by Nick Thorpe
Samer Kayssoun was an antiques dealer, originally from Homs, Syria’s third city. He had been living in Lebanon for two years, then in Turkey for a few months, when he set out to reach Europe. Now he was on trial with his seventeen-year-old nephew, for illegally crossing the fence. ‘We were safe in Turkey,’ he told the judge, ‘but we were not allowed to work there. I left ten family members behind and set out for Europe. It took us ten days to reach Serbia. In Greece I got help from smugglers, they brought us to the Serbia– Hungary border. They pointed out the way. Then we saw the fence.’
He, his nephew and several others climbed over or through the fence, then set out in search of the police, he said. The smugglers had told them the Hungarian police would help them travel on to Austria. Instead, they were immediately arrested and put on trial. Samer cut a strange figure in the court in his large anorak, its hood lined with fake fur, the shoe-laces of his shoes removed, to prevent him hanging himself in his cell. If the smuggler had been a little bit kinder, he would have directed him to join the thousands trudging through the fields in Croatia instead. This knowledge made his current predicament even worse.
I watched the inevitable sentencing, then chatted with the judge. Didn’t it disturb him, I asked, that he knew that the sentence he had just delivered could not be carried out? Since Serbia had suspended the mutual deportation agreement between the two countries, very few of the 600 people who had already been sentenced by the court in Szeged, could actually be officially deported. The Hungarian authorities did not know what to do with them. Some ended up in closed asylum detention facilities, some were quietly released and simply continued their journey into Austria. My enquiries at the Vác prison, west of Budapest up the Danube, revealed that there were thirty migrants there, awaiting deportation. The judge in Szeged, on the corridor on his way to his lunch break, said the execution of the sentence had nothing to do with him.
Samer and his nephew were led away to the police cells. We followed them down the corridor of the court house, filming them as far as we could. I assumed they too would spend weeks or months in prison. I discovered, much later, that they only slept one more night in custody before being released into an open camp. Samer rang a friend in Vienna, who drove to Hungary immediately to pick them up by car. Thirty-six hours after his humiliation in the Szeged courtroom he was in a hot shower in a good Viennese hotel. Such were the strange inconsistencies of Hungarian justice. It was like an elaborate theatre performance, designed to give the Hungarian public the illusion of safety and the migrants the illusion of danger.
By the end of October 2015, the Hungarian court system had spent 300 million forints, €1 million, on interpreters alone. It was easy to rack up such charges at €60 an hour. The poor lawyers only got €50 for the three hours they were in court, or were preparing the case. Several Szeged lawyers refused to have anything to do with the whole charade.
*
In Germany, the quarrel intensified between Hans Seehofer, the Bavarian premier whose CSU conference Viktor Orbán blessed with his presence in late September, and Chancellor Merkel. Seehofer wanted Merkel to agree to an upper limit on the number of refugees allowed in each day or each month, or a final total. ‘Explicit measures of self-defence to limit immigration are necessary, such as turning back people at the Austrian border,’ Seehofer told Bild Zeitung. Merkel refused. ‘The term self-defence signals that a politician wants to do something that isn’t really legal, but which he thinks is necessary,’ commented the Süddeutsche Zeitung.12 The CSU youth wing suggested capping refugee numbers at 250,000 a year. The AfD filed criminal charges against Merkel for ‘human trafficking’.13
‘If Bavaria starts turning people away at the border, then it’s obvious that Austria will do the same at the Hungarian border,’ commented Stephen Dünnwald of the Bavarian Refugee Council. ‘And Hungary is already doing that with Serbia. It’s a chain reaction and what we call Schengen will break apart very quickly.’14
Germany was in turmoil, and each opinion survey seemed to contradict the last. The Bild Zeitung claimed that 90 per cent of its readers favoured Seehofer’s view that ‘we cannot take any more of this’, in opposition to Merkel’s mantra ‘we can cope’. But a poll by the Forsa agency in Der Spiegel found that 44 per cent of those asked said they had actively helped refugees in the past year, either by volunteering or with donations.
On 23 October 2015, the European People’s Party met in Madrid for its annual congress. Representatives of seventy-five conservative parties from forty countries gathered in what the Deutsche Welle correspondent described as ‘a windowless concrete bunker near the airport’. Viktor Orbán was photographed raising Angela Merkel’s hand towards his mouth to kiss it. The chancellor, in a scarlet jacket with a chunky amber necklace, looked at him suspiciously, as though he was about to bite her hand.15
Merkel told the delegates:
Everyone who arrives in Europe has the right to be treated like a human being!
We did not create the Charter of Fundamental Rights so that we could treat people from other places inhumanely.
We must fairly distribute the burden and the tasks among ourselves, with each contributing what they can according to their abilities and their means. It has always been that way in Europe, and that is a formula for success. Therefore, I will not stop fighting, so that we can also master this, perhaps our greatest challenge in decades, in solidarity.
‘Today, Europe is rich and weak. That is the most dangerous of combinations,’ Orbán replied in his speech. We should not make promises to refugees we cannot keep, he admonished Merkel. Allowing in so many Muslims would ‘fundamentally change European society’, he said. ‘And we don’t have a mandate for that.’
Manfred Weber of the CSU, the chairman of the European People’s Party group in the European Parliament, leant rather towards Merkel’s position, than Orbán’s. ‘If desperately poor nations like Jordan and Lebanon offer so many Syrians shelter, then Europe has to be able to that as well. That is our primary task, to offer help.’ He agreed with Orbán that ‘We have to give states back the power to control Europe’s external borders.’ But this did not mean setting up more borders or fences within Europe, he added.
*
On 15 October, Hungarian minister János Lázár announced that the fence on the Croatian border was now complete. Viktor Orbán announced that it could be closed ‘at an hour’s notice’. On the morning of Friday 16 October, I watched the ladies from the local Caritas charity, in their short skirts and high-heeled shoes, serve tea to the bus-drivers waiting to transport refugees for the last time. The last few groups of refugees were allowed to cross, twenty at a time. Then at midnight the tall steel barriers clanged shut. The Croatian interior minister announced that migrants would from now on be channelled towards Slovenia.
With no more work to be done at Beremend or Zákány, I moved to Lendava in Slovenia, to watch the refugees arrive there. Meanwhile Angela Merkel held talks in Turkey with President Erdoğan and Prime Minister Davutoğlu.16
‘We want to create conditions in which refugees can stay nearer to home,’ Davutoğlu told her. ‘Our priority is to prevent illegal immigration and reduce the number of people crossing our border. In that respect we have had very fruitful negotiations with the EU.’ The deal was worth €6 billion to Turkey. Though Merkel was not willing to impose a ceiling on the number of refugees she would accept at home, the other option, now vigorously pursued by the German chancellor, was to persuade Turkey to squeeze them before they set out. One way or another, all European politicians now agreed that the numbers needed to fall.
The tent camp at Lendava was empty when we first arrived – long orderly lines of green army tents in a warehouse area near the middle of town. Overnight, it became a little corner of the Middle East, overflowing with children. Everyone seemed to have lost a family member in the rain and mud of Serbia and Croatia. The main nationalities were Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans. We set up our cameras and people clustered round
us, shyly. Standing in our little puddle of technology, our cameras and laptops and satellites and cables, it would have been cruel to refuse to share our communications with the people who needed them most. We lent them our mobile phones. In Croatia in the rain at Opatovac, men had been ordered to board separate buses to women and children. Now everyone was trying to find their families. Many were distraught about their treatment at the hands of the Croats. One man was looking for his pregnant wife and three children. ‘Why didn’t you stay close to them?’ another man wanted to know. ‘We were separated by the police,’ he explained. Delshan was distraught, looking for her elderly father. A father was trying to reassure his small son that he would see his mother again ‘tomorrow’. Always tomorrow. They struggled to grasp that Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia were separate countries, requiring separate telephone codes and SIM cards. They were worn out from a 60-kilometre hike across the fields of Croatia. In the early morning cold, my nose started streaming. A small boy noticed and handed me his little packet of tissues. I took one, hesitantly, from his five. Twenty per cent, perhaps, of his worldly possessions. Islamic hospitality. The bells in a church tower nearby chimed seven.
One evening, back in our hotel in Lendava, an aid worker in Austria called us. Hassan, an Afghan refugee now safely in the Austrian village of Neudorfl, was looking for his mother, aunt and sisters. One of them had used my colleague Orsi’s phone to ring him earlier in the day, he thought, but he had missed the call. Hassan sent Orsi a photograph of the women. Orsi went back to the Lendava camp to look for them. All she had was a photograph, and a first name. She went from one cluster of refugees to another. No one recognised the photograph. There was a rapid turnover in the camps, as the efficient Slovenes transported the refugees on to the Austrian border at Šentilj-Spielfeld. She was about to give up, when she heard footsteps, running towards her. She was pulled excitedly into a huddle of women beside a big white tent. The phone was passed round. Hassan’s mother, wrapped in a huge blanket, began hugging her. There was an explosion of joy in the chill Slovene night. Orsi took a picture of the family, to send to Hassan. Then there was a moment of sadness, as it turned out that Sediqe, his fifteen-year-old sister, was still missing – the younger woman in the photograph.
We watched an impromptu refugee football match, the goalposts made of rubber tyres. I tried to find out if it was Afghanistan versus Syria, or if the teams were mixed. No one seemed sure. No one even counted the goals. All the tensions and frustrations of their journey flowed out into the tarmac. The goalkeepers hesitated to dive on the hard ground and risk injury after risking so much on their journeys. Many goals were scored that afternoon. The whole refugee crisis for a moment looked to me like a football match. Rich Nations of Europe 2 – Wretched of the Earth 3. But how long would the match last? Can we play in their team, and they in ours? Who’s the referee? And what might victory mean, for either side?
In front of his tent, looking into space, I met Elyassin. He was only fifteen, he said, but looked much older. With the help of an interpreter, he told me his story. An Afghan from the Hazara Shi’a minority, his family had fled persecution in Afghanistan to Iran before he was born. When he was fourteen, he was sent to work in a factory. After only a few months there, Revolutionary Guards rounded up the young men like himself, and told them they were being sent to fight in Syria, in one of the Iranian units fighting for President Assad. If they refused to go, their whole families would be deported back to Afghanistan. After a month’s rudimentary military training, he was sent straight to the front line, as cannon-fodder. Each morning the boys were injected with heroin before they were sent to the trenches. They fought, out of their minds. After three months of pure hell, they were allowed home to Iran for a few days for a religious holiday. Elyassin fled to Turkey and started on the long trail to Europe. Now he sat in the sunshine in Slovenia, trying to remember how it might feel to be a child. He was now fifteen and no longer knew how to smile.
Children clustered round our cameras, laughing, munching on the huge apples given them by the charity workers. They were happy, safe at last. Under the watchful eye of the Slovene police and army, Red Cross workers and volunteers from ADRA, a humanitarian charity, distributed hot food. No one wore face masks or dark glasses. Had the people somehow become less infectious now the Hungarian authorities were not involved? In contrast to the Hungarian soldiers in their NATO fatigues, bearing big machine-guns, the Slovene soldiers did not carry weapons at all. I watched a small girl in pink trousers, a green stripy top and rubber boots carrying a teddy bear, trudging to and fro, admiring her reflection in the puddles left over by the downpour of the previous night. The food was unpacked from the back of an army truck.
In a large tent at another camp nearby, at Bapska on the Slovene border with Croatia, we found volunteers from Germany, Australia, Argentina and Switzerland chopping vegetables and laughing. They were cooking up a huge cauldron of vegetables for the new arrivals in long white UNHCR tents next door. ‘Our common belief is that all borders are ridiculous. We’re making a cabbage soup for two border crossings. We never know how many people will be coming, so we just keep cooking hot food to distribute.’ These were ‘no borders’ activists, a cheerful band of anarchists, chopping vegetables and making themselves useful on a very twenty-first-century front line.
Slovenia’s approach to the refugee crisis was to allow in as many people as they could register and accommodate. That often created long tailbacks on the Croatian side of the border, as the Slovenes told new groups to wait. While many countries on the Balkan route made efforts to accommodate new arrivals, they were less concerned with those preparing to leave. And the rain had become the biggest problem, drenching refugees, aid workers, police and soldiers alike. The single photocopied papers which refugees waved, with details of registration in Turkey, or Greece, or Serbia, some flimsy official recognition from someone somewhere that they existed, got lost in the mud. People became separated from each other in the crush of trains and buses, in the dark. Efforts by the police and army of one country or another to impose order also meant that men and women could easily be separated.
‘There was no food, nothing to drink, no blankets, no Red Cross, just rain,’ Mohammed Skerek, a refugee from Syria, remembered the two days he spent at the Croatia–Slovenia border.
It only took an hour for a coach, on the motorway, from Lendava to the Austrian border at Šentilj. Normal passenger rail traffic was temporarily suspended, to make sure trains were available to carry the new arrivals across the country. The authorities were determined to stay in complete control.
‘Slovenia is a transit country. We are going to focus even more on safety, security, and order, so our country can function normally,’ said Prime Minister Miro Cerar.17 But there were also preparations for the day when Austria and Germany would say no. ‘If the destination countries adopt stricter measures, Slovenia will too.’ Each of the countries on the route dreaded the day that the borders ‘upriver’ would clang shut, on the Hungarian model, and wanted to prevent their own country from turning unto a storage lake of human misery. Everyone on the route was acutely aware of the impending winter. What would happen if these numbers kept coming, in the rain and snow? Over 400,000 refugees reached Germany from Austria between 5 September and 15 October alone.18
Each day we drove to Šentilj, to see the refugees entering ‘the West’. Two huge white heated tents had been set up at the border crossing between Šentilj and Spielfeld on the Austrian side, with a capacity for 2,000 refugees. As journalists, as at all camps in Slovenia, we were allowed inside to see the conditions. Despite their careful preparations, the Slovenes were now struggling to cope with the large numbers – by now at 8,000 a day. Long queues formed at the crossing point into Austria. They were allowed across into Austria whenever the Austrian authorities said they were ready, day or night, for another group of 150. For once, the authorities on both sides of a European border seemed to be willing and able to coordinate with each other
. It was a different story on the Croatia–Slovenia border, where the Croats seemed incapable of telling the Slovenes when the next bus or train would arrive – or unwilling to do so – which resulted in some trains being stopped and the people on board suffering even longer. New border crossings were opened overnight, catching the Slovenes off balance. Slovenia and Austria were, in any case, both members of the Schengen group of countries. In normal times, there were no border controls at Šentilj anyway.
20 October was a Monday. At midnight, we stood in the glare of the spotlights, the roar of a generator, watching more than 2,000 refugees crossing from Šentilj into Spielfeld. The rain of the last forty-eight hours had stopped, but the refugees bore its marks. They were a bedraggled crowd of humanity, wrapped in multi-coloured nylon blankets, clutching their small bags of possessions. Many had not slept for days. The Austrian police were allowing them across to be registered in groups of fifty, as soon as an interpreter became available. ‘Farsi’ was announced through a loud speaker, and a new group of fifty people shuffled forward. Many of the smaller children were asleep on their parents’ shoulders.
Safah was twenty-three, from Syria. She was travelling with her mother and brother. She had already reached Germany once, with her father, she said, but had returned to Turkey, where her family had been living for the past year, to fetch her mother and brother. They had not been living in a camp, but in a house, she said. But she had convinced her family that they should go to Germany.
The last few days, she said, had been ‘deadly’. The worst country to cross was Macedonia. ‘The Macedonian police treated us in a bad way.’ They told her to die, she said. ‘“Just stay there and die!” We die over there. We can’t even breathe. We have small children, pregnant women with us.’ The family had now been travelling for five days and nights, non-stop, she said. Croatia and Slovenia had been better, because ‘the authorities cooperated with us’. Though there was sometimes a shortage of blankets.
