The Road Before Me Weeps

by Nick Thorpe

  In honour of the architect and filial love, we flew our camera-drone around his mosque, above the tree tops. It filmed the Danube, stretching away like a silver ribbon below, and the city of Vidin, and beyond, the flat lands all the way to the Serbian border. We sent the delighted imam a copy of the film, a bird’s eye view of his own corner of paradise – a God’s eye view, I almost wrote.

  Back in Sofia, I met Philip Gunev, the deputy interior minister. He confirmed many details of my smuggler’s tale, including the extent of corruption in the police force. Even rather high up. He told one recent story of an officer found with €5,000 in his pocket. Polygraph tests – better-known as lie detectors – would soon be introduced in the police, he said, despite resistance from the police trade unions. Back in my hotel, I looked up the polygraph, and stumbled on this quotation: ‘We discovered there were some Eastern Europeans who could defeat the polygraph at any time. Americans are not very good at it, because we are raised to tell the truth . . .’ said Richard Helms, former director of the CIA. That could be bad news for the Bulgarian authorities.

  Philip Gunev was rather relaxed about the numbers now passing through Bulgaria, compared to a year before: 50 to 100 a day, he estimated. That was the figure he supplied to the weekly video conference call with the interior ministers of other countries on the Balkan route. At that call, the other interior ministers and their representatives seemed relaxed about the numbers too. Only the Hungarians believed that it was necessary, or even possible, to reduce the number to zero.

  Greece has a 1,000-kilometre land border with Bulgaria and Macedonia and Albania, and Bulgaria has an additional 300-kilometre border with Turkey. So it’s natural that some people will manage to go through, it’s impossible to seal the borders.

  I don’t think anyone is trying to really do this. Even the Hungarians realised that building a fence doesn’t solve the problem. The fence is just one of the instruments to try to keep things in a manageable condition. It’s an instrument which reduces the need for such a large number of border guards to control a very long border.

  According to the weekly video conference meetings of the interior ministers and Frontex, he said, 200 to 400 migrants were currently reaching Austria each day. About half these came through the Balkan route, the other half up from Italy. Of these around fifty a day went through his country, from Turkey, he believed, and another hundred or more through Serbia from Greece. What that added up to was about a tenfold reduction in the numbers of just one year earlier.

  Realistically it will be very difficult to bring the numbers any further down, because organised crime over the past several years now has developed significant networks.

  We have so far constructed about 140 kilometres of border fence. This fence has helped us to reduce the number of officers we had to send from around the country to help the border guards on that Turkish border. But it’s only an instrument! People can cut through or climb through or dig under fences. Fences are just another instrument to help control border areas.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  KEEP CALM AND THINK OF ENGLAND

  The decision is yours, but I would like you to know that Hungary is proud to stand with you as a member of the European Union.

  Viktor Orbán, paid advertisement in the Daily Mail, 21 June 20161

  The British people voted to leave the EU on Thursday 23 June 2016. The result was clear by 4.30 Hungarian time on Friday morning. Viktor Orbán, though known to be an early riser, didn’t have much time to absorb the shock before he was live on air on the Kossuth radio morning programme at 7.30. For once, he sounded genuinely shaken. A few days earlier he had appealed to the people of Britain, through a full-page political advertisement in the Daily Mail, not to leave.

  ‘The decision is yours, but I would like you to know that Hungary is proud to stand with you as a member of the European Union,’ Mr Orbán wrote. The words were white capitals on a square blue background, rather like the ‘Keep calm’ series appearing on coffee mugs, postcards and T-shirts across Europe at that time. The dark blue square was superimposed on a Hungarian tricolour, fluttering in the wind on a pale blue sky, through which drifted large white unthreatening cumulus clouds. But his words, like those of more moderate leaders across Europe, fell on the stony hearts of the 17.4 million Britons who voted to leave. Hungary, like the other East European countries, wanted Britain to stay in the EU, as a necessary counterweight to the federalist dreams of French, Belgian, German, Italian and Scandinavian leaders. They liked the quirky British defence of their own sovereignty, the mockery of the uniformity which ‘the bureaucrats in Brussels’ constantly seemed to be trying to impose – according to the British tabloids at least. Without Britain, Hungary was going to be a lot lonelier at the long EU table. And further down towards the end.

  ‘The key issue . . . was immigration,’ Mr Orbán said on public radio, as he struggled to explain to the people of Hungary what had happened in the Brexit vote.2 He failed to add, however, that the word ‘immigrants’ in Britain means mostly East Europeans, and increasingly among them, the Hungarians. David Cameron had visited Hungary in January, in one of his last-ditch efforts to win concessions from EU countries to reduce immigration to the UK to below 100,000 a year, from the over 300,000 where it currently stood.

  The key to that, he believed, was to reduce or eradicate benefits for fly-by-night East Europeans, including Hungarians, whom the Daily Mail and the Daily Express claimed were only drawn to the UK in the first place by the possibility of cheating the British state. That was pure rubbish, of course. Hundreds of thousands of hard-working Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians and Romanians did work in Britain, often in jobs for which they were hopelessly overqualified, earning the minimum wage, living in overcrowded and often uncomfortable accommodation in order to pay off their debts or save for their future. And in doing so, they paid of lot of National Insurance contributions and taxes to the British state. But the British Conservative Party was driven by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) agenda. And now UKIP, a party that couldn’t win a parliamentary election, had achieved all they ever wanted anyway – to drag my island kicking and screaming away from its European mother.

  The shock in Britain about what the British had done with the vote was amplified across Europe. On the grim, industrial battlefields of eastern Ukraine, young men were dying for the right to fly the dark blue European flag from a pole in front of their local council offices. In Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia, the hope of EU membership, perhaps as soon as 2020, was the main argument of ordinary people to restrain the block-headed nationalists who were eager to start new conflicts. With one country, Britain, now set to leave the EU, it seemed unlikely that it would ever expand again. Croatia would be the last allowed in. It was a dark day for young people who felt a budding European identity, alongside their national and other senses of belonging.

  Geert Wilders disagreed. The leader of the Dutch Freedom Party was in an excellent mood when I met him, later on the morning of the Brexit result, in the hallway of the Gellért Hotel in Budapest.

  ‘Britain is again in charge of its own country, and I congratulate the British people on their excellent choice,’ he told me, as we sat at the end of the smart, old-fashioned café, and the waitresses tried to work out who this dashing young man (Wilders) was, with his almost comical quiff, and little posse of bodyguards. He was on a private visit to Budapest, he explained, because his wife is Hungarian. He watched with disdain as I constructed a makeshift tripod for my small digital camera out of a pile of trays and saucers. I came completely unprepared for this encounter and decided the plates would make a marginally more stable base than the hotel’s excellent cheese scones.

  The Netherlands would follow Britain out of the EU, Wilders predicted, provided he won the elections scheduled for early 2017, as opinion polls were suggesting. How soon could they leave? I asked. A referendum could be arranged ‘within twelve months’, he explained. Although it would not be binding under Dutch law
, he was confident that such a plebiscite to leave would be irresistible. And that it would be followed soon after by a similar decision by France if Marine Le Pen and her Front National won the presidency.

  It is too late to reform the EU. The end of the European Union is just a matter of time, and not such a long time . . . The EU is more or less dead. It’s just that a lot of politicians can’t get used to that idea . . . We separatists did not kill it, they did it themselves, by making an economic project into a political project, and by ignoring the people.

  What would he say to all those, like myself, who fear conflict in Europe without the EU?

  I would say, don’t be afraid. It was not because we had no political body like the EU that it came to war in the past. It happened in the 1930s when certain countries lost democracy. That was the danger that was not tackled. I believe on the contrary that democracy needs the nation state. Democracy means you have a nation state, that you have an identity, that you rally around the national flag, that you have national sovereignty and that you have national decisions. And if all European countries had that, they would benefit from working with one another, when it comes to free trade, to economic cooperation, to fighting terrorism . . . The problem is that we are not ruled by Thatchers, but by Camerons and Merkels and Ruttes, by people not fighting for their country but who are transferring away more sovereign rights, day in and day out.

  As European countries reeled from the shock of the British referendum result, Slovakia prepared to take over the helm of the EU for six months from 1 July. Like Hungary, Slovakia was not a fan of refugees, even though very few had even tried to enter the country. In a nod to Austria, a small camp was allowed at Gabčikovo, in the shadow of the ugly hydroelectric project opened in 1992. It was to be for migrants waiting for their asylum claims to be considered in neighbouring Austria. But even here the government insisted that only Christians be hosted, not Muslims.

  Slovakia, like Hungary, also launched a legal challenge to the September 2015 plan of the European Commission to redistribute refugees more fairly among EU member states. There was no sign yet of a verdict in those cases, and Slovakia had no intention of dropping that legal challenge to the body it was about to lead.

  Speaking at a press conference with Jean-Claude Juncker in Bratislava, Prime Minister Robert Fico sounded somewhat conciliatory. A ‘flexible’ approach would be needed to migration, which would allow EU member states to make their own proposals. As the summer progressed, the word ‘flexible’ recurred more and more often in the communications of Visegrád Four leaders, leading up to the proclamation of ‘flexible solidarity’ at the summit in mid-October. Juncker and like-minded leaders dug in their heels and said member states had to abide by the EU treaties they had signed and could not cherry-pick between them. Fico, Orbán, Zeman and Tusk emphasised the need to shore up the borders of the European Fortress, rather than wasting precious time discussing how to redistribute those who had already got into the castle, when the gates were still ajar.

  *

  ‘My name is Rohullah Hassan, I’m from Kabul city, Afghanistan. And I’m a refugee in an illegal camp in Serbia.’ I found the entrance to the makeshift camp at Horgoš, just on the Serbian side of the border with Hungary at Röszke, with some difficulty. First you have to cross the border on the old road to Horgoš. Then visit the little, first-floor police station, surrounded by pine trees, where friendly Serbian policemen and women check that the Interior Ministry in Belgrade has approved your visit. Then you drive in a big loop through the village of Horgoš, back onto the main Belgrade to Budapest motorway, and drive almost right up to the motorway border crossing. Then you do a U-turn of dubious legality, narrowly missing a red- and white-painted crash barrier, to get onto the motorway heading back towards Belgrade. But even before you reach the first bridge over the motorway, you turn onto the hard shoulder, and drive through a gap in the fence and turn right along a rough, sandy track, back towards the border. On your right, a line of trucks leaving Hungary. On your left, apple orchards and maize stripped bare while still unripe by hungry refugees from distant zones of war or hunger or dissent. Straight ahead, a jumble of bright tent tops, makeshift shelters made of branches and blankets, home to an ever-changing population of Afghans, Iranians and Africans. The Arabic speakers tended to make their way to another makeshift, illegal camp at Kelebia, 30 kilometres to the west – like this one, hunched up against the Hungarian border fence.

  Rohullah was travelling with his wife and four children. He had crossed each border he had reached illegally until now, he told me. Into Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria and Serbia. He was grateful, he said, that Hungary was finally going to give his family a chance to cross its border legally – however long that took. The ‘transit zone’ at Röszke was a long line of fifty cabins, painted dark blue and topped with razor wire, to form this section of Hungary’s border barrier. The difference was that at the eastern end of the zone, there was a steel turnstile, which reminded me of the entry point from Israel into Gaza. Once a day, at around ten in the morning, fifteen asylum seekers, fourteen from families and one single man, were allowed to enter through the turnstile into the cabins. There, their asylum claims were registered. Families were then sent on to the refugee camps at either Bicske or Vámosszabadi. The single men were normally kept in the cabins for a month, before it was decided whether or not they would be allowed to travel on.

  On the Hungarian side everything happened slowly. No journalists were allowed inside the transit zones, but it was possible to watch through the fence. Occasionally, an official from OIN, stirred himself to get up off his chair and go into a cabin, casting a backward scowl at the journalist photographing him through the wire. When the two zones – one at Horgoš, the other at Kelebia – were set up in September 2015, OIN informed the UNHCR that they could process 100 asylum seekers a day. A go-slow process was clearly taking place, in which the government instructed the OIN to deal at a snail’s pace with the applications, in order to avoid any impression that the asylum seekers might be welcome. But the sheer determination of people like Rohullah Hassan and his family won through in the end. They would wait forever, if need be, to move up the long list. And eventually they did get in. Like hundreds of thousands before them, they would then go through the charade of applying for asylum in a country where they do not want to be, and which would not accept them, even if they wanted to stay. Then they would quietly slip away across the border into Austria, and beyond. Before the fences got even thicker, and the natives even more hostile.

  There were around 700 people living in the camp at Horgoš when I visited. The number had shot up since 4 July, when a new Hungarian law came into effect, allowing the police to immediately deport any migrant found within 8 kilometres of the fence. That was the rough distance between this section of the border fence and Route 55, which runs westwards from Szeged all the way to Baja on the Danube. But several people in the camp told me they had already been deported from deeper inside Hungary. A man from Eritrea said he had talked to fellow Africans who were picked up in Budapest, and pushed back through the fence, at night, when no one was watching.

  The camp at Horgoš was rife with reports of Hungarian police violence when I visited. One young man said the police kicked him as he lay on the ground, not resisting arrest. And that as they were pushing him back through one of the gates in the fence, they squirted pepper spray in his eyes, to discourage him from ever trying to climb over the fence again. As such reports multiplied, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, Human Rights Watch, Médecins Sans Frontières, and the Jesuit Refugee Service began to take testimony, backed up with medical and photographic evidence.3

  Heavy bruises, in the shape of police batons, and dog bites, were especially frequent, though the dogs should have been muzzled. Frontex at that time had fifty-one officers deployed in the Balkans in their ‘Flexible’ mission, of whom three Austrian officers were on duty on the Hungarian-Serbian border, when a reporter from the French newspaper Libérat
ion stumbled across them. The role of Frontex on the Hungarian stage was ‘awkward’ the reporter suggested. Their code of conduct was to strictly respect the rights of migrants. Had they witnessed any interventions from the Hungarian side which failed to live up to that code, which Hungarian laws also insisted on, the French reporter wanted to know.

  ‘We do not have the mandate to supervise the work of national border guards,’ said Izabella Cooper, the Frontex spokesperson, in Warsaw. ‘If an officer deployed by Frontex came across an asylum seeker, his task was simply to refer to the local police authorities.’

  Momčilo Djurdjević, a Médecins Sans Frontières doctor, related first-hand evidence of excessive force used by Hungarian police against those who crossed the fence illegally:

  We have witnessed a lot of cases intentional trauma that can be related to excessive use of force. And from the testimonies that we collected from the refugees we have evidence that they have been mistreated in some way by the Hungarian police. And not only by the Hungarian police. We have also had people from other borders and other regions who were clearly the victims of mistreatment by the local authorities. Bruises, cuts, dog bites, police stick-shaped bruises on their bodies. I would stress, we have never witnessed the beatings live ourselves. We only have testimonies and medical evidence.

  The Jesuit Refugee Service had posted pictures of the injuries he described. The Hungarian police rejected all accusations of using excessive force.

  Most of Momčilo’s work here was primary health care.

  Medical needs here at Horgoš are closely related to the conditions people are in every day here, poor hygiene, poor diet, the sun, limited access to clean water. Most of the land is dry and sandy as you can see, and temperatures here can rise to sub-Saharan ones on some days. All of that combined contributes to respiratory infections, diarrhoea and skin rashes. And, of course, a lot of people who make their journey even by foot all the way from Macedonia have all kinds of accidental trauma on their feet or on their bodies. So they are already exhausted when they reach this place, and as hygiene and basic shelter are really of such low quality, this all contributes to worsen their condition.