular scuffles between them, to add to the general misery of the weeks or months on the road.

  This new bottleneck of the crisis was in the lowlands along the Danube and Drava rivers, close to the Croatian cities of Vukovar and Osijek, from which many refugees fled to Hungary in the Balkan wars in the early 1990s. The walls of the refugee camps at that time, in Kiskunhalas, Debrecen, Bicske and Nyírbátor were scarred with a mixture of Arabic and Serbo-Croat graffiti.

  During the Bosnian war in 1993, I often took watermelons to a trainload of Bosnian refugees near Čakovec in Croatia. There was one thirteen-year-old girl who acted as the English translator for about 100 people. As we sat drinking coffee with her mother, I asked her what she was reading. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque’s poignant tale of life in the trenches in the First World War. At that time her father was missing somewhere in the quagmire of war in Bosnia, fighting in the Bosnian-Croatian army. Years later, I discovered that he had survived and the family were reunited.

  In September 2015 the Croatian government of prime minister Zoran Milanović had two choices: to allow the refugees across his territory to the north into Hungary, or west into Slovenia. He chose Hungary first – to the fury of the Hungarian government.

  ‘Instead of honestly making provision for the immigrants, it sent them straight to Hungary. What kind of European solidarity is this?’ Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó asked rhetorically.

  ‘Your border,’ the Croatian prime minister, replied fiercely, ‘can only be sealed by killing people. Croatia does not shout, does not build fences, does not send its soldiers to the border. It just does its job,’ said Milanović.

  In the second half of September 86,000 refugees entered Croatia. Many slept in the fields around the Opatovac refugee camp before being moved on by train
and bus to the Hungarian border at Beremend and Zákány. In the chaos, many simply set out on foot across fields of maize and sunflowers, and through the vineyards which dot the famous Ilok wine region. White wines from here were sent to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953.

  All the closure of Röszke had achieved was that exactly the same numbers, about 6,000 a day, were entering Hungary but now through Croatia instead of Serbia. This time, however, the Hungarian authorities showed just how organised they could be if they wanted to. A fleet of blue city buses queued to take them to railway stations nearby, and on to the Austrian border. While the new laws which came into force in Hungary were draconian in many ways towards refugees, there were also elements designed to make the work of the police easier. From now on they could requisition buses and coaches, which meant that the onward transport of refugees to Austria became much easier.

  Hungary could have closed that border too at any time but appeared to hesitate. Orbán was in close talks with Slovak, Czech and Polish leaders and seemed determined, this time at least, not to act alone. A consensus already existed among the Visegrád Four countries – Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland – which fitted his political ambitions well. Orbán now saw his chance to become the leader not just of Hungarians who like him regarded the current influx as a new ‘Muslim invasion’, but of all ‘sensible Europeans’ who resented immigration from non-EU countries in general. At talks through the second half of September and the first half of October, Orbán called the Austrian and German bluff: You want these people? Perhaps we should just send them on to you. You want us to stop them? Then please say so publicly, then we won’t be blamed so much for doing so.

  Orbán was also working hard, with some success, to convince his friends in the German Christian Social Union (CSU) that Angela Merkel was personally to blame for the whole refugee crisis. He gave many interviews to German media in an attempt to persuade German public opinion of this as well. It was a simple narrative, but a false one. Hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants had already entered Germany by the time Merkel made her comments in late August and early September, cited above. With deteriorations in their physical safety, those then pouring across the borders had made up their minds to leave a wide swath of countries, in the Middle East and beyond, early in 2015 or the previous year. A study published in Die Zeit, partly based on Syrians’ Google searches of keywords such as ‘Germany’ throughout the whole of 2015, revealed that there was no increase whatsoever in migrant numbers as a result of Merkel’s comments.8 If the chancellor had been less polite, she could have fairly blamed Orbán’s fence for adding to the domino effect, by swaying those who had not yet made up their minds in June.

  Orbán did not just offer a simple explanation for what was happening, he offered a simple solution: Germany should close its border. This argument was also based on a false premise: that Germany policed an external border of the EU, which any secondary school geography student could have pointed out was not the case. Those reaching the German border had already crossed five or six European state lines on their way.

  If Germany closed her border, as Merkel immediately realised, each country on the Balkan route would face a massive build-up of refugees and migrants, and chaos would result all the way back to Greece in Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia and Macedonia.

  Merkel’s policy was based on reaching a consensus, while Hungarian policy was based on unilateral action by member states. Meanwhile the European Commission dithered, and its president Jean-Claude Juncker focused on relocation quotas. These would never be popular at an EU level, and would not have affected the current burning issue of the 5,000 souls a day entering the EU. In the absence of leadership from Brussels, Germany was reluctantly leading attempts to find a solution.

  *

  On 7 October Angela Merkel and French president François Hollande jointly addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the first time the heads of state of the two countries had done so together since Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand greeted the reunification of Eastern and Western Europe in December 1989.

  ‘We must not succumb to the temptation of falling back into acting in nationalistic terms,’ Merkel said. ‘National solo efforts are no solution to the refugee crisis.’ A plan was needed, and there was already one on hand.9

  ‘It all started with a paper we wrote in September,’ Gerald Knaus of the Berlin-based European Stability Initiative told me. The ESI report was entitled ‘Why People Don’t Need to Drown in the Aegean’.10 ‘We made the point that everything depends on Turkey.’

  ‘The situation on the European Union’s external borders in the Eastern Mediterranean is out of control,’ the report began. ‘In the first eight months of 2015, an estimated 433,000 migrants and refugees have reached the EU by sea, most of them – 310,000 – via Greece.’ Of this number, 175,000 were Syrian, and therefore almost certain to be granted asylum when they finally reached Western Europe, having risked their lives and been robbed, often several times, by smugglers on the way. There had to be a better solution.

  Gerald Knaus had lived in Turkey for seven years, and had excellent contacts with Turkish, German and Dutch diplomats. Crucially, he knew what Turkish politicians most wanted: visa-free access for Turkish citizens to EU countries, and more financial resources to cope with the millions of refugees it was already generously hosting. ESI researchers were themselves influenced by a study-trip to Finland in 2013, along that country’s long border with Russia. There they learnt the importance of neighbouring countries in keeping irregular migrant numbers down. Inside Russia, old Soviet-era installations – including two 4-metre-high fences with a track down the middle – and the watchful eye of the FSB, the Russian secret service, kept numbers down. Finland only has a low, largely unmanned fence, mainly to mark the actual border.

  The ESI circulated their new proposals to German journalists, who responded enthusiastically, publishing the key elements and carrying long interviews with Knaus. Neither the German (liberal asylum policy) nor the Hungarian (everyone build a fence and shut them all out) approach offered a solution to the ever increasing numbers of Syrian refugees, the ESI argued. Instead, Turkey needed to be recognised as the gatekeeper of the EU and a deal needed to be struck with it – the bare bones of which were, at this stage, that over the next twelve months, Germany, with the organisational assistance of the UNHCR, should take 500,000 asylum seekers directly from Turkey, while Greece should agree to send back all those arriving irregularly in small boats across the Aegean. Order needed to be reimposed on the external border, and in the process, on the internal borders of the EU as well, based on the fair and humanitarian premise that most of those on the road were genuine refugees and deserved the help of Europe on the basis of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

  ‘There was a vacuum at the heart of EU policymaking,’ Gerald Knaus told me later. Over the coming months, he toured Western capitals and Ankara, publicly and privately discussing different elements of and objections to the plan. Two Turkish diplomats, the Ambassador to the EU Selim Yenel, and Avni Karsioglu, Turkish Ambassador in Berlin, played a central role in conveying the ideas to Ankara. Contacts inside Angela Merkel’s office, and in Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel’s team, ensured that the proposals received an attentive audience in the German government. As Gabriel and Merkel increasingly referred to it, the German media soon dubbed the ESI proposals ‘the Merkel plan’.

  *

  I went from the Croatian border back to the Serbian one to attend several refugee trials in Szeged. There were two separate courtrooms in use, one in the main county court, on Széchenyi Square, a massive nineteenth-century building painted Habsburg yellow, and a second, more modern one, quickly improvised to serve as a courtroom to reduce the workload. The verdicts were all the same – guilty, deportation. The only variation was in how long people would not be allowed to re-enter Hungary. As if they would ever want to. Earlier in October, the European Commission accused Hunga
ry of contravening the 2013 EU directive on asylum procedures.11 The letter, written by Director-General of Migration and Home Affairs Matthias Ruete, accused the government of criminalising those who crossed its border, of failing to inform them sufficiently in their own language of the charges against them, of neglecting their rights because of the sheer speed of the procedure, and of failing to make proper provision for the children among them. It also criticised Hungary for refusing to allow human rights organisations into the ‘transit zones’.

  ‘A person who wants to apply for asylum has to get access to the territory of the given country, and has to get access to a fair and legal asylum procedure,’ Ernö Simon, the UNHCR spokesman told me.

  Now we see that all those people who arrive from Serbia and ask for asylum in Hungary are without exception rejected, just on the grounds that they come from a ‘safe’ third country, Serbia. The UNHCR does not consider Serbia a safe country. We do not recommend that other countries send asylum seekers back to Serbia, Macedonia, or even Greece. So this is against our official position as well.

  After one trial I witnessed a much more mundane, almost ritual humiliation. Following his guilty verdict, a young man in yellow trousers was marched down one of the main boulevards in Szeged, by three large policemen. I followed at a safe distance, taking photographs. His hands were handcuffed behind his back, he struggled to keep his trainers on, because the laces had been removed. All around, the good people of Szeged looked the other way and carried on with their everyday business. Girls with long blonde hair, like dandelions in the autumn sunlight. Young lads pushing bicycles. Parents with children on the back of their bikes, carried on as if everything was normal, as the young man was marched to the headquarters of the Immigration Office on Szeged’s very own London Boulevard, which also sported a blue European Union flag on its square yellow exterior.