The Road Before Me Weeps

by Nick Thorpe

  *

  Mazen was from Damascus. He was living in a makeshift shelter, half-tent, half-branches, with UNHCR blankets stretched between them at Horgoš, a few metres from the Hungarian border. Only a few metres of razor wire and a few thousand Hungarian police and soldiers separated him from the rest of his family. He and his two daughters, aged fifteen and twenty, had reached Serbia from Bulgaria fifteen days earlier, he said, and had been at Horgoš for two days. His wife and two sons had travelled ahead of them and had already been in Hanover in Germany for nine months. Why did he come to this border, exactly?

  ‘As you know, crossing borders illegally, and paying smugglers is prohibited. So I have to come the legal way. I have to take these young ladies to their mother. I don’t have any other way to reach there.’ So he had joined the ever lengthening queue of refugees and migrants trying to enter Hungary legally through the transit zones at Röszke and Kelebia.

  Mazen worked as an IT engineer in Syria. Daily life in Damascus had become too dangerous he said. ‘Syria has been torn up into many pieces. We don’t have a country anymore . . . There are so many mad people there, Assad, his security police, IS, it’s a disaster.’ As the head of the family, he felt he had to take his daughters to safety. ‘I cannot play the role of mother to them,’ he explained a little forlornly, man to man. His wife had looked into the possibility of asking the German authorities for family reunification, so they could get a visa for Germany, but it might take several years.

  There were sixty or seventy people in the camp, under the watchful eye of Hungarian police and soldiers, walking up and down the roof of the transit zone, raising binoculars to their eyes. The Serbian police were less efficient, and less well equipped. It was a long walk on the Serbian side to the village of Horgoš. When the police were there, men were sometimes refused permission to leave the camp and go to the village to buy food or cigarettes. The worst aspect of life here, and at the other transit zone at Tompa, was the uncertainty. No one knew when they would be let into Hungary. The most vulnerable had priority, in theory, but sometimes that would lead to families being divided, so migrants would rather wait longer, in order to be able to carry on together. At this time, twenty to thirty people a day were being let into the transit zones at Horgoš-Röszke, and a similar number at Tompa. After registration, families would then be allowed to continue to the open camps at Bicske or Vámosszabadi. Single men were usually held much longer, up to thirty days in the transit zones. There was room for fifty in each, in small containers, but rarely more than a couple of dozen there at any one time. From the Hungarian side, it was easy to look through the wire, and follow the pace of life inside. It moved at a snail’s pace. There were very few Hungarian immigration officers. Those there were seemed sluggish, and certainly unfriendly to the media. It was as if they were trying to work as slowly as possible. So much for the fast-track procedure, promised under various Hungarian laws and legal amendments.

  As I talked with refugees at Horgoš, officials of the UNHCR, the Serbian Refugee Council and Doctors Without Borders moved through the camp, distributing food, offering medical help. A couple of refugees asked them for rubber gloves, so they could clear away the rubbish.

  Goran Makić was an employee of Médecins Sans Frontières.

  We offer basic medical care to all these people, especially to the most vulnerable, pregnant women, small children, families. There are chronic illnesses, people with diabetes and other complaints they brought with them from home. There are people deeply traumatised by war. And there are people with just the everyday complaints of those who have walked long distances in inappropriate footwear, with irregular food, and only rare possibilities for personal hygiene.

  Médecins Sans Frontières also provided medical help to the 150 migrants arriving each night at the bus station in Subotica, 20 kilometres down the motorway, or across the fields. The numbers were well down from the previous September or October when a thousand people were in this camp, but still substantial at about 250, he explained. As it was an unofficial camp, different organisations coordinated their work with one another. The main problem was that the Hungarian authorities let through so few people, he said. Those – mostly young men, travelling alone – who got in, then were rejected, were the most forlorn. Some tried to climb the fence, further away from the camp, and were often caught and pushed back. Some went back to Belgrade, as they realised the only way to proceed was with smugglers. The fence was forcing all but the lucky few who were accepted by Hungary, straight into the hands of the smugglers.

  It’s difficult to follow the new routes, but it’s not a secret that people are coming through Bulgaria now. There are also still a lot of people in the camps in Serbia, at Šid, Adaševci, Principovac, Preševo. A small number, like these here, are trying the legal way into Hungary. People are exhausted. It’s already 24 degrees today. It will be terrible here when it gets hot again. These are improvised shelters. You get four or five days of high temperatures, then wind and rain.

  By the end of April, 3,500 had entered Hungary legally, through the transit zones, since the start of the year.

  At around ten in the morning, there was a sudden commotion over at the fence, at the steel turnstile which led into the transit zone. Mazen heard his name called out. He scooped up his daughters, a couple of bags, and they started running. With a screech and a groan, the turnstile turned, police walkie-talkies crackled, and they disappeared into the first container. Three of the fifteen people allowed into Röszke that day.

  On the forecourt of the first filling station on the motorway on the Serbian side of the border, I stopped to talk to a young Iranian couple holding hands, Said and Fatima. They were Christian converts from the city of Mashhad, they said.13 She was twenty-six, he was thirty. They had spent about thirty days in Turkey. Their original plan to cross to the Greek islands was scuppered by the EU–Turkey agreement, so they walked for four days to cross the Turkish-Bulgarian border. No, they were not married yet, they smiled, shyly. And they were fed up with eating tuna fish. At some point, the UNHCR, who supplied much of the food to the camp at Horgoš, ordered a vast number of tins of tuna fish, to satisfy the no-pork sensibilities of the Muslims. They ate it cold, straight from the tins, or cooked it up for a change on the metal rods they fixed over the fire holes they dug in the sandy soil. This was the same soil so well suited to growing sweet potatoes, not far away in Ásotthalom, the ‘sweet-potato capital’ of Hungary. I gave the young Iranians the cheese sandwiches I had carefully prepared for my own lunch, from home-made bread, that morning in Budapest. They could hardly have thanked me more if I had handed them a wad of euros.

  Mashhad, their home in Iran, is the second largest place of pilgrimage in the world, after Mecca, with 20 million visitors a year. Shi’ite Muslims go there to visit the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth Shi’ite imam. There are an estimated 3 million Afghan refugees in Iran, and of these, 300,000 live in Mashhad, which is close to the Afghan border. The city is also famous for its jewellery, especially of the precious stone turquoise, and for the production of a particularly valued carpet, known as the Mashhad turkbâf, made with a special Turkish knotting technique by immigrants who came from Tabriz in the nineteenth century.

  ‘Fewer Hungarians from Hungary are going abroad to work now, but more Hungarians are going from Vojvodina. I think that’s because of the growing xenophobia here,’ Ilona Kulcov told me. We were sitting in her small, tidy office in Szeged, from which she organised work for Hungarians in Britain. Across the border in Serbia, in the city of Subotica which has a significant Hungarian population, she ran a similar office. There was a big difference, she explained. In Vojvodina, the large province in northern Serbia with important cities like Subotica and Novi Sad, many different cultural and linguistic groups mingle, and live side by side. Most of the bakers are Albanians from Kosovo. This was once part of Austro-Hungary, and there are many Hungarians. There are also Germans, Croats, Jews, Roma and Romanians, and other nationalities,
not to mention the Serb and Roma refugees from the Krajina and from Kosovo.

  ‘When Hungarians from Subotica go to Britain, they have no problems living in a multicultural society. Hungarians from Hungary are more shocked, and find it harder to settle down,’ she told me. ‘They’re used to living in a mono-cultural society. To have neighbours from different cultures, especially children of Asian and African and Caribbean origin sitting next to their children at school, was quite a shock.’

  I visited the Hungarian refugee camps at Bicske, and at Vámosszabadi – or rather, the main gate, as journalists in Hungary, unlike in Serbia or Bulgaria, are never allowed inside. Just down the road from the Bicske camp, in the entrance hall of a Tesco supermarket, furtive-looking Afghan migrants queued at a Western Union money-transfer office. The Hungarian men behind the counter were bored, dispensed money grudgingly, or refused it because of the misspelling of a name. Hungarian shoppers and security guards watched the scene suspiciously. Two local teenagers tried, unsuccessfully, to sell a tablet with a broken screen to the Afghans.

  *

  In early May 2016 the European Commission published its proposals to overhaul European Asylum Policy.14 The cornerstone was the idea of shared responsibility, as outlined in all the treaties EU members signed when they joined the EU. Each of the twenty-eight EU members would be asked to take a fair quota of migrants, corresponding to their size and wealth. The actual number, and who exactly was sent, would be decided by a computer, based at EASO headquarters in Malta. To encourage asylum seekers to stay where they were sent, welfare, housing, education and other social and integration services would only be available for each in the country she or he was sent to. This was designed to solve a previous objection to quota schemes, especially from the East Europeans, that it was ‘impossible’ to keep an asylum seeker in the country to which they were assigned against their will. Countries could refuse to take their fair share of asylum seekers but would be required to pay a ‘solidarity tax’ of €250,000 per person. That would add up to €1.5 billion for Poland, if it refused to accept all 6,200 refugees it was allocated, and €300 million for Hungary.

  On the day the plan was announced, the foreign ministers of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic were meeting for a Visegrád Four summit in Prague. Their outrage was immediate.15 ‘This is blackmail,’ grumbled Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó. ‘The quota concept is a dead-end street and I would like to ask the commission not to run into this dead-end street any more.’ ‘It sounds like an idea announced during April Fool’s Day,’ said Polish foreign minister Witold Waszczykowski. Czech foreign minister Lubomir Zaoralek said he was ‘unpleasantly surprised’: ‘The commission is returning to a proposal upon which there is no agreement. It should not propose something that divides us.’

  The East Europeans had overestimated their weight in the new Europe. As one country after another reimposed border controls and – with the stubborn exception of Germany – began capping migrant numbers, East European governments had convinced themselves that they were ‘winning the argument’. In fact, changes to policy were a reluctant acknowledgement by member states that there were limits to their own generosity – limits that were closely related to performances in elections. But that didn’t mean that they had now embraced the demographic or security or cultural arguments advanced by the anti-refugee governments in Budapest, Bratislava, Prague or later Warsaw. Such views remained in the minority, identified as at best ungenerous and at worst racist, across the twenty-eight-member block. ‘We either face this challenge together or we give up on facing it at all, with dire consequences for all,’ said Frans Timmermans, the vice-president of the commission.16

  In an adaptation of the existing Dublin procedures, migrants would still be required to request asylum in either the EU member country where they first arrived, or in the country in which they now live. ‘If a country receives more than 150 per cent of its “fair share” of asylum seekers in a year – a level calculated on the basis of population and national income – then it triggers a system to redistribute claimants around Europe,’ explained the Financial Times.17 Alongside this proposal were less controversial suggestions to expand the EU database of fingerprints, EURODAC. EASO would be expanded to become the ‘nerve centre’ of the new EU asylum system, with 500 asylum experts available to be posted to any future refugee front lines. Finally, those countries – including Germany, Austria, Sweden, Denmark and Norway – that had introduced temporary border controls to cope with the sheer number of migrants arriving, were allowed to extend those controls for a further six months.

  ‘The most sensible course of action for the EU would be to use this opportunity to find more lasting solutions to the migrant crisis,’ wrote the Financial Times:

  The bloc needs to strengthen its external borders so as to manage new arrivals in the future. It should put in place measures to share out asylum seekers among member states. And if it is to stop the growing flow of migrants coming across the Mediterranean towards Italy, it needs to deepen relations with the countries of North Africa, strengthening their security and economic development.

  *

  In late May I heard from Bulgaria that a smuggler I had been trying to track down was finally willing to talk to me. It had been a long negotiation, through a network of contacts, up and down the River Danube. This was also a time of persistent reports of Bulgarian vigilantes taking the law into their own hands and catching and mistreating migrants, either those trying to enter the country from Turkey or leave it through Serbia.

  The smuggler, let’s call him Vlado, met me at the café outside the hotel I had chosen to stay in because of its reputation as a haunt for smugglers, overlooking the Lion’s Bridge in Sofia. All around us migrants and refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, the Middle East and many African countries waited in small groups, studied the screen of their phones, or gazed forlornly into space. It was getting harder to get into Europe, and they were painfully aware that it would only get harder still. They were tortured by the thought that they had missed the boat. Their best hope was still people like Vlado.

  We found a quieter bar, a few streets away, in a slightly more touristed area, to appear less conspicuous. He was younger than I expected, about twenty-eight, with the brash confidence of a film star, rather than a member of a criminal fraternity. I didn’t record anything on tape but took copious notes.

  He picked his clients up near the Turkish border, he explained, especially in the easternmost section, below the city of Burgas, where the fence was not yet complete. From there they were taken to Burgas, then from Burgas to Sofia. Why not avoid the capital? I asked, and stay close to the Danube, if you are taking them to the north-west of the country anyway. He shook his head. Because our organisations were created in Sofia, he explained. And there too, he and his men had their best contacts with the Bulgarian police.

  In 2015, Vlado said, he earnt €200,000 in three months, transporting sixty to eighty refugees a day across Bulgaria, from the Turkish to the Serbian border. Half of that money went on paying off middlemen, his drivers, and the police. The other half went into his pocket. In 2015, 30,000 migrants registered with the authorities in Bulgaria, I knew. What did he think was the true number, who transited the country? He told me there were five or six other smuggling bands like his own, though his was the biggest. We calculated the numbers on the back of an envelope. That figure represented between a quarter and a half of those who actually crossed the country, he suggested. So somewhere between 60,000 and 120,000 people.

  The convoys worked like this. The police knew they should always stop the first vehicle in the convoy. There was always just a driver in that one. The second vehicle was always waved through the police checkpoint. Then a third and final car followed the second, watching the back of the convoy, to make sure no rogue policemen, who hadn’t been paid off, didn’t try to interfere with the plan.

  Who picks the migrants up on the far side of the border?
I asked ‘We have the honour,’ he said, ‘to be in contact with Serbian people who do this.’

  As we stood up to leave, I handed him my map of north-west Bulgaria. He studied it carefully, then marked three small ‘x’s on it, along the border with Serbia, where he and his people normally took people across. ‘But you won’t find anyone there!’ He laughed. ‘If we’re any good at our job!’

  We drove to Vidin on the River Danube, a town which has seen more prosperous days but still possesses a certain riverside charm. And from there we followed our map, down to the Timok River, a tributary of the Danube which forms a small section of the border with Serbia. Vlado was right – all we found were fields of sunflowers, ankle deep. A wild quince tree, its fruit still small and hard, but full of promise. And a black mulberry, just ripe, a feast for the birds, and the children on this Bulgarian-Serbian frontier. In one clearing, near a village where he drew a small x on my map, I found the remains of fireplaces, biscuit wrappers, baby-wipes and cigarette butts – a place where groups of people whiled away the twilight, waiting for darkness to fall before they slipped away through the vineyards into Serbia.

  In Vidin I went for a run along the river-shore, early one morning, and befriended Samet, the imam of the local mosque, pottering around in the beautiful rose gardens of his house of prayer. Built in 1801, when Bulgaria was still just a rosebush in the increasingly overgrown Ottoman garden, the mosque boasts a heart instead of a crescent moon on the peak of its minaret – the only one in the Muslim world with that distinction. The architect put the heart there, Samet explained, in honour of his parents. That word ‘honour’ again, I thought.