by Nick Thorpe
On 30 January the Hungarian prime minister was in the parliament building, handing out prizes to deserving students. The speeches dragged on. Orbán was wearing a bright silk tie, of a colour somewhere between the bright yellow of a lemon and freshly squeezed gold. The ceremony took place beneath the central dome of the building, next to the Crown of St Stephen, Hungary’s most precious heirloom, thin hammered gold, encrusted with jewels and pictures of the saints, preserved in a glass case. I photographed Orbán through the case from several angles – the King of Hungary. The lights from the dome overhead reflected on the glass, like frogspawn. Before the ceremony was over, the prime minister’s press chief and constant companion, Bertalan Havasi, noticed me lurking with a BBC colleague near the braided rope which separated the crowd from the dignitaries. We had positioned ourselves there on the assumption that he would walk past us at the end, and we might be able to get a quick question to him.
‘Don’t you dare even try!’ Havasi growled at me. A few minutes later our guess proved accurate. ‘Prime minister, would you please answer a question on the Merkel visit?’ I asked.
‘Maybe next time,’ said Havasi, trying to move Orbán away from us. But the prime minister would not be moved. We asked about Merkel’s visit the following week and that of Vladimir Putin on 17 February. ‘Plus the prime minister of Turkey, plus the prime minister of Georgia . . .’ he added, in conversational mood, ‘the diplomatic life is going on.’
‘How difficult for Hungary is the balance between East and West now?’ my colleague Hugh Sykes asked. ‘That’s part of the life if you are born here,’ he replied, before his minders swept him on his way. A video of our encounter, filmed by the commercial channel ATV gathered 200,000 views on YouTube. It was very unusual for a reporter to successfully doorstep the Hungarian leader.10
On 4 February I visited Ásotthalom for the first time, a sprawling village of 4,000 people down on the Hungarian-Serbian border. Articles had begun to appear in the Hungarian media about a big influx of migrants. ‘What Lampedusa is to the Mediterranean, Ásotthalom is to the Balkan route,’ wrote the conservative weekly Heti Válasz.11 Hungarian police sources suggested more than a thousand people, mostly Albanians from Kosovo, were crossing into Hungary each day.
It was a damp, cold, grey February morning, the temperature 4 degrees Celsius. In front of the covered market in Mórahalom I saw a group of thirty or forty migrants waiting patiently beside two police minibuses, their blue lights flashing. Several smaller groups of six to twelve people straggled along the road towards Mórahalom from Ásotthalom. A slight majority were men but there were also many families, pale, thin and determined. They reminded me of the Kosovars who fled Slobodan Milošević’s police and army in 1998 and 1999, through the snows of the Pashtrik mountains into Albania. These Kosovars were fleeing the country whose independence their compatriots died for.
On the roads of southern Hungary the Kosovars wore anoraks or denim jackets, woolly hats and scarves. Some rolled babies along the tarmac in pushchairs, others carried children on their shoulders. They didn’t run away when the police stopped them. Some even waited for the police to come, to hand themselves in. Hungary was just a transit country, and they knew they would not be turned back. The rain got heavier, and I turned on my windscreen wipers. The Kosovars kept coming, smudges of pink and blue and black in the flat green Hungarian countryside.
My name is Drita. I’m twenty-three, from Mitrovica in Kosovo. I left because the mafia is in charge in Mitrovica. They run everything, hand in glove with the politicians. I can’t get a proper job there. I finished two years at college, then quit to make this journey.
Drita set out with his brother and a group of friends. First by bus to Merdare, on the Serbian border. Ever since Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in February 2008, the Serbian authorities had refused to recognise the dark blue Kosovo passports, and considered the fist-shaped map of Kosovo imprinted on the front an insult to the memory of the province as the cradle of Serbian culture. But in 2014 the Serbs began to implement an agreement with the Kosovar authorities, brokered by the EU, to allow freedom of movement across their territory. At the border crossing point at Merdare they were issued with a laissez-passer, a single sheet of paper with their name and date of birth and a round purple Serbian stamp. There wasn’t even a photograph.
From Merdare they took another bus to Belgrade. From Belgrade Drita took a taxi to the Hungarian border, though it would have been cheaper to take the bus to Subotica and walk. He and his friends had been walking all morning. They were on their way to Germany, they said, to find properly paid work.
Arafat, from Vushtrri in Kosovo, was in his late forties, travelling with his wife and five children. We spoke as he walked down the road, trying to balance his two-year-old son on his shoulders. The boy was fast asleep and much heavier as a result. He had left Kosovo, Arafat said, because his salary was pitifully low. Somewhat better off than most of his compatriots, his plan was to find a small hotel for the family for the night. I left him and his family, walking towards Mórahalom, burdened down with their luggage.
László Toroczkai sat in a bright red chair in the conference room of the village council in Ásotthalom, beneath a painting of the royal crown of Hungary, two hands, and the Virgin Mary. He was a controversial figure in his country, radical instigator of an impromptu roadblock on the Elizabeth Bridge across the Danube in Budapest in 2006, as part of a protest against the then Socialist government. In 2013 he was elected mayor of Ásotthalom in the colours of the radical nationalist party, Jobbik.
‘The migrants were not a problem here until 2012 but their numbers have been growing ever since,’ he said. Now they were causing untold suffering for his community. About half the population of the village lived in outlying farms, dotted through the woods which covered most of the municipality. Waiting outside his office I had studied a detailed map of the area and noticed one part of the woods close to the border called ‘the home of the curse’. Cursed, the mayor explained, because there was no water in the wells, no matter how deep they drilled into the sandy soil.
The migrants crossed into Hungary at night under cover of darkness. They set the dogs barking, knocked on the doors of the inhabited houses asking for food or water, and broke into the unoccupied houses to shelter for the night. They made fires in the woods to keep warm. He was afraid of a major forest fire breaking out when the drier weather came.
Did he not feel any sympathy for them? I asked.
I feel responsibility first and foremost for the 4,000 Hungarians who live here, my constituents. Of course I believe we should help those who are genuine political refugees. But most of these are from Kosovo, a safe country. I cannot understand why they set out in freezing temperatures in mid-winter with babies just a few months old. Every week we have to call ambulances to save them. There is poverty here too. I understand people who fear poverty. But some of these Kosovars are better off than we are!
Toroczkai reorganised the civil defence of his village. He appointed three field rangers, with four-wheel drive Lada Nivas, to patrol the rough tracks along his 30-kilometre stretch of border with Serbia. And eighteen volunteer civil guards, to keep order on the streets. He spoke disparagingly of the police.
‘They simply act like taxis for the migrants. What we really need here is a fence, like on the Bulgarian-Turkish or US-Mexican border, and the reestablishment of the Border Guard.’ The Hungarian Border Guard, as a separate body within the armed forces, was disbanded in 2008, and its duties given to the police. The only help he had received from the state to cope with the ongoing migrant influx, Toroczkai told me, was a grant of 6 million forints (€20,000) from the Interior Ministry the previous autumn to be spent on seven or eight night-vision cameras. Two dozen police reinforcements had also been stationed temporarily in the Pinetree bed and breakfast for the past weeks, which had also helped ‘a bit’ he concluded, grudgingly.
I went on patrol with one of the rangers, Barnabás He
redi. As we bumped over the rough ground towards the border, he told me his typical day. Up at 4.25. Check the bus shelters in the village for sleeping migrants. The cleaning woman was usually already there, swabbing down the huts with disinfectant. Then out on the sandy tracks all day, occasionally returning to the asphalt roads. Local people rang him when they spotted migrants. In camouflage uniform, in a jeep with official markings, Barnabás was assumed by the newcomers to be police, although he carried no gun or handcuffs. His job was to ring the police and stay with the group until they arrived. Depending on the numbers that day, it could take anything from two to eight hours for the police to get there.
As we drove through the wet grass a startled deer jumped out and fled our approach. After we parked and went ahead on foot four men suddenly appeared out of the trees. We communicated in my poor Serbian. They were Kosovars from Vushtrri. They wanted to know if they were on Hungarian soil yet and were delighted to find out that they were. Could we please tell them the way to the nearest railway station? We pointed in the rough direction of Szeged, 35 kilometres to the east. They thanked us and set out stoically. No point in calling the police for such a small group, Barnabás told me. They would round them up on the main road anyway and take them to Szeged themselves.
Then we came to the border, a shallow drainage ditch or canal, known as the Körös-éri channel. Much of it was overgrown with reeds. In one place a small bridge crossed to Serbia on the far side. The bridge was strewn with a tangle of thick rusting steel cables to prevent an earlier generation of smugglers from bringing stolen cars across here. The actual border was marked with white-painted concrete waymarks every few hundred metres, with the letter M for Magyarország on one side and RS for the Republic of Serbia on the other. A few disused control towers still rose above the fields on the far side, from the era of tension between Socialist Yugoslavia and Socialist Hungary during the Cold War. We could see the roofs of outlying farmsteads in Serbia, many of them abandoned and useful resting places for migrants.
Footpaths were clearly visible in the reeds which crossed the canal, worn down by the constant tread of feet during the night. The paths into Hungary were lined with litter. Discarded bottles, biscuit wrappers, a packet of Lucky Strikes with a health warning in Albanian, socks discarded after getting soaked crossing the canal. And documents, dumped in the long grass, often torn to shreds, but still legible. I stooped to study some of the crumpled pages, issued to the Kosovars to cross Serbia.
Basrije Havolli. Born 8 June 1979. Identity card number 1015386092. Crossed at Merdare, 1 February 2015. Only the February rains, the marshy land, and the mole hills dotted through the dead yellow grass slowed the new arrivals. Above the birdsong the traffic on the motorway from Belgrade to Budapest hummed through the morning. Ásotthalom had become the main bottleneck for migrants entering Hungary from the Balkans, and the reason was abundantly clear. At one point the motorway ran only 500 metres from the Hungarian border.
When I returned to the village a few days later, the rain had turned to snow. This time there were Afghans, Africans and Syrians beside the Kosovars, huddled round small fires beside the main road, watched over by nervous policemen. The Kosovars were treading the grass flat on the Balkan route, for all the other nationalities to follow.
‘Where the fuck are the Maltese?’ one of the police shouted into his walkie-talkie, referring to the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta. A grey-bearded Afghan man approached us in tears carrying a child in his arms. The three-year-old boy had not been able to sleep or keep food or water down for several days. He vomited everything back immediately and had a high fever. We laid the child on the back seat of my car and explained the situation to the police. A coach was supposed to arrive soon to take all the refugees to the police registration centre in Szeged where the child would get medical care. Around the embers of a fire, the man’s three other children crouched with their mother, eating apples given them by locals.
Also huddled in the wet grass were several men from Mali in West Africa, and two Syrians from Homs. The Afghans seemed the hardiest, the Malians the most despondent, incongruous in the Hungarian winter. The Syrians stood a little to the side, better dressed, better organised for their journey than the others. Eventually the coach arrived and took them all away. I found the Afghan child’s blue woolly hat on the floor in my car.
I met László Toroczkai again in the mayor’s office. He was preparing for a debate on the migration issue in parliament a few days later, to which he had been invited as mayor of the most affected community. László was indignant about the ease with which potential terrorists or weapons’ smugglers could cross the border here, so soon after the Charlie Hebdo attacks: ‘They could just walk in with rocket-propelled grenade launchers. They could even drive in a tank, and nobody would notice!’ His men had noted cars with Lithuanian and Portuguese licence plates recently, he said, as well as the usual German and Austrian ones. The nearest official crossing at Királyhalom closed at seven each evening. Like the migrants, local people simply walked over the green border when they felt like it. The beer was cheaper in Serbia.
On this visit to Ásotthalom I went out with Vince Szalma, another of the rangers. His record ‘catch’ in one day, as he put it, was 1,140 migrants. That was down now to 80–100 whom he personally encountered each day. He put the improvement down to police reinforcements, brought in from Vas county and elsewhere in the country.
I watched a group of Kosovar Albanian men being rounded up. It was a humiliating affair, for both sides. The officer put on blue rubber gloves and made them stand against the side of the police minibus, to search them before they were allowed aboard. They had crossed the border illegally, therefore they had to be treated as criminals, the police explained.
I crossed into Serbia at Királyhalom. At the bus station in Subotica, a handsome, former Hungarian city, I noted the arrival times of ten buses a day from Belgrade. Poorer, or better organised migrants, able to dodge the shark-like taxi drivers who haunted the streets around the bus and railway stations in Belgrade, paid a small sum for the two-hour journey up the motorway here. But not all were as successful in crossing the border as those I had met at Ásotthalom, or on the approach roads to Mórahalom. Among a cluster of Kosovars in the waiting room, I found one man who spoke a little English. He had taken a taxi from Subotica to the border with his young son but was turned back by a Serbian police patrol. ‘Go back to Kosovo,’ they told him. Discouraged, he had returned to the bus station in Subotica, where he met up with some more Albanians who had just arrived from Belgrade. They were planning to try to cross the border again that night, this time in a larger group of ten to fifteen people.
Back in Hungary I took pity on a group of men, women and children sheltering from the snow in a bus shelter, waiting for one of the infrequent buses to Szeged from Ásotthalom. Twelve people squeezed enthusiastically into my seven-seater Volkswagen.
‘We are heading to Germany because the economic situation in Kosovo is catastrophic. That’s why we have to leave our country. All our politicians are corrupt, from top to bottom.’
‘I’m travelling with my wife,’ explained another. ‘We are leaving because we lack even basic living conditions.’
‘Everyone there is trying to make ends meet but it’s just not possible,’ said a third. ‘It’s not easy to leave your country, but we have no choice.’ I dropped them at the railway station in Szeged.
Back in Kosovo, alarmed by the exodus, the president and prime minister launched a publicity campaign and even toured bus stations, trying to persuade their citizens to stay.12 I calculated that at the current rate of 1,000 a day, it would only take six years to empty Kosovo completely of its 2 million inhabitants. In Pristina, some commentators even alleged that the Serbs were letting them go on purpose, to make the new state unviable. The police in Belgrade said they had already issued 60,000 laissez-passer papers.
In Szeged, József Seress, the head of the regional inspectorate o
f the Office for Immigration and Nationality (OIN), placed the increase in numbers crossing Hungary in a longer perspective: ‘In 2013 we processed more than 17,000 asylum claims here in the southern Alföld region. In 2014 more than 37,000.’ In the first six weeks of 2015, his office registered 18,000 claims, more than the total for the whole of 2013.
Of these claims, 80 per cent were from Kosovars, and 40 per cent were children. The exodus from Kosovo began in September 2014 when Serbia, which had previously refused to recognise Kosovan passports and therefore would not let them cross their territory, relaxed the rules under pressure from the EU. From now on, they were just asked to stamp a single, photocopied paper, saying they had passed into Serbia.
Once in Hungary, they could be held under EU regulations for no more than twenty-four hours before they were put in an open camp. ‘What happens to them then?’ I asked, feigning innocence, fully aware that Hungary had no more than 2,000 places in its three refugee camps at Bicske, Debrecen and the new one at Vámosszabadi, opened in 2013. ‘It can happen that they set out for the camps, but never arrive,’ Seress said cautiously. It was the understatement of the year. Only the most vulnerable, or those in need of rest, actually reached the camps. For several years the Hungarian authorities, like the Serbian authorities to the south, had been simply turning a blind eye to the tens of thousands of migrants crossing their territory. That was all now about to change.
The police chiefs of Hungary and Serbia held a crisis meeting at the motorway border crossing point at Röszke. Károly Papp spoke first, for the Hungarian side. The two counties on the Serbian border had over 1,000 officers at their disposal and had already received 136 reinforcements. His officers were coping with the situation, he said, by renting new premises, notably a hangar at Röszke and coaches with which to transport the migrants from the roadside to the registration centres at Röszke and Nagyfa. He used none of the alarmist language used by Hungarian politicians but spoke of the situation simply as a professional challenge. Twelve police officers had arrived from Austria and Germany to monitor the situation, with fifteen more due soon, under the auspices of the European border control authority, Frontex. The numbers of migrants arriving had already fallen to around 600 a day, from a peak of 1,200, thanks to joint patrols organised with the Serbian colleagues, he said.