by Nick Thorpe
The main problem in the camp where we were taken here in Körmend was not the heating. The main problem is that we humans are not comfortable living outside, and a tent is like living outside, you sleep and the wind blows. No matter the intensity of heat from the stove, you always feel cold at night because the tent cannot conserve the heat. You keep putting more wood on the fire, every two hours, but it changes nothing because you never feel warm inside.
What would he most like to do? I asked. ‘To resume my studies in Chemical Engineering. We hope for a better future in every sense. I would like to be helpful in society.’ He felt inspired by the ‘Moonshot’ initiative for cancer research, announced by President Obama in his State of the Union address in January 2016.4 While in Bicske, he had started learning German at the Goethe Institute in Budapest. Now he couldn’t continue his classes.
I hope to find peace here. There’s propaganda that immigrants are this or that but fortunately some people have found out that immigrants are not bad!
My dad is a Baptist, my mum is Catholic, and I went to Baptist secondary school. But the message is the same. Jesus Christ died on the cross, assisting as he did. We shouldn’t segregate Muslims from Christians, like the government does. We should accommodate all people in spite of our differences. We should bring our similarities . . . to forge ahead together.
Standing beside him in the kitchen was Abdul, aged twenty-one, from Afghanistan. He had reached Europe through Greece, Macedonia and Serbia, he said, and had even got as far as Germany once, stowing away on a cargo train. But the German police had caught him and deported him to Hungary, as the place where he was first registered under the Dublin procedures. Now he simply didn’t know where to go.
Afghanistan in the autumn of 2016 was descending deeper into violence, just as EU countries led by Germany stepped up the repatriation of Afghans.5 According to EASO, an equal number of civilian casualties was caused by government and insurgent forces. The last places of peace and stability in the country were certain districts of Kabul. Nevertheless, on 4 October, the EU–Afghanistan Joint Way Forward plan was launched, under which EU states would be able to charter flights to take home Afghans who refused to leave voluntarily.6 Germany deported the first group of thirty-four in December and a second group of twenty-six in January 2017. German interior minister Thomas de Maizière announced that Germany would send back up to 11,800 Afghans.7
‘Young Afghans don’t see any future in Afghanistan and most are stuck in Kabul because they can’t travel to the provinces,’ Abdul Ghafoor, a refugee rights activist deported from Norway in 2013, told the EUobserver website.8 With little or no help once they reached home, many attempted, once again, to reach Europe. There were at least 2.7 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran. In 2015, 178,000 – nearly one in five – of the asylum seekers who reached Europe were from Afghanistan.
At the press conference, Father Németh defended his decision to give the refugees shelter. Neither the church council nor the police had objected. The migrants were simply obliged to report once a day to the camp, which they did. On the first night eight had stayed, on the second night five. They had facilities to wash and to cook here. And he was planning to serve them a big Christmas dinner.
Why had Körmend alone of all the Christian parishes in Hungary followed Pope Francis’s appeal and offered help to refugees? I asked.
We are not unique. I think every priest would do the same, if he found himself in this situation, on the border . . . Many are helping today in the country, as individuals.
Pope Francis made his appeal on 6 September last year in his Sunday sermon, and many people scratched their heads about what to do. Here in Körmend I called together the church advisory council on 9 September so we could discuss how to respond. The majority of those present rejected the Pope’s words. Their reaction was, ‘We do not need to take this seriously anyway, because there won’t be any refugees here.’ But on exactly the same day the government started building a refugee reception centre here.
For several days after the Hungarian-Serbian border was closed in October 2015, refugees were brought to Körmend from Beremend on the Croatian border. Father Németh and his parishioners helped them at the roadside, day and night, before the flood was diverted to Szentgotthard, south-west of Körmend.
I don’t know how many ‘terrorists’ there were among them. What I do know is that we met many grateful people, struggling with very difficult circumstances.
I must admit there is not a very positive image of us Hungarians in the West. A few weeks ago I spoke to a Benedictine abbot who told me that Hungary has a reputation as haters of refugees. Of course, I tried to soften that image. I told him that Hungarians do not hate strangers. Perhaps we are just afraid or concerned about big waves of them. In the past day I have received many emails and messages from people who support what we are doing here, and offering help. All those people gave their full names and addresses. Those who express doubt or scepticism in the media usually express their hatred anonymously.
His parish was most definitely not trying to replace the work of the state, he said. But as far as he knew, he was not breaking any laws by showing Christian charity.
From Körmend I crossed the Austrian border towards Gussing. There were no border controls on the Hungarian side, just a temporary cabin on the Austrian side where a friendly policeman waved me through with the most cursory glance into the car.
It’s a two-hour drive from Körmend to Traiskirchen, first through pretty Austrian villages, then up the A2 motorway north, towards Vienna. On the car radio, I listened to the latest news about deportations from Germany.9 The refugee camp was an important stopping place for Hungarian refugees in 1956. On the site of a former Austro-Hungarian cavalry barracks, the tall buildings and low wall around it reminded me of the castle at Gödöllö. There were big white UNHCR tents in the courtyard, where the horses were once put through their paces, and a Caritas van parked on the pavement outside where volunteers were serving hot drinks. I last saw Ali Sadat at the Adaševci motel camp in September. Aged twenty-eight, he had a company in Afghanistan importing telecommunications towers from Russia. The company still exists, but he was forced to leave by the threats of violence against him and his family – by both sides, he says – if he didn’t pay protection money. He decided to flee with his four sisters, who are all older than him. All have university degrees. Once they are safely settled in Austria, Ali plans to go back to Afghanistan, close down his company, and start a similar business in Europe. Ali was working when I got to Traiskirchen, looking after three small children who were travelling alone, so I set out to explore the town – the small fifteenth-century church of St Nicholas, a good bookshop, a couple of cafés, an Indian restaurant and a pizzeria. Not much else. The white Austrian winter was closing in on the foothills which ran all the way to Vienna.
The asylum seekers in the camp were free to come and go, and were prominent on the streets around the camp, but hardly visible in the centre of town. There was a man selling Christmas trees in the main square.
Ali greeted me enthusiastically at the main gate, flashing his laminated pass at the night-watchman to get out. It was only 5.30 p.m. but already dark and wintry in the streets outside. We drove into town for a pizza. He was more dynamic here than in Serbia. He had finally reached the goal of his journey, and his phone rang every few minutes, as he helped organise the lives of all around him. His journey here from Serbia across Hungary illustrates the different fates of so many migrants on this route, and how a little charm and good luck can radically improve one’s journey. Ali was spotted by the BBC in Kabul even before he set out, and filmed much of his journey on the Go-Pro camera my colleagues there gave him. He featured in the BBC documentary Exodus.10
At the camp in Adaševci, he made himself so useful to the camp administrators that he was soon ‘promoted’ to be the camp commander at Horgoš, the liaison person between the Serbian and Hungarian refugee authorities, finalising who woul
d be let into the transit zones. He spent twenty-eight days at Horgoš as camp leader, while his sisters waited in the refugee reception centre in Subotica. He was upset by the cold and lack of basic facilities at Horgoš, and the constant rain, but managed to negotiate better food, blankets and, most important of all, smoother passage into Hungary for dozens of refugees while he was there. ‘It was like a desert,’ he remembers. He also surprised me with tales of just how many refugees were managing to get through the Hungarian fence and not get caught, despite the massive police and army presence. One in three got through, he reckoned. The fence was easy to cut, and the smugglers went with them. If they were caught they just pretended to be fellow migrants. Some were returned every night. ‘The smugglers, the criminals are always one step ahead of the police, and they are very clever.’
Like other refugees I spoke to, he related tales of Hungarian police brutality. But they were kind to him and his sisters, for which he was grateful, he told me. They were only kept for four hours in the transit zone, then transferred by bus to the open camp in Vámosszabadi near Györ. ‘I think the Hungarian authorities would have liked me to apply for asylum, because they thought I could be useful to them,’ he said. But he had no intention of staying long. ‘So few people are granted asylum in Hungary, we stood little chance. And anyway, Hungary does not show respect to refugees. I wanted to reach a country where they are kind to asylum seekers.’
After a few days in Vámosszabadi, he and his sisters took the bus into Györ and bought train tickets to Vienna. When the police saw them on the station, they checked their camp documents and said they could not board the train. They feigned resignation, left the station, then ran back on to the platform when the train arrived. This time no one tried to stop them. The Hungarian border police on the train left them in peace. When the train was already on Austrian territory, the Austrian police noticed that one of his sisters did not have the right documents. ‘Then we all surrendered,’ he told me. ‘The Austrians were the first friendly police we met on the whole journey from Afghanistan.’
They spent a night in a police cell, then were taken to Traiskirchen. This was normally a transit camp but Ali and his sisters were allowed to stay longer because he had a lung problem which needed medical attention. He too had heard that Germany was stepping up deportations of Afghans. ‘It’s ironic that the first country to make us welcome is also the first to start sending us back,’ he said bitterly. ‘The situation in Afghanistan is even worse now than it was a year ago and is getting worse still. They are sending some of those people back to their deaths.’
I asked about the young German girl raped and murdered in Freiburg by a seventeen-year-old Afghan asylum seeker in October.11
‘I think first I should say how sorry we are to the family of that lady. We are also all nervous because of this. But I hope people will remember that not all fingers on a hand are the same, not all people are the same, not all Afghans are like that.’
Ali had done some research on the perpetrator, who had grown up in Iran: ‘People in Afghanistan, especially educated people, are very respectful of women. But we have a lot of cruel people too, who sell and buy women like animals. I just feel sorry about what happened in Freiburg. It was very bad what he did, and we want the court to punish that guy.’
What was his advice to European policy makers?
‘To gain something we should also lose something. In some cases, Europe is right to deport people. But the EU also needs physical workers and carers to work here, whose work benefits these countries.’
In any case, the mess in the Middle East and in his own country was caused by Europeans interfering, he said. The wars fought in Afghanistan were turf-wars for control of the lucrative European and US drug trade. NATO was strong enough to stop the war there, and defeat Da’esh and the Taliban. They must have some reason for not doing so.
Back in Budapest, with Christmas coming, I interviewed Balázs Orbán, head of the Migration Research Institute set up by the Századvég think tank in September 2015 to advise the government. How much had his institute been able to find out in the first fourteen months of its existence, about who exactly the asylum seekers, migrants or refugees were, and why they were coming, I asked.
The vast majority of Hungarians think that those arriving at the Hungarian-Serbian border right now are economic migrants rather than refugees. They think the countries they come from are stable. They know there are serious conflicts around Europe, the Middle East, in sub-Saharan Africa, in Asia, but they don’t think the migrants are escaping direct persecution.
Had that view changed over time? I asked.
The official starting point of my institute and my personal view is that while the attitudes of migrants are extremely complex [. . .] we in Europe do not differentiate between those who actually need international protection and those who do not.
The language and the practice of the 1951 Refugee Convention were both outdated, he explained, and in need of reform. The existing rules forced those arriving to claim asylum, often in countries where they didn’t want to be anyway.
Balázs also attempted to shed light on why Hungarians appeared so hostile to migrants. According to a public opinion survey carried out by his institute at the beginning of 2016, a quarter of those asked said they had had personal contacts with migrants, on the streets, or trains, or railway stations. And of these, 75 per cent said that contact was rather negative than positive. ‘My analysis is that this was because of the irregular way people are crossing borders and walking across the country without permission. This is true for the population in every country. So it’s not true that the majority of Hungarians do not like these people.’ They just had negative experiences of them.
So the huge Hungarian billboard campaigns, the constant anti-migrant propaganda of the government had had no effect? I asked, a little incredulously.
Not really. The Tárki survey in September 2015 showed that when the numbers were highest, people’s sympathy with them was also at its highest. Hungarians are motivated by pragmatism, not ideology or xenophobia.
Sympathy towards them changed when people witnessed the way migration happened. When they saw what happened at the east station, when they saw migrants marching along the highways. Hungarians like law and order, and that story was about something else. That is why attitudes changed from positive to negative.
From the government perspective, this situation caused serious tensions in hosting or transit countries. People had valid concerns, and in this situation it does matter how the government reacts.
While in Hungary in 2015 the government took public concerns seriously, Balázs explained, in Austria the government did not, and this neglect of the grassroots concerns of Austrian voters caused serious tensions in society. ‘Voters were radicalised. They wanted to express their opinion in a much harsher way. This didn’t happen in Hungary. We haven’t had any demonstrations against migrants here. The government’s communication has calmed down public opinion, not radicalised it.’ His view contrasted strongly with my own observation that the Hungarian government was radicalising the public with its ceaseless campaigns and turning them against genuine refugees.
According to statistics released the same month by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, based on figures from the OIN and the UNHCR, 69 per cent of the 28,000 people who sought asylum in Hungary between January and October 2016 were from zones of war or terror: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq or Somalia.12 If the Hungarian public didn’t know that, it was because someone had misinformed them.
There is a minority in the Hungarian population, not a growing number but the same number as in past years, who do not like any foreigners. That is the radical right. While the majority of the population thinks that those people are different from us and we should help them because they are in trouble. But it is not a solution to let them in, because that would not be good for them or for us.
A majority of Hungarians also say we should put more money into projects
which help their countries of origin. But we don’t think we should host them and offer them a new life here, because these people do not want to live our life and we don’t want to live their life.
The people who do not like migrants are the same as those before who didn’t like Gypsies or Jews. They are typically radical right-wing radical xenophobic people.
And you don’t think their narrative has spread in society? I asked.
No, I don’t think so. The only thing you could experience is that they are a bit harsher in communication, they are much more visible. There’s also a sociological principle that in these situations these people can be louder, much more visible, but not in the long term. It will disappear.
I arranged to see Ussamah Bourgla, the Syrian doctor I first met in Bicske in September 2015. I had heard from colleagues that he and his family were leaving Hungary. He had a rather different perspective on xenophobia to Balázs Orbán.
We sat in his daughter Amira’s flat in the 8th district of Budapest. Ussamah is a gentle-mannered man, in his mid-fifties. He has five children in all, four daughters and a son, just like Viktor Orbán. He even met Orbán once, in around 2008 when he was leader of the opposition. Ussamah was the manager of the football team in Bicske, and his son was in the team. Orbán’s son Gáspar was playing in the same tournament. They chatted for a few moments during the match, and Ussamah found him charming. He was from Tall, a small town near Damascus, and came to Hungary as a medical student in the early 1980s. ‘I was sent here by the Socialist government of the older Assad, Hafiz. I had taken part as a young student in the earlier revolution in Syria, from 1978 to 81, to defend Assad. I believed in that regime then. It was only later I found out what terrible things it did.’
In Hungary he started his medical studies in Budapest and finished them in Szeged. Budapest was too crowded. He fell in love with his future wife and moved as a GP first to Ózd then to Bicske in 1992. Their four children followed in quick succession. He always loved Hungary and the Hungarians, he said. ‘I joined the Socialist Party in 2009, out of solidarity with it, just when everyone else was leaving it. Social justice is an important idea for me.’
