The Road Before Me Weeps

by Nick Thorpe

  The other thing which angered Momčilo after nearly twelve months working with refugees, he said, was that the Hungarian authorities were to blame for this situation. Just two weeks earlier, there were only 200 refugees at Horgoš, he explained. Thanks to the Hungarian police crackdown, and the 8-kilometre rule, Horgoš was turning into a big bottleneck. There were now more than 800 people there. What would be the solution, if someone in power would be willing to listen to him, I asked.

  There is a need for some kind of unified strategy between different countries on this route, some kind of agreement that will increase the quality of the people at this site and give some kind of information. Because the mental situation, the psychology of these people is very tense now. They are extremely anxious, when can they leave, what’s going to happen, is the border going to open, or not. With these increased push-backs, a lot of rumours are spreading, and they are getting more anxious and desperate.

  What does Momčilo say to those in Europe, especially in Hungary, who think that most of those coming are economic migrants, not genuine refugees? ‘It is very hard to prove if someone is actually an economic migrant. From my perspective as a doctor, those I treat are mostly families, the very young and older people, with chronic diseases. And a lot of them, the vast majority are coming from war-torn countries.’ As he had been working with the refugees for nearly a year, since September 2015, I asked him what had changed.

  The main change since last September has been in the numbers. But as the number of refugees decreased, their vulnerability increased. When large numbers passed swiftly through Serbia, bus transportation was available. Now a lot of people are here for a month or more. In these conditions, more people get ill.

  One kindness from the Hungarian side which made a great difference to the refugees trapped at Horgoš, especially in the baking July heat with temperatures reaching as high as 37 degrees Celsius, was the provision of clean running water. A single pipe ran from one of the blue cabins of the transit zone, leading to two taps. All day women and children filled bowls and water bottles here. Men and women washed their hair, and children played. The two taps remained legally on Hungarian territory, as the white posts showed. The first 2 metres inside the camp were Hungarian soil. The refugees, under the 1951 Refugee Convention, had only to stand there, in the pool of mud spreading beside the taps, and call across to the other side to claim asylum.

  Along the top of the cabins, police and soldiers patrolled. Life must have become excruciatingly boring for them, after 4 July, with so few migrants to catch. Only a few dozen attempted to get through the 175-kilometre long fence each night. They faced an army of up to 10,000 police and soldiers.4 While on the Hungarian side I had the impression of a whole countryside mobilised for a war against illegal migration, on the Serbian side police patrolled occasionally in old Lada Nivas, rather like those used by László Toroczkai’s ‘field rangers’ in Ásotthalom. The Serbian police appeared to want a quiet life, and probably didn’t have enough diesel money to waste too much time looking for refugees.

  In the camp at Horgoš, some refugees were heating up tins of tuna on their fires, others roasted sweetcorn they had picked from neighbouring fields or bought in the shop in Horgoš. Everywhere tea was being brewed in blackened tin or enamel mugs. Wherever I went, I was welcomed, and invited into the tent encampment – an open area between the tents where mats had been laid out, and blankets or pieces of awning strung up between poles of acacia, cut from the bushes nearby to create a bit of shade. Visitors carefully removed their shoes before entering and sat cross-legged. Some listened to music on radios or phones to while away the time. Many people had Indian-made chargers, which looked like giant egg-timers or small drums, to generate enough energy to charge a phone or a dim light against the evening dark.

  ‘We need safer areas, more food, and more toilets,’ Rohullah explained. Sometimes the Serbian police prevented them from walking the 3 or 4 kilometres to the market in Horgoš. They felt trapped here, between two countries, on the long journey to Europe.

  I went to see a small pond near the encampment where, three days before I came to Horgoš, a small Afghan boy of seven or eight years old drowned. It was overgrown with reeds, and even after the tragedy, several children were playing there in the treacherous mud, with no adults to look after them. The dead child’s mother was pointed out to me, walking past in deep conversation with a UNHCR official. The UN agency was trying to negotiate with the local authorities for the child to be buried in a village cemetery. The mother was insisting that she would like to take his body with her, into Hungary. In the meantime, her son lay in the morgue in Subotica.

  Sitting on the white-painted border-stone I met Heydels Mohammed, aged seventeen, from Somalia. He wore a clean white T-shirt, and his curly hair was dyed yellow along the top. He had been here five days, and, like any teenager, was getting impatient. His name was on the list to enter Hungary, he said, but as a single male travelling alone his chances of getting in anytime soon were very low.

  I don’t know what to do now. I don’t want to do anything illegal, because if I cross the fence the Hungarian soldiers will beat me, and make pepper spray, so it’s dangerous.

  My father died in Somalia. My mother and sister and brother are still there. There are too many problems. With Al-Shabab, with Al-Qaida, with the government. If you work for the government, Al-Shabab kills you, if you join Al-Shabab, the government kills you!5

  Somalia, like Congo, gained independence in 1960, the year I was born, and has had rough years of alternating drought, civil war and foreign invasions ever since. In 2006 radical Islamists known as the Islamic Courts Union seized much of central and southern Somalia, including the capital Mogadishu, and declared Shariah law. Ethiopian troops invaded, and in January 2007 the Islamists lost the town. In the meantime, a radical offshoot of the movement, known as Al-Shabab (‘the youth’) was formed. (The Taliban means ‘the students’ in Pashtu). Between 2010 and 2012, 260,000 people are estimated to have died in the famine in Somalia.

  Kenyan forces first entered Somalia to fight Al-Shabab in 2011. Al-Shabab merged with Al-Qaeda in 2012. While Al-Shabab have to a great extent been suppressed militarily, the group still launches regular attacks across the border in Kenya, including a suicide attack in Nairobi which killed sixty in September 2013. In April 2017, 147 students were killed by Al-Shabab militants at Garissa University in northern Kenya. Christians were singled out and shot in cold blood.

  In the open space in front of another tent, closer to the border fence I met Faisal, aged eighteen, from Afghanistan. He was travelling with his mother and father, four sisters, and another couple with two children:

  We had a hard way from Greece to here, it was so hard to cross Macedonia because there are so many police there. We tried to cross four or five times but each time we were caught and the police took us back to Greece. On the sixth attempt we made it. A smuggler in Belgrade said he could get us into Hungary illegally, but my father turned him down. We just want to be patient.

  They had been camping at Horgoš for fifteen days.

  Today I asked a Hungarian soldier, in English, through the fence, why don’t you allow refugees to pass? He said that the European Union, Germany, and other countries asked them to close the border. I told him there are good and bad people everywhere. How do I know you are a good person? he asked. I will be patient and prove to you I am a good person, I told him. He wished me good luck!

  The previous day, a fire had broken out at the camp, which threatened to get out of hand. It could have been an accident, but in the dry, parched grass, many suspected it was started deliberately. The refugees beat it out themselves with branches.

  Both here and at Kelebia, informal lists were drawn up by leaders chosen by the refugees at each camp. These were handed or emailed to the Hungarian immigration authorities, with the mediation of the Serbian Commissariat for Refugees.

  From Horgoš I drove east through Subotica to Sombor, another formerly
Hungarian town, close to the River Danube in the north-west corner of Serbia. I had received a tip-off that on one recent Saturday evening eighteen taxis full of refugees drove to the Hungarian border in a convoy, and somehow managed to cross. Aid workers had told me that they believed smugglers were active in the camp at Horgoš, but everyone I asked there denied this. They said they had met smugglers often, but that trips were organised from Belgrade. It would be logical to avoid the too well-known Röszke–Horgoš–Kelebia–Tompa crossing points, and funnel people quietly through at a place where fewer police were watching and where journalists rarely trod.

  In Sombor, the fact that refugees were smuggled across the border from here into Hungary was an open secret. Certain local organised crime bosses, known to the police but too powerful to touch, had switched to migrant-trafficking from drugs, I was told, because there was more money in it. One of the routes taken, was between the small Serbian village of Rastina (Hadikfalva) and the Hungarian village of Bácsszentgyörgy. The police on both sides of the border were involved in the business, my source said.

  As the sun set to my left, I drove the straight road between fields of tall maize, freshly harvested wheat, and sunflowers taller than a man, anxious to reach Rastina before dark. In Rastina men sitting at an outdoor bar watched my car crawling past with interest. At the end of the road, where a track led to the Hungarian fence, a Serbian police car was parked. I turned right along Radomir Putnik street until it petered out, at the foot of a small hill with an old, Cold War era watchtower on the top. General Putnik was Chief of the Serbian General Staff in the First World War, and the Balkan wars which preceded it.6 He gave the order for the final, desperate retreat of his army through the mountains of Montenegro and Albania in the winter of 1916. Seriously ill and exhausted, he had to be carried in a chair through the treacherous mountain passes. He survived the journey but died the following year in France.

  The hill gave a perfect vantage point to survey the fence, stretching as far as the eye could see across the low rolling hills, in the last light of a balmy summer evening. Two men were planting something in the rich black soil near the border. There was a row of blue, green and brown painted beehives almost touching the fence. Through the coils of razor wire, the Hungarian policemen patrolling the fence in pairs on the far side were clearly visible. There was also what looked like an army tent on the Hungarian side, and a ruined house with its roof caved in on the Serbian side. The pale-yellow Catholic church in Bácsszentgyörgy was clearly visible across the fields.

  I slept in Sombor and crossed the next day to Hungary, for a closer look. The road crossing from Bezdan towards Baja was relaxed. The Serbian police officers seemed bored, the Hungarians eager. There was also a lot of military activity on the Hungarian side, soldiers were climbing down from a lorry, replacing the overnight patrol. I drove north, then turned right at Csatálja. On the wall of the primary school, a fresco painted in 1930 showed a young man dressed all in white, his left hand lightly touching a curling Hungarian flag, held by a soldier in modern uniform, while he held out his right hand in benediction to a group of children and their mother. The front child held up the coat of arms of Hungary towards him. The scene took place beneath the spreading arms of an ancient tree. In the background was a church with twin towers, and to the right a man in ancient headdress and tunic, holding two horses. On closer inspection, the long haired, saintly youth had a halo around his head. It must have been St Stephen, the king who founded modern Hungary in the year 1000, the man responsible for converting the Hungarians to Christianity. According to the village website, this Bácska region was ravaged by war and illness during the century and a half of Ottoman occupation from 1541 to 1686. In the eighteenth century it was reinhabited by German Swabians, encouraged by the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa to migrate to Hungary to repopulate the country. They arrived in their long wooden boats down the Danube from Ulm.

  On the village war memorial were the names of the 86 men from this village who fell in the First World War, and the 138 who fell in the Second.7 By 1941 the village only had six Jews, who were deported with 20,000 others from the wider region in June 1944 to be killed in Auschwitz. Almost the whole village, 2,200 Germans, were forced to leave in 1946–7, in the wave of expulsions after the Second World War. They emigrated to West Germany. Their places were taken partly by Hungarian Szeklers from Bukovina, deep inside Romania, and partly by Hungarians forced to leave their homes in southern Bácska, when it reverted to Yugoslav control.

  On the outskirts of Bácsszentgyörgy the road led directly towards Rastina on the Serbian side. The tump with the watchtower where I had stood the previous evening was clearly visible. The road was blocked by the fence, and a group of soldiers in camouflage uniform watched my approach suspiciously. There was also an old stone cross with the figure of Christ spreadeagled in agony across it, his face turned towards the fence, as though he was looking at it, and a bowed figure of Mary at the base. A field of tall sunflowers, their heads bowed like a congregation at prayer, stretched all the way to the church.

  The officer in charge asked me politely to leave, as this was an area of security operations. I asked if I could take pictures. Only back into Hungary, he said. Surely I could take pictures of Christ on the Cross. No way. I tried to make idle conversation and he softened a little. A tiny, brightly feathered bee-eater flew constantly in and out of Hungary, to a steep sandy bank on one side of the blocked road on the Hungarian side, where it disappeared into a labyrinth of holes. The officer confided that this was one of the few pleasures of his job, watching this particular bird crossing the border he was supposed to be defending. I remembered Viktor Orbán’s comment that not even a bird could enter Hungary now without permission.

  In the village shop I bought a bottle of water and struck up a conversation with the proprietor. He told me that you could see migrants every day on the streets of the village, who had somehow crossed the fence, and that ‘locals’ were also involved in the business. He spoke disparagingly of Muslims, and Islam in general.

  Outside the church the legend of St Dominic was recorded. It tells how a heretic challenged him to an ordeal of fire. Each wrote down their faith on paper, and threw it, one after the other onto the fire. The heretic’s words were reduced immediately to ashes, while those of St Dominic remained un-singed, not once, but twice, when they repeated the experiment. Outside the shop, a cardboard cut-out of a policeman, Rudolf Sipos, held open a range of recruiting leaflets.

  Back in Subotica, I bought five pairs of shoes for Faisal and his brothers and sisters. They wrote their sizes down in the back of my notebook. Their own footwear had worn out on the long journey from Afghanistan. I also bought notebooks and crayons for the children, and coffee, tea and dates. They were rather surprised, and very happy to see me again. The shoes were more or less the right sizes.

  Almost as soon as I arrived at the camp, a big Serbian Red Cross Mitsubishi turned up, to hand out bread. A long queue formed. Away from the queue, a woman in a yellow and white dress, purple headscarf and pink flip-flops started sobbing, stumbling towards the transit zone. She sat down on the ground beside the steel turnstiles. Other women gathered around her, trying to calm her down. Her patience had snapped. Soon the camp ‘commander’, a pleasant twenty-five-year-old Afghan doctor arrived, and eventually succeeded in soothing her. Her companions led her back to her tent, still sobbing.

  Saboor Nadem, twenty-five, was a radio and TV journalist from the Ghur region of Afghanistan. He also worked as the secretary in the local library. The last straw was when both the Taliban and local government officials started ringing him and threatening his life if he didn’t write stories favourable to them. ‘I cannot do that, I am not allowed as a journalist to favour either side,’ he told them. He moved his mother and sister to Herat, then set out for Europe. He had heard from friends who had made the journey before him that he could live and work in safety here. He crossed the Aegean to the island of Lesbos in a small rubber din
ghy on 28 February, just days before the Turkey–EU agreement came into force. From Athens, he paid a smuggler €2,500 to get him as far as Serbia. ‘I do not like them, but we cannot get anywhere without them.’ The journey had been far harder than he imagined. Once he rang his mother and asked her if he should return. She wept on the phone, and pleaded with him not to, because he would surely be killed.

  Now the smuggler was ringing again, offering to get him to the place above all where he would like to go – the United Kingdom. But it would cost another €2,500, he was told – through Italy, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway. Just to Germany from Horgoš would cost him €1,500.

  For now at least, he wanted to try the legal way, on the long waiting list into Hungary. If he could just make it to Budapest, he would simply take the train.

  The back of the dark blue transit zone faced the camp. A yellowing poster from the Hungarian Red Cross decorated one of the panels: I am looking for my . . . brother, son, family, mother, husband. Each of the sixteen photographs was accompanied by a number, not a name. So many people lost or mislaid or separated on the long journey to Europe.8

  *

  On Friday, 15 July, the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was on holiday with his family in the coastal resort of Marmaris. At about five thirty in the afternoon, his brother-in-law rang from Istanbul, slightly perturbed. Why were all those tanks blocking the Bosphorus bridges? Presumably it was just an exercise?9

  Erdoğan rang his intelligence chief, just to check. No reply. Then he rang the chief-of-staff of the armed forces. No reply. Only then did he begin to panic. Later that evening, soldiers loyal to the coup plotters descended from helicopters by rope onto his hotel. He had already left. He asked his pilot to fly him to Ankara. His bodyguard convinced him Istanbul was a better idea, because he had been mayor there for a long time and could be sure of greater loyalty.