by Nick Thorpe
The regional representative of the UN Refugee Agency, Montserrat Feixas Vihé was not impressed: ‘We are deeply concerned by the way the government increasingly vilifies people who have fled from war zones like Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq and who desperately need safety and protection in Hungary,’ she said. ‘The UNHCR believes the questions intentionally attempt to confuse refugees and asylum seekers with so-called ‘economic migrants’ and wrongly blame refugees for a number of purported threats to Hungary and Europe.’ And she concluded: ‘We need to remember that around the world the primary threat is not from refugees, but to them.’6
The justice and interior ministers of the rest of Europe had not been idle since the Paris atrocities in January. At a meeting in Latvia on 29 January they issued the Riga Statement. Counter-terrorism efforts were now a priority at national and international level.7
‘The carefully planned attacks demonstrated the elevated threat to the EU from a fanatic minority, operationally based in the Middle East, combined with a network of people born and raised in the EU, often radicalised within a short space of time, who have proven to be willing and able to act as facilitators and active accomplices in terrorism,’ Rob Wainwright, director of Europol, the European police agency, wrote a year later, looking back at 2015.
The difference in the Hungarian government’s approach was that instead of a fanatic minority, they saw a fanatic majority. And where EUROPOL identified a network of people born and raised inside the EU, radicalised inside or outside prison, Viktor Orbán’s government saw immigrants. In the sixty-page EUROPOL report on the terror threat to Europe during 2015, published in 2016, migrants are only mentioned five times.8
Due to the continuous rise in the number of irregular migrants entering the EU, including asylum seekers, and the increasing difficulties in accommodating them, the migration issue may remain the focus of social discourse and media coverage for a non-foreseeable period of time. In addition, it is likely that right-wing extremists and groups will reinforce their efforts to portray the asylum policy in a polarising manner and exploit the debate for its own purposes [italics added].
It could have been a description of the position of the Hungarian government. The ‘war on migrants’ was about to restore the sliding popularity of Fidesz.
On 22 February 2015, the party lost the safe seat of Veszprém in western Hungary to an independent candidate backed by the (unusually united) opposition. On 12 April, Fidesz lost the Tapolca by-election to the far-right Jobbik. Immigration was not an issue in the election, which focused mostly on the threatened closure of the town hospital, and the low pay of medical staff, which forced many to leave the country.
The numbers of asylum seekers were falling on the southern border. While in January nearly 15,000 and in February 17,000 were registered, only 6,000 arrived in March. This was a result of heavy intervention from the Kosovar authorities and warnings from Germany to the people of Kosovo that new arrivals would simply be sent home. Under heavy pressure from Germany, the Hungarian and Serbian authorities agreed to expedite that process, and busloads of reluctant Kosovars began to take the long, lonesome road back down the Balkan route in a southerly direction. But as their numbers fell, the numbers of other peoples, especially those fleeing the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, began to rise, along the tracks through the fields which the Kosovars had created.
In April, 8,224 migrants entered Hungary. Entering the country without the proper documents – a passport, stamped with a visa for the Schengen group of countries to which Hungary belonged, was defined under Hungarian law as a misdemeanour. The Justice Ministry were working on new regulations to turn it into a criminal offence.9
In May 11,606 arrived, an average of 374 a day. The police had few buses of their own. Through the spring of 2015, most of their requests to the government for funds to hire buses from private companies were turned down.
The police had developed a system to deal with the Kosovars at the start of the year. They collected all migrants at one place beside the road, then took them by bus to a blue hangar at Röszke for registration. The hangar, rented since January, had a capacity of 500. As it overflowed, rows and rows of green army tents were set up in the field next to it.
‘We were under enormous pressure from the Austrians and Germans at that time,’ recalled Gizella Vas, then head of the border police for the southern counties of Hungary, bordering Serbia and Croatia. ‘The Austrian attaché came to see me one day, very aggressively. “Where are all the fingerprints?” he demanded. In fact, we did a good job, registering everybody and taking their fingerprints, until early September [2015].’
The police were also under huge psychological pressure, many of them drafted in from other parts of the country, with few language skills and little or no experience of handling foreigners, let alone refugees. In the circumstances, they did their best.
In early June 2015, giant government-sponsored roadside posters went up all over the country, to complement the ‘National Consultation’, which had received a disappointing response from the public. Ostensibly aimed at the migrants, the messages were in Hungarian, targeting Hungarian voters: ‘If you come to Hungary, don’t take our jobs’, or ‘If you come to Hungary, you must respect our culture!’
A wave of disdain for the crude style of the posters ran through Fidesz, but there were no resignations or serious protests within the party. It was a similar story in the Catholic and Protestant churches. Some bishops even took up the government’s crusading tone, echoing the prime minister’s call to ‘defend Christian Europe from the Muslim invasion’. The Catholic archbishop of Veszprém, Gyula Márfi, was particularly extreme.10 This flew in the face of the pro-refugee approach taken by Pope Francis. Relations between the Catholic bishops in Hungary and the Vatican deteriorated, as the refugee crisis continued. The Pope made clear his own sympathy, his own desire to help refugees at every opportunity. His first visit outside the Vatican after taking office was to African refugees on the Italian Mediterranean island of Lampedusa in 2013. Asked about relations between the Hungarian Catholic Church and the Pope, one dissident priest told me that ‘Most of my church is praying for the Pope to die.’
The churches, especially the Calvinists (Orbán is a Calvinist), have a long tradition in Hungary as defenders of the nation at times of foreign occupation. By describing the influx of asylum seekers as exactly that, Orbán tapped a rich vein of patriotic feeling which the churches were unwilling, or unable to resist. At the same time, his government spent lavishly on the churches, and their schools. ‘They have bought the churches’ loyalty,’ one Greek Catholic priest lamented.
Rival, humorous posters began popping up across the country in strategic locations. Funded by the scurrilous Twin-Tailed Dog Party, the messages, usually in English, included: ‘We are sorry about our prime minister’ and ‘Come to Hungary! We’ve got jobs in London!’ When police were deployed to protect the official posters from attempts by activists to deface them, the party produced a new one. ‘Dear police, there is no need to guard this poster. Please keep the public order somewhere else!’
In preparation for 20 June, International Day of the Refugee, the Central European branch of the UNHCR in Budapest put up its own posters on the walls of the metro.11 Four successful immigrants to Hungary were identified: Begum Ali, a Bangladeshi woman who owned a restaurant in the eighth district, Dariush, a young Afghan man who worked as a tourist guide, Sophie, thirty-one, from Togo, now working as a nanny in a kindergarten, and Zeeshan, nineteen, from Pakistan, a prominent figure in Hungary’s little-known national cricket team. I went to the open day at Begum Ali’s restaurant.
Begum and Moshaid Ali fled their home in Bangladesh in 2000, when their shop was burnt down during political violence. Begum was eight months pregnant with their first son, Ferdoz, at the time. He was born in Pakistan, where they first found refuge. Their daughter Lutfa, now seventeen and their second son, Kalam, fifteen, were also born there. Violence in Pakistan for
ced them to flee again, first to Iran, then Turkey and Greece, where they spent nine years in a refugee camp, but failed to get refugee status. Of the three children, Kalam, the youngest, spoke most easily of his childhood as a refugee. ‘The worst experience was on the Greek-Macedonian border, when a fight broke out between Afghan and African refugees in early 2013, when we were trying to cross,’ he told me. ‘Hungary was the first country to make us welcome, and we are very grateful for that.’
They spent their first six months in a refugee camp in Debrecen in the east of the country. When they were granted refugee status, they borrowed money from a family friend to open a small restaurant, the Al Modina. As we spoke, Kalam’s mother rushed around the kitchen putting the finishing touches to various curries, including one made from Danube carp. Samosas sizzled in a vast pot. There were only six tables but it seemed a popular and cheap spot to eat in a neighbourhood where almost every second building boasts a restaurant. According to Kalam, the family had only been the target of racist insults once in their three years in Hungary, when a man shouted at them, ‘but he was drunk,’ explained Kalam. ‘We came to Hungary to try to find a better life, and we found it here.’
*
The Bulgarian land border with Turkey stretches along the rough granite rocks of the southern Rhodope mountains. In early June, giant purple thistles, their heads like the busbies worn by the ceremonial guards outside Buckingham Place, grew everywhere. Towering above them, glinting threateningly in the morning sunlight, a tall fence topped with razor wire was also growing. The Bulgarian fence grew out of the same seed as the short, stubby Greek one nearby.
This is the ancient province of Thrace, the gateway to Europe from Asia.12 Bordered by the Danube to the north, the Black Sea to the east and the Aegean to the south, the first farmers brought their livestock to the narrow strip of land between the Marmara Sea and the Black Sea in the sixth millennium before Christ. They also brought grain, and the art of winning copper from rock and fashioning elegant tools, weapons and jewellery from it.
West of Istanbul, the granite Yildiz or Star mountains climb gently for 300 kilometres to their highest ridge, 1,031 metres near the Turkish town of Kirklareli. The forests on their slopes are mostly of beech and pine. Beyond Kirklareli is Edirne, once famous for the manufacture of drums, used on the Ottoman military campaigns up through the Balkans. I bought one for my sons here, long ago.
Bulgarian museums are rich in stone images of the lone figure of ‘the Thracian horseman’, his spear held at the ready. This was probably the archetype of later images of the Christian figure of St George. The Christians simply added a dragon.
The flow of migrants has never stopped through Thrace, in the footsteps of those first farmers. The Evros River is 480 kilometres long; it rises in the Rhodope mountains in southern Bulgaria, where it is known as the Maritsa. The last 205 kilometres of its course forms the border between Turkey and Greece, before it flows into the Aegean near the port of Alexandropoulis. Throughout history, its valley has guided invading armies, traders and adventurers up into the Balkans and beyond. In the new migrant crisis, it was to play a similar role.
Between 2006 and 2008 most refugees crossed the narrow stretch of water from the Turkish coast to the Greek islands nearby. By the summer of 2009, that number reached more than sixty a day. The conditions in which they were detained on the islands were often atrocious. The removal of land mines left over from the 1948 Greek Civil War beside the Evros River in 2009 opened a new route for refugees coming from Turkey who were disillusioned with the sea route. But crossing the Evros River was already hard, and about to get harder.
In the winter of 2010, Italian photographer Giovanni Cocco captured the determination and despair of migrants trying to cross the marshy reaches of the Evros River on their way to Western Europe.13 His photographs include many of the river itself in the early morning, of migrants from Africa and the Middle East drying their clothes after swimming over, or crossing the river in inflatable boats. There are pictures of men huddled around fires trying to warm themselves in the frosty Balkan winter. One of the most poignant is of the little mounds of earth, mostly unnamed, at the ‘illegal migrants cemetery’ at Sidiro, on the Greek side.
Foreign photographers and reporters were not the only ones to notice the migrant influx. In 2011, 55,000 people were intercepted by police trying to enter Greece along the Evros border. In January 2012, the Greek authorities began to build a 4-metre high razor-wire fence along the drier 12-kilometre bottleneck through which most migrants crossed, between the villages of Kastanies and Nea Vyssa.14 This was the Greek equivalent of the woods at Ásotthalom. Mórahalom in Hungary was similar to the Greek town of Orestiades nearby. Twenty-three night-vision cameras were installed along the Greek fence, partially financed by the EU, and Greek patrols were backed up by Frontex, the European border guard service.15
In response, the smugglers simply rerouted their clients back to the Aegean coast. They established a flotilla of rubber dinghies to take them across to the nearer islands, risking the lives of those in their care by overpacking the boats. In 2014, 43,500 migrants and refugees arrived in Greece by sea alone, triple the number for the previous year. By far the largest number were from Syria, followed by Afghanistan, Somalia and Eritrea. The Greek reception centres barely improved. In its December 2014 report the UN Refugee Agency recommended that other European countries not return asylum seekers to Greece. The French medical charity Médicins Sans Frontières noted 1,000 attempts to reach the Greek islands in the last week of September 2012. By the end of the year, attempted crossings of the Evros River border near Orestiades were down 95 per cent.16
In Bulgaria, construction of the fence on the Turkish border began in January 2014. There was no plan initially to build a fence along the whole 288 kilometres of the border, just along what was regarded as the most vulnerable stretch, the 30 kilometres between the Kapitan Andreevo checkpoint and the checkpoint at Elhovo to the east. That took seven months to complete at a cost of €5 million. EU funds were provided for a large number of night-vision cameras along the whole border. Most were small and fixed, but there were also one or two super-powerful cameras, with a range of 18 kilometres, deep into Turkey. By the summer of 2015, a new 100-kilometre section of fence was under construction. The British government presented Bulgaria with fifty ex-army land rovers. Cameras were mounted on many of the new vehicles.
Kapitan Andreevo is a big modern checkpoint, renovated by the EU, with five lanes in each direction. Approached from the Bulgarian side, giant posters advertise the ancient Via Diagonalis, which once ran from this point diagonally north-west across Bulgaria to Serbia just below the city of Vidin on the Danube. If any of the migrants glanced at it, they might have noticed that it runs more or less exactly along the route they hoped to take.
During 2014, 11,000 people applied for asylum in Bulgaria; 5,000 applications were granted, almost all from Syria, 3,000 more were given ‘protected status’ and 3,000 people simply disappeared – through Serbia or Romania, towards the West. In the first three months of 2015, 4,700 people crossed the land border and applied for asylum in Bulgaria.17
Captain Aleksandar Andreevo, nicknamed Chapata, was a guerrilla fighter against the Ottoman empire in the early twentieth century. In Bulgarian eyes then, a revolutionary, while for the Turks, a terrorist.
For the Communists too, the border had a great symbolic value. In the corridor of the border police control centre at Elhovo, there is a large oil painting. It shows a determined soldier with a red star on his cap, his arm locked across the neck of a desperate young man in everyday clothes clutching a machine-gun, while a dog sinks its teeth into his arm – a border guard seizing a guerrilla fighter opposing the Communist takeover of Bulgaria in 1948. In the background, the rocky terrain with snatches of forest had changed little, but the trees gave precious cover now to thousands of desperate people fleeing war and poverty. Or so they thought.
The bank of screens in the control ce
ntre each portrayed the view from eighteen cameras, six across, three down. Black and white images, of the fence, the road running beside it, or of craggy outcrops of rock, flickered on each. The perspective from the larger cameras was amazing – the rolling hills with darker patches of trees and woodland, stretching into the far distance. The camera was powerful enough, I was told, to zoom in and read a car number plate at a distance of more than 10 kilometres. Beneath it, on a pop-up menu, the corresponding map could be brought up. Men and women in camouflage uniforms craned over the screens, scanning them for intruders. If any were spotted, two calls were made. One to the Turkish army on the far side, and the other to their own border police. I was shown a short video of a recent, night-time interception. Four small white figures could be seen, white because captured on night-vision cameras. The two in the middle were taller, the one ahead slightly smaller, possibly a woman. The figure at the back held the hand of a child. Each carried a small rucksack, which showed up black on the screen. They turned a corner, where the track got wider. At that point it turned out that there were six people in the group. Another white light appeared on the horizon. The figures scattered across the screen. One man seemed to kneel down, perhaps to protect a child. An army jeep raced down the track towards them. Then they all scattered, back into Turkey.
Harmanli, in Bulgaria, is a town set back 45 kilometres from the Kapitan Andreevo border crossing. It’s a sleepy place with a fine Ottoman bridge, built in 1585, over the dried-up River Harmanli. ‘The world is a bridge, across which the way of the king and the poor man passes,’ reads the plaque on the middle.