by Nick Thorpe
From Adaševci I went to the official refugee camp or One Stop Centre in Subotica. At fifty-eight, Dalal Hasan was one of the older women I met on the route. She was travelling with her two grandchildren, aged seven and four, and her daughter-in-law, who was thirty. Her husband, a taxi driver, was killed in 2014 in an airstrike, trying to rescue other children who were injured in the street in Aleppo. They crossed the Evros River from Turkey to Greece in a small boat. She had set out with no money whatsoever. Other refugees paid the smugglers for them, she said.
‘We are poor people from Syria. A simple and honest and good-hearted family. Everyone wants to help us.’ The last straw which made them flee Aleppo was hunger. ‘There was so much bombing. We were afraid of everything. We were sick and had no money to buy something to eat.’
Smugglers in Macedonia locked them in a room in the mountains, broke the windows, and threatened to kill them if each family did not produce more money. They refused them even water. They were so thirsty, their skin turned yellow, she said. When I had finished asking my questions, she said she wanted to tell me something. She wanted, through me, to thank all the people around the world who help the poor people who have no land, and no country now, she said.
I walked her back to the room where she slept. Babies were crying, refugees were treading silently on still-wet concrete. Rita Belić, the camp doctor, said she had attended the births of three babies at Adaševci. Dalal Hasan was wearing the pink, plastic sandals she received from volunteers in Belgrade. She had lost the shoes she had come all the way from Aleppo in.
At Kelebia, Gordana worked for Care International, helping refugees on their way to Hungary at a small roadside camp. She was a Serbian refugee herself – from Croatia – kicked out of her own home by the Croatian military in the summer of 1995. Many of the volunteers in Serbia were refugees like her, she said. They understood what it was like.3
The NGOs in Kelebia rented a small patch of ground, to provide a safe play area for children, a distribution point for food and tea and clothes to those living nearby, in a cluster of shacks beside the Hungarian fence, hoping to enter the transit zone into Hungary. Was the Balkan route now more or less over? I asked.
People in need are like water. They will always find ways forward. Fences cannot stop them, but they can reduce their numbers. This will stop only if there is an end to the wars in their countries. People always look for a way to survive, and there will always be people who keep trying.
The children give their mothers the energy to try. Women will fight for their children’s sake. They don’t need to eat, they don’t need to sleep, so long as they feel they are taking their children to a place where they will be safe, where they might even be able to go to school.
*
After the British referendum in June, a second European plebiscite loomed in October 2016 – the anti-quota referendum in Hungary.
Do you want the European Union to be able to mandate the obligatory resettlement of non-Hungarian citizens into Hungary even without the approval of the National Assembly?
Like the questions included in the ‘National Consultation’ questionnaire in the spring of 2015, the referendum question was heavily loaded to favour the government’s own interpretation.
It was not clear whether the European Commission still believed in the compulsory quota idea. Apart from Italy and Greece, the two countries which would have benefited from the relocation of asylum seekers, no EU country appeared very enthusiastic. By September 2016, only around 20,000 of the 100,000 supposed to be relocated had in fact arrived at their destination. Many countries were struggling to cope with the volume of people who had arrived uninvited. Nevertheless, the quota idea was a useful publicity weapon for the Hungarian government in its ‘war’ with Brussels. The government used it to maintain the public’s worries about immigrants, even though relatively few had come through the country since the fences were erected on the Serbian and Croatian borders, and even fewer of them either wanted, or were considered eligible, to stay in Hungary.
From March to September 2016, giant roadside billboards, and television, radio and online advertisements rammed home the government’s message. We have defended our front door, now the European Commission wants to smuggle illegal economic migrants into our country by the back door, they suggested. The campaign reached a particular intensity during the Rio Olympics in August. Short advertisements appeared on state television every half an hour, urging the public that it was their patriotic duty to take part in the referendum. There was also controversy over TV coverage of one of the swimming heats, where an eighteen-year-old Syrian swimmer, Yusra Mardini, one of the ten-member Refugee Team competing in the Olympics, came first. The TV commentator listed all the other names, except hers. He later said this was due to a technical fault and was not intentional. Yusra Mardini reached Germany in the summer of 2015. When the outboard motor on her overcrowded dinghy broke down in the Aegean, she and other refugees swam for three hours, to propel it to the shore of a Greek island.
Most opposition parties urged a boycott of the referendum, while the far-right Jobbik party offered lukewarm support. Only the satirical Twin-Tailed Dog Party (TTDP) dared mock the government. Through crowd-funding, advertised on social media, the party raised €100,000. Their rival billboards and city light posters mocked the government’s messages, in both style and content. There were twenty-seven versions, modelled on the government’s ‘Did you know . . .’ question. These included:
Did you know that there’s a war in Syria?
Did you know that the average Hungarian has seen more UFOs than migrants?
Did you know that the main rivals of Hungarian athletes in the Rio Olympics were foreigners?
Did you know that one million Hungarians want to emigrate to Europe?
‘We can’t do anything about all the people who spend their days hating migrants,’ TTDP leader Gergely Kovács told me, ‘people who have probably seen more aliens from other planets in their lives than immigrants. What we can do is appeal to the millions in Hungary who are upset by the government campaign. We want them to know they are not alone.’
The government defended both its referendum, and the campaign. ‘I don’t believe that common sense can be called xenophobia,’ said government spokesman Zoltán Kovács. ‘People all over the EU sense that something wrong is happening with migration. What is happening is out of control. We need to regain our ability to reinforce law and order at the borders of the European Union.’
Polling agencies recorded a shift in public attitudes towards refugees and migrants. While there was a lot of sympathy towards refugees the previous summer, when many Hungarians had everyday experience of actually encountering them, the absence of migrants and the omnipresence of the government campaign swayed the hesitant.
‘In September 2015 two-thirds of Hungarians we asked were in favour of helping the migrants, one year on two-thirds are against,’ András Pulai, director of the Publicus Institute told me. ‘In September 2016 only 21 per cent of those asked had any sympathy or solidarity towards them, and 78 per cent said they didn’t want any refugees settled in Hungary – even those fleeing war or persecution.’
Gergely Kovács said such figures gave a wrong picture of the hard-heartedness of Hungarians: ‘It’s really important for us to show that Hungary and the Hungarian people are much more friendly and normal than you would imagine if you just see the government posters. There are millions here who don’t agree with this campaign.’ His party urged people not to boycott the vote, as some opposition parties did, but instead to spoil their ballots.
*
A series of high-level summits in September offered European and world leaders a chance to propose or repeat their visions of a solution to the refugee crisis. Slovakia took over the rotating presidency of the EU on 1 July. Like Viktor Orbán, Slovak prime minister Robert Fico was implacably opposed to accepting asylum seekers. EU leaders met in Bratislava in an atmosphere of strained politeness – and
confusion over whether the quota idea was still alive.4 The Hungarian government needed it to be, in order for their expensive referendum to still seem relevant. Other EU governments, including the Slovaks, were trying to sound more reasonable, and tone down the language of dispute.
Angela Merkel contributed to the search for more inclusive language by admitting that she had made mistakes in her handling of the refugee issue.5 She told reporters that she would like to ‘turn back the clock by many, many years, to better prepare [herself] and the whole government and all those in positions of responsibility for the situation that caught us unprepared in the late summer of 2015’. It was not the admission of so many people to Germany that was the mistake, nor the absence of a cap on numbers ever since, she explained, but the lack of preparation, and the lack of explanation to other countries – this she should have done differently, she said.
The state of the EU in general and particularly the refugee crisis is not good at all. In Europe, we still don’t have a common understanding to acknowledge the flight of so many people for what it actually is, a global and moral challenge . . . It weighs on me, too, that we haven’t succeeded in that.
Her confession was provoked by another poor electoral result for her CDU, this time in her home state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The SPD won comfortably, but the AfD came second, with the CDU slipping to third place – for the first time in its history. The main issue in the campaign was immigration, even though there were relatively few in Germany – 23,000 were accepted in 2015. The result was another warning to the German chancellor.
The Bratislava summit was the first official summit after the Brexit vote in June, at which EU leaders could spell out their vision of the future without Britain. In the warm-up, Viktor Orbán was characteristically blunt: ‘The moment is now; a cultural counter-revolution is possible,’ he announced in Krynica, a resort in the Carpathian mountains in southern Poland, where a regional economic gathering took place in early September.6 ‘People don’t change, national and religious identity still have their place . . . There is no European identity that could replace them.’
Warming to his theme, he explained that the problem in Europe was now the arrogance and ideology of European elites. The elites had insisted that ‘it wasn’t modern to be a Pole, a Hungarian, a Czech, a Christian or other believer; they proposed a new identity – the European identity . . . but Britons have said “No”, they want to be British.’ The answer, Orbán and his friend Jaroslav Kaczynski, leader of the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland insisted, was a major overhaul of the EU to give national parliaments a stronger voice. Federalism should be abandoned. Kaczynski also laid into the ‘hegemony’ of Germany in EU affairs. The diversity of Europe was being wiped out by the rise of what he called ‘pop culture, American culture’.
At the Bratislava summit, Orbán suggested that the answer was to put the waves of migrants in huge camps or ‘hotspots’ outside the EU, for example in Libya. In one of his traditional volte-faces, he also suddenly backed the idea of a European army – without explaining how this squared with his constant appeals to increase and defend national sovereignty. His vision of migration as primarily a security issue seemed to have persuaded him to change his mind. One task of the new army, he argued, would be to defend the outer borders of the EU. The conservative Luxembourg prime minister, Jean Asselborn, contributed to the warlike atmosphere by suggesting that Hungary be excluded from the EU, or at least have its membership suspended, for the government’s ‘disgraceful’ conduct over the refugee crisis.
In the end, the final declaration in Bratislava, and the road-map for the future agreed there, was a compromise. The Visegrád countries arrived there with a declaration of their own, calling for ‘flexible solidarity’. This would mean that those countries that do not accept the relocation of asylum seekers could contribute in other ways, for example by strengthening or patrolling the outer borders of the EU, or providing equipment. The ‘potential and experience’ of each country should be taken into account. The Visegrád proposal was broadly welcomed as constructive by former critics of the Visegrád countries, including Angela Merkel and Martin Schulz.
In the final document, the Visegrád countries won a growing commitment from the others to strengthen the outer borders of the EU. There should be no return to the chaos of the previous year, all agreed. There was also a commitment to strengthen consensus and solidarity among member states, after the terrible squabbles between them. A broader consensus would be needed on a long-term policy on immigration, ‘including on how to apply the principles of responsibility and solidarity in the future’. The peoples of Europe needed to feel a greater sense of security.
The success of the summit created another problem for the Hungarian government. If ‘the compulsory quota idea is now dead’ as Slovak prime minister Robert Fico announced triumphantly, why were the Hungarians still holding a referendum to oppose it?7
On 19 September in New York, the United Nations General Assembly convened the first ever summit devoted to refugees and migrants.8 There were an estimated 21.3 million refugees in the world: 84 per cent were temporarily sheltered in poor countries, only 16 per cent in rich ones. It was a statistic worthy of a giant roadside billboard in Hungary, but there was no one to pay for that one. Governments had been slow to respond to the increasingly desperate appeals by UN agencies for funding. Only 19 per cent of the target had been contributed to the UN appeal for South Sudan, 22 per cent to the appeal for Yemen, and 49 per cent to the appeal for Syria. Russia accepted no refugees for resettlement, and nor did the Gulf States, although many people from conflict-torn states worked there. Saudi Arabia said it had suspended the deportation of thousands of Syrians who had over-stayed their visas.9
Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó attended the New York summit for Hungary and struck the usual defiant note.10 He told the Assembly:
We have protected our borders so far and we will not allow mass violation of our borders in the future either. We have to make clear that in the meantime there are migratory polices all around the world which have failed. Migratory policies which consider all migrants as refugees have failed. Migratory policies which want to force countries to receive thousands of migrants against the will of their own citizens have failed.
US president Barack Obama’s speech was rather different in content and tone:11
We are here because, right now, there are mothers separated from their children – like the woman in a camp in Greece, who held on to her family photographs, heard her children cry on the phone, and who said ‘my breath is my children . . . every day I am dying 10, 20, 30 times.’ We’re here because there are fathers who simply want to build a new life and provide for their families – like Refaai Hamo, from Syria, who lost his wife and daughter in the war, who we welcomed to America, and who says, ‘I still think I have a chance to make a difference in the world.’ [. . .]
If we were to turn refugees away simply because of their background or religion or, for example, because they are Muslim, then we would be reinforcing terrorist propaganda that nations like my own are somehow opposed to Islam, which is an ugly lie that must be rejected in all of our countries by upholding the values of pluralism and diversity. And finally, this crisis is a test of our common humanity – whether we give in to suspicion and fear and build walls, or whether we see ourselves in one another.
The New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants was signed by representatives of all 193 countries present. The signatories agreed that ‘protecting those who are forced to flee and supporting the countries that shelter them are shared international responsibilities that must be borne more equitably and predictably’.
The British charity Oxfam was disappointed.12 ‘The world had the chance to come up with a more humane approach, but for now governments gave us a half-hearted response. We cannot continue to accept it,’ wrote Josephine Liebl an Oxfam official who specialises in Africa.
The most important result of the
summit, was to task the UNHCR with developing a Global Compact for Refugees, and a separate Global Compact for Safe, Regular and Orderly Migration.13 The first committees for both would meet in early 2018. The leaders of countries on the western Balkan route, plus Donald Tusk, Angela Merkel, Austrian chancellor Christian Kern and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán met in Vienna for the final summit of the month on 24 September 2016.
‘We need to confirm – politically and in practice – that the western Balkan route of irregular migration is closed for good,’ said Tusk. Kern called for ‘massive improvement’ of the EU’s external borders. Viktor Orbán went further, calling for the establishment of what he called ‘a giant refugee city’, on the Libyan coast. European Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos reminded participants that any solution to the EU’s migration wave should be based on humanity and dignity. ‘Solidarity is not à la carte,’ he said. The day before the summit began, more than 160 migrants drowned when their boat sank off Libya.
In an interview in the Austrian daily Der Standard Chancellor Christian Kern praised Hungary’s contribution to slowing the refugee influx:
We are ourselves beneficiaries of this policy of [Hungarian prime minister] Orbán, as a result of which far fewer refugees are reaching Austria and Germany. This means that we also share the responsibility of addressing the negative consequences of this measure. Some time, these people are going to set out on their own account, so that the problem will shift to a different European border.14
