by Nick Thorpe
There are many misunderstandings between civilisations. Mistaken presumptions about what the other side is doing, or thinking. Those people not able to integrate, to get into the society they arrive in, will form their own parallel societies. Those who don’t mingle are very dangerous. They could have an effect on Europe like a cancer in the body.
We are a humanitarian organisation, but we have Christian principles. So our aim is not just to help physically and materially, but to communicate our spirituality. To communicate to them that there is salvation only through Jesus Christ. No other religion can save them. You might say that message is too harsh. But Jesus too could be harsh. He said: no one can reach the Father, except through me. We know that people who embrace other religions are lost. But we show them love, the love that comes from God.
Some of his own happiest moments are when he has baptised formerly Muslim and atheist refugees. He holds church services, for Iranians in particular, in abandoned buildings and, when the weather permits, in the open air. ‘We have witnesses who told us of people who wanted to become Christians, who met people on the way who were Christians. As a result of such charity, they converted. ‘In Europe, people lost their Christian perspective, and live according to a very liberal way of life which does not respect our roots. Europe lost its Christian identity. We are not just doing a job, we are living it. We help not just refugees, but everyone who needs help.’
The refugees in Palić were frightened of the Serbian police. One showed me a shaky video, taken on a mobile phone by a man hiding in the bushes, of a recent raid by plainclothes police on the building. Burly, short-haired men wandered casually between the buildings, smashing cooking utensils, cutting plastic water containers with knives, and doing everything they could to destroy the fragile means of subsistence eked out here. It was just another of the many ‘acts of deterrence’ along the route, to send a message to them that they are not welcome – the opposite of Tibor’s Christian charity.
From the ruined building we set out again in his minivan, crossing the main Belgrade to Budapest motorway, then turned off the road onto the sandy tracks lined with apple trees close to the Hungarian border. Tibor pointed to a line of darker fir trees, already inside Hungary. Between them, hidden by the apple trees, was the Hungarian fence.
The opening words of Psalm 89, cited at the beginning of this chapter, were written out by hand, in capital letters, on a piece of paper on the dashboard of the van. Tibor stopped abruptly next to a clump of bushes. We waited a couple of minutes, then three men appeared. More warm embraces. These refugees, two of Afghan appearance, one from Africa, didn’t even have a ruin to shelter in. They were part of a group of a dozen or so at this place, sleeping in tents or makeshift structures they built in the bushes, waiting for the right time to make yet another attempt on the fence. If it wasn’t for Tibor and BelgrAID they would starve.
As we drove away after unloading more provisions, we stopped for a moment to taste the sweet red apples which still hung from the low-lying branches of the trees, long after all the leaves had fallen. Local people in Serbia often help the refugees, with water, or food, Tibor explained. But they didn’t like it if aid organisations or journalists started visiting regularly, churning up the mud, and drawing the attention of the police.
The final stop on this distribution trip was an open field, next to the ruins of what was once a substantial brick storehouse, on the grounds of a manor house. A sign beside the track flagged a region of outstanding natural beauty and value because of certain rare grasses and plants. About fifty men and women were waiting – the largest group I had seen in a long time. Tibor had messaged them on WhatsApp, so they were expecting him. More embraces. He joked with some, pretended to be stern with others. Some of the men helped him unload the remaining provisions. One of the women asked if he had any nappies and sanitary pads. Not this time, but he would try to bring some on the next visit. Some of those present, hearing we were from Hungary, were genuinely curious as to why Hungarians, compared to all the other peoples on their route, seem so determined to stop them in their tracks. I tried to explain – with examples from history, fear, the government. Not an easy task, standing in this desolate field, on the wrong side of the fence.
*
By the autumn of 2017, the men in the bushes told me, it had become well nigh impossible to cross the Hungarian fence. One option now for the trickle of migrants coming up through Vojvodina, the northernmost province, was to veer right – eastwards – into Romania. The Hungary–Romania border is 448 kilometres long. There is no fence, though Hungarian officials sometimes threaten that they are going to build one. With the Hungary–Serbia border hermetically sealed, smugglers developed a new route from the western Romanian city of Timișoara, across central Hungary into Slovakia, and from there through the Czech Republic and across into Germany over the 815-kilometre long Czech-German border. As Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Germany are all part of the Schengen group of countries, there are no border controls between them. And while Hungary went to great lengths to stop refugees and migrants entering its territory, there wasn’t much concern about those who did get in, leaving again, as Zoltán Boross admitted to me in an earlier chapter. Those caught entering from Romania, however, were pushed back where they came from.
On Sunday, 1 October 2017, eighteen refugees crossed the open fields on the Romania–Hungary border, about 100 kilometres east of Subotica. Fifteen were Yazidis, two Kurds, and one Arabic speaker, all from northern Iraq. They included five children, Sachem and Pasha, twins aged nine, a twelve-year-old girl Horia, Sonja aged five and Aiman, nine. There is no fence on the border here but frequent police patrols. They walked for two nights and slept during the day. A Tunisian smuggler came for them at 01.30 on the morning of 3 October, in a minivan with an Italian registration plate. The refugees squeezed in, and sat on the floor next to each other.
‘After only a few minutes, we saw the flashing lights of a police car behind us,’ Safaa, aged twenty-one, told me. ‘The driver shouted at us, in Arabic, to get down, and keep out of sight. Then he drove faster and faster.’ The next thing he knew, Safaa was lying in the wet grass next to the twisted wreckage of the van. He heard the crackle of police walkie-talkies and saw the blue lights of many ambulances. ‘I could hear Sonja crying, so I knew she was alright, but my mum was just lying there, as though she was dead. Then the medics took her away.’ The van had rolled down the embankment of the M43 motorway. Footage from a local television station, taken within hours of the crash, shows debris scattered across the road and at the foot of the slope. The chalk marks on the road where the driver fell from the moving vehicle. A line of police cars and ambulances, in a river of blue flashing lights. And the wreck of the black van.
Baran, the mother of the twins, died in the accident. The driver, a Tunisian aged forty-five, died later the same day in hospital. Hali, Safaa’s mother, was one of those with the worst injuries. Her skull was cracked, and she suffered brain damage, a broken pelvis and broken legs. The children escaped largely unscathed, but all the adults were injured, some badly.
Three months after the accident I visited Hali with Safaa in the hospital in Szeged. She could open her eyes and move her hands slightly, and spoke a few words to her son. She spoke only of the past, of Iraq. She did not understand where she was or remember the accident. Safaa spent all his days at her bedside. There is a shortage of doctors and nurses in Hungarian hospitals as so many have gone to Western Europe to work. So Safaa was a welcome addition to the ward, giving his mother sips of water from a tube, feeding her, mopping her brow.
His young sister Sonja, just five years old, was only lightly injured in the crash and was fetched from Hungary by relatives, who took her to Germany. Thanks to the many operations and excellent medical care she received, Hali’s condition was stable. By April 2018 she could speak a little more, and recognise other people, but she could hardly move. Safaa’s family paid the hospital for her care, and for his stay i
n Hungary – $10,000 for the first five months. Most of the money came from his older brother in Munich. But the family’s funds ran out.
The family hoped to get Safaa and his mother to Munich, and that the whole family could be reunited there. But Germany had enough refugees already and was not looking for any more – certainly not in Bavaria, the bastion of Horst Seehofer’s CSU. Applying for family reunification could take years. The doctors at the Szeged hospital told Safaa that there was nothing more they could do for his mother. I went with him to meet Dr Endre Varga, the traumatologist overseeing his case. What his mother needed now, he explained, was constant attention from family members, backed up by an expert medical team. She needed the stimulus of words and music, food and water, and all the attention which her children could best provide, to help her regain her memory. And she would need active daily physiotherapy, to help her regain the ability to walk.
Safaa faced a difficult choice. If he applied for asylum in Hungary, he and his mother would probably be transferred to the prison-like conditions of a transit zone for many months while their applications were considered. They would probably be separated. If she came with him there, in a wheelchair, he was concerned that she would not receive the constant care she needed in such an enclosure, behind barbed wire. If she stayed in a hospital which his family could no longer afford to pay for, who would attend to her? Yet if they did not ask for asylum in Hungary, both of them would be deported back to Romania. In early summer 2018 their case took a sudden turn for the better. Thanks to the mediation of the UNHCR and the goodwill of the Hungarian Immigration Office, Safaa and Hali were placed in Hungary’s last open refugee camp, at Vámosszabadi, while their family reunification request was considered by the German authorities. Hali’s condition continued to improve, slowly, and she could recognise and converse with visiting UNHCR officials and thank them for all their help.
Just across the Romanian border in Timișoara, I went looking for other victims of the crash. Samir, aged twenty-five, from Mosul in Iraq, came slowly down the road towards me on crutches. The refugee camp, known as the Emergency Transit Centre, is on the northern fringe of Timișoara, next to a large shopping mall. There are 200 places for people already granted refugee status, awaiting resettlement mostly in the UK and the US. And there are a further fifty places for asylum seekers, those who have recently crossed illegally from Serbia to Romania.
Samir was in pain as he moved, especially when swivelling round to sit down. We went into the shopping mall, to a café where the waitresses are known to be kind to refugees. They let them recharge their phones here, and sit in the warm for hours on end, even if they don’t drink anything. Sometimes they even bring them free sandwiches or cups of tea.
Samir wore a dark hoodie pullover with an orange lining. He had a short beard and dark brown eyes. Goran, a Kurdish refugee from the camp, who has also applied for asylum in Romania, translated for us, from Arabic to English. Samir has two sisters and three brothers left, after another brother was killed by Shi’a militia. But he has had no news from any of them, or from his mother and father, for a long time. He doesn’t even know if they are still alive. His father served in the Iraqi army when Saddam Hussein was in power before the 2003 US-led invasion. After Saddam was toppled, the US disbanded that army, a move generally accepted now as a disaster, as many of its best trained soldiers ended up joining the forces of the so-called Islamic State; as troops with battle experience they played a central role in making IS such an effective fighting force.
Samir’s father fled over the border into Turkey. When IS occupied Mosul in July 2014, Samir’s Kurdish mother hid him in their house. After Mosul was recaptured by Iraqi forces in July 2017, he was regarded as suspect by the new authorities. He went to Turkey, then returned to Iraq when he thought it was safe. He was caught by an armed Shi’a group, the same one that killed his brother, who put him in prison and tortured him – presumably as a suspected collaborator. When he was released, he escaped to Turkey again, and from there, reached Romania through Bulgaria and Serbia.
The medical care he received in Hungary after the accident was good, he said, but the police were constantly asking when he would be well enough to be deported. Two police officers were constantly present in the Hungarian hospital, though Samir was hardly in any condition to run away. The doctors allowed them to take him away too soon. In Romania, the condition of his leg worsened, his scar opened, and he got an infection. Now he was uncertain where to go. He applied for asylum in Romania but continued to look for chances to move on. Through Facebook, he stayed in contact with others who had passed through the camp, and had then reached France, Italy or Germany with the help of smugglers. They offered to help him. He was torn. ‘I don’t want to go to any more countries. I’m tired of crossing borders. Germany, Romania, they are all the same to me because I have never been to Europe before.’
Samir was a keen footballer before the accident, but because of his injuries would probably never play again. As he was good at fixing mobile phones and computers, he hoped to find that kind of work. Or as a social worker. ‘So many people have helped me on this journey. I would like to help refugees too, in future.’
First, though, he would need to finish his schooling, which was cut short by the US invasion in 2003, when he was ten. When I asked if he had any possessions that he brought with him from Iraq, he reached for his collar, and turned it back to reveal a thin silver necklace from his father. On his left wrist was a thicker, silver bracelet from his sister. Another bracelet, from his mother, which he wore on his right wrist, was lost during the accident.
Murat, his wife Khose and nine-year-old son, Aiman, Yazidis from a village near Sinjar, were also injured in the crash. Aiman was playing table tennis with other Kurds in the camp when I arrived. Later that morning I visited his Romanian language class. There were just three pupils, practising the peculiar vowels and syllables of a strange alphabet, in a country where they did not want to stay any longer than absolutely necessary. But at least learning Romanian eased the boredom of waiting.
Aiman took me to see his mother and father, across the yard. All three were deported from Hungary in December. They spent many hours waiting at the border, in pain, for the officials to complete the paperwork. Khose’s injuries – to her spine and legs – worsened, and she had to spend two more months in hospital in Timișoara. Goran, my interpreter, shook with fury as he told me their story. He showed me photos on his phone of how he had to clean the infected wounds of the deportees himself, because they couldn’t be admitted to hospital in time.
Aiman spent most of his time helping his injured parents, cooking food, washing the dishes and the clothes and changing the bedsheets, his mother told me proudly.
Murat described the drama of his family’s escape from Sinjar, when IS forces entered. He was the only person in his family with a car. He drove his wife and child and as many relatives as would fit in, up the mountain to escape. But when he tried to go back for his wife’s family, it was too late – the city had fallen. Nine family members are still missing, including several girls and children. Two years have passed, with no word from them. He fears they are all dead.
Could he ever imagine going back to Sinjar? I remembered the scenes of utter devastation, street after street of rubble, which other Yazidi refugees showed me, in Dimitrovgrad in Serbia in November 2015.
‘What should I go back to?’ Murat replied, quietly. ‘I will see on one side of my house those whom IS killed, and on the other side I will see the gap where my missing relatives used to live. I will miss them every day. So where should I go back to? I cannot go back to a town with so many problems.’
‘The most important thing now is for my wife to recover. In my heart we all still want to go to Germany, and for the four children I left behind in Iraq to come and join us there, and for us to live together as a family again. We cannot stay here.’
Aidi was twenty, a serious, determined Yazidi girl, who stayed behind in Iraq to a
ttend a Business Studies course at Dohuk University when her mother and six brothers and sisters set out for Europe in 2016. Her father had moved to Germany several years earlier. In September 2017 she set out alone to join them in Munich. She teamed up with another girl in Romania, then was involved in the same crash in Hungary. She ended up in the hospital in Orosháza, east of Szeged, with serious leg injuries. In the hospital she was befriended by Noémi Nikodém, a local Baptist pastor.
I thought the doctor would have to amputate my legs, and that I would never walk again. But Doctor Zoltán said to me: Aidi, do not be afraid. You will walk again. The doctors and nurses were very kind, everyone in Hungary was very kind to me, and I am so grateful to them.
Noémi’s mother and other family members came to visit her in the hospital. Then Aidi too was deported to Timișoara. In the camp kitchen, she sang softly under her breath as she washed the dishes.
*
In 2016, only 1,900 people applied for asylum in Romania. In 2017 the number rose to 4,600, as more people tried to transit Romania on their way to Western Europe.1 Most passed through Timișoara. Resettlement was a different issue – a glimpse of good practice in the often frustrating international refugee system: 126,000 refugees were resettled by the UNHCR from the countries where they first fled, and which were deemed unsafe, to other countries around the world. The Emergency Transit Centre in Timișoara acts as a halfway house for those already accepted for resettlement.2 There they attend courses and complete the final paperwork before they are flown to their destination countries. Since the camp was established by the Romanian Immigration and Asylum Office (IGI), the UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in 2008, 2,500 refugees have passed through it.
