by Nick Thorpe
The town museum was firmly shut, but in its courtyard a bust of Lenin, chiselled from grey granite lay on its side. Someone had thoughtfully placed a flowerpot with a tall thin plant growing out of it, by his head. The plant was clearly watered regularly, as it would hardly survive otherwise in the June heat. An act of consolation for the fallen giant of Marxism-Leninism, or gentle mockery.
A large tourist map on a stand in the main square promoted the glories of the Haskovo region. There were Thracian tombs and monuments, including one called the Deaf Stones, and Roman roads and Orthodox churches dedicated to the Virgin Mary, St Constantine and St Helena.
The Harmanli refugee camp is a former army camp, opened in 2013 when the first large waves of migrants caught the Bulgarian authorities unprepared. The atrocious conditions drew the ire of human rights groups, and a big effort was made to improve the place. The pink-painted barracks are still crumbling, but the rooms and corridors have been renovated. Cabins and tents were added to absorb up to 3,000 people at a time.
In a classroom I met an English teaching volunteer, Sadie Clesby and her mother.18 They came for a month, and stayed. The classroom was brightly painted, with stacks of games, and the Arabic and Latin alphabets on the wall. Girls kneaded multi-coloured play dough into funny shapes, a boy challenged his sister to yet another game of table football, the sun shone in the window and grateful mothers pottered by to check their children were alright. Two boys climbed in and out of the ground floor window. Most of the inmates were Syrian Kurds, but there were also Iraqis and Afghans. Refugee girls, teenagers who had learnt some English at school, helped Sadie and her mother talk to the children.
‘They learn so fast, communication is not a problem,’ she explained.
When the children first arrive, it is as though they are shell-shocked. Some cling to the walls of the classroom. They need their parents to be there at first, which would be normal behaviour, until you see the worry lines on their faces. They often have the worried, facial expressions of adults. When some of the older refugees set off fireworks in the courtyard to celebrate Nowruz, the Kurdish New Year, the children went completely silent – not like normal children when they see fireworks. They clung to us. They were terrified.
Before we came here there was no school, no play area. We just set up something to keep them busy and let them have fun.
Most of the children in the classroom were from Al-Hasaka. As we spoke, a major drama was unfolding in their home town. IS had launched an offensive to capture the city, which had 190,000 inhabitants before the war. On 5 June, the Kurdish YPG militia (Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units) joined government troops to fight IS forces which were taking the city district by district. By the time IS forces were finally driven back, after two months of fighting, large parts of the city, and the homes of the children I met at Harmanli, lay in ruins.19
In a room off a corridor near the schoolroom, I met some of the adults. Idris, from Afren, near Aleppo, said he had been in the camp for seven months. He knew people here who had been waiting for five years, he said. His own story was typical. It took him fifteen days on foot to reach Turkey from Syria in September 2014. In May 2015, he joined migrants attempting the land route through the Balkans to Germany. From Istanbul he took a bus to Edirne, where he stayed five days. A smuggler told him where to cross the border into Bulgaria. New smugglers got him and his travelling companions as far as the Bulgarian-Romanian border, but there they were caught and sent first to the asylum detention camp at Elhovo, and from there to the open refugee camp at Harmanli.
Days earlier, a baby died from a snake bite in the camp, the men told me. Since then, another larger snake had been caught and killed. They took me to see it. A man held up a harmless grass snake, minus its head, as the children gathered round to laugh nervously. A police minibus arrived, and disgorged more refugees, mostly women and children. One woman wore the full black chador, while other women, probably Kurds, were dressed in Western style with their hair flowing down their shoulders. The adults seemed exhausted, the children full of energy and excitement at arriving in a new place. The same journey which almost turned their parents’ hair white with anxiety and fear often seemed nothing more than a great adventure for the children.
I asked the men milling around outside, gazing at the snake, if any had direct experience of the IS group. One said his friends had told him that many Europeans come to fight for them. He didn’t understand why. Another man butted in. ‘Everyone is fighting just for the money, not for freedom, not for their fellow man. The fighters say they are fighting for Islam, but deep in their hearts, they just need money.’
Were there people in this camp who lived in areas under IS control?
‘Yes, but they won’t speak to the media because they are afraid for their families, who stayed behind. One man here told me how they killed his brother. First they took him to prison for a long time. There was no information about him. Then he found out they had killed him.’
He too, he said, had met Da’esh (a pejorative name for IS) fighters as he was fleeing from Aleppo. You cannot trust them at all, he said. ‘Maybe this man today is very handsome, very kind, a very good man. But from one hour to the next, he turns into a killer, a murderer, who might kill you. No one knows why they change so fast.’
The refugees at Harmanli were nervous about the Dublin procedures, a cornerstone of European asylum law. They were afraid that by giving their fingerprints they might be returned to Bulgaria even if they did make it to Germany. The Dublin III procedures entered into force in 2013, an addition to the European asylum rules agreed in 2005. The country in which a refugee was first registered assumed a legal responsibility to care for that person. If the person travelled on to another country they could be returned to the first. Also implicit in the Dublin procedures was the principle that asylum seekers should be distributed fairly among EU member states. It was this principle which would later be opposed so bitterly by East European governments.
By 2015 the Dublin procedures were breaking down, both under the weight of numbers and because of reservations in Western Europe about how asylum seekers would be treated if they were returned to the East. In the whole of 2014, only eighty migrants were sent back to Bulgaria from Western Europe.20
The asylum seekers at Harmanli asked me for advice. What could I say? They could hardly expect Bulgaria or any other country to let them in, or let them through without registering them and recording their identity. Most had been persuaded by the smugglers to hand over their passports or other identity documents as they crossed Turkey. Others had torn them up or abandoned them at the roadside. Many later came to regret this, as in order to pick up money from a Western Union or MoneyGram office, you have to prove who you are.
In a plain whitewashed room on the first floor of the main building I was allowed to attend a security screening. There were three officials, from the secret services, the State Agency for Refugees (SAR) and an interpreter. The session lasted about fifteen minutes. The man was young, perhaps in his mid-twenties with a small, pointed face and chin, wearing a red T-shirt. He seemed earnest and confident in his innocence. The officials had notepads open. The man from the secret services asked most of the questions. I thought of Nikolai and his needle in a haystack.
Back in Sofia I met Nikola Kazakov, head of SAR. Bulgaria has the longest land border of the EU directly affected by the current refugee crisis he explained, almost proudly:
All are escaping wars in their countries, from Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan. They are afraid of executions, afraid for their lives.
For most of these people Bulgaria is a transit country to their final destinations. But we would like them to regard Bulgaria as their country. We want whoever wants to stay here, to integrate here, to be part of the society. And that is why the Bulgarian government just started to implement a national strategy for immigration and integration.
Our position is that we want all the countries in the EU to share responsibility
towards refugees, and to distribute them fairly between them.
Under the quota scheme under consideration by the EU, Bulgaria had been asked to take 788 refugees and had agreed to the request. In return, as the poorest country in the EU, Bulgaria was asking for three kinds of assistance. Financial help, expert advice, and for an EU-level assessment of the refugee situation in each country, to decide what resources were needed.
If Bulgaria is so welcoming, why build a fence? I asked.
‘The aim of fence is not only to stop people but also to redirect them to the checkpoints, so they can cross legally. The second purpose of the fence is to fight the human smugglers.’ By the end of April, 50 per cent of new arrivals came through the official border crossings. They hid in the back of trucks, and freight cars on trains.
As we finished the interview, sirens wailed across Bulgaria. It was noon on 2 June, the day Bulgarians celebrate their nineteenth-century poet and revolutionary fighter against the Ottomans, Hristo Botev. Botev was shot dead aged only twenty-eight. Traffic stopped. People stood to attention beside their cars or on the pavements where they were walking. The siren parted the red sea of the city. Then the sound wound down, and the waters came cascading back in.
Krassimir Kanev, head of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, began by praising the Immigration Directorate, when we met for coffee in a quiet street near my hotel: ‘We have one of the highest rates of asylum granted in Europe.’21 Almost all Syrians were granted asylum. Hidden behind the numbers however, was the Bulgarian government’s desire not to integrate the new arrivals, but to get rid of them as quickly as possible, Krassimir claimed. Knowing that they regarded Bulgaria first and foremost as a transit country, the sooner they got their documents, the sooner they would leave, he argued. In the light of the experience of other countries, I wasn’t sure. The Serbian authorities gave them twenty-four hours to leave the country, while the Hungarians gave them seventy-two hours.
The Bulgarian fence was also the butt of much criticism by human rights groups. ‘The government is trying to stop the influx by all means possible, without regard to who is coming. There are many reports of physical ill-treatment, including deaths in suspicious circumstances,’ Kanev said. He also suggested that the efforts at integration of those who wanted to stay were half-hearted at best. Bulgaria might pay lip service to the idea of a fair distribution of refugees based on a quota system, but its Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voted against the concept in the European Parliament.
In defence of the fence, I suggested, surely it was only fair that a country knows who is crossing its borders? What about the threat of terrorism?
‘They want to end one illegal situation by creating another, with more risks. The government says they should go to the official checkpoints. But as they have no Schengen visas, they will be turned back. So the fence is actually pushing them into the hands of the smugglers, not saving them from them.’ This also meant that only the better-off refugees, who had the money to pay, stood a chance of getting through. The poorest, and most in need of international protection, could not even set foot on Bulgarian soil. The answer would be the creation of a sensible policy at European level, and the fair distribution of refugees through a quota system. On this at least, he agreed with the government.
CHAPTER THREE
VIKTOR ORBÁN’S JIHAD
The Arabic word ‘jihad’ is often translated as ‘holy war’, but in a purely linguistic sense, the word ‘jihad’ means struggling or striving. The Arabic word for war is: ‘al-harb.’
Islamic Supreme Council of America1
With huge shortages of funding and wide gaps in the global regime for protecting victims of war, people in need of compassion, aid and refuge are being abandoned. For an age of unprecedented mass displacement, we need an unprecedented humanitarian response and a renewed global commitment to tolerance and protection for people fleeing conflict and persecution.
António Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees2
In his regular, bi-weekly interview on public service radio on 12 June 2015, Viktor Orbán said that ‘every possibility [to block the migrants] will be analysed, including the possibility of full, physical border closure’. A decision, based on the options drawn up by the Interior Ministry would be announced the following Wednesday.3
On 17 June in parliament, during a break in the cabinet meeting, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó announced that Hungary was going to build a fence along the whole 175-kilometre length of the border with Serbia. It would be 3 metres high, with 70-centimetre coils of razor wire along the top. The poles would be buried 1.7 metres into the ground. The components would be manufactured by the inmates of Hungarian prisons and erected by them, with the help of soldiers and those on government work schemes, to reduce the burden on the Hungarian tax payer. Initially, the foreign minister said it would be finished ‘by the end of November’. That message was quickly altered to ‘the end of August’.
‘Iron Curtain!’ proclaimed the banner headline the following morning in the Blikk tabloid. The fence could cost 30 billion forints – €100 million – the paper’s readers were told. ‘And might keep out 125,000 migrants a year.’ Beneath the article was an advertisement for holidays in Tunisia. Non-Europeans should stay out of Europe, apparently, but Europeans wanted to keep enjoying the sun and sand in North Africa.
In fact, the fence was not a new idea. The first secret studies on the viability of a border barrier were commissioned by Interior Minister Sándor Pintér in 2013. Police officers were despatched to study existing fences, and Hungarian embassies in countries with border fences were required to submit information about their efficacy. But Viktor Orbán’s government initially showed no interest in the information submitted. It was only after the loss of two ‘safe’ Fidesz seats in by-elections that the government’s communications gurus dusted off the reports. Orbán now produced them unexpectedly from his top hat like a magician: ‘This is not a wave of migration,’ he said, ‘but a process of mass migration which we can expect to last a long time.’
Central to the government’s argument was the valid point that before reaching Hungary, unless they arrived by air, the newcomers must have passed through at least one EU member country – Greece or Bulgaria. Under EU law, they should have sought safety there. Hungary now began changing its own laws, to criminalise the migrants in accordance with its own ideology.
On 1 August 2015, a new law came into force, declaring all countries south of Hungary ‘safe’ for refugees. This was a logical extension of the fence idea. If anyone got through it, they would henceforth be pushed back into Serbia. This broke international refugee law, which explicitly ruled out such push-backs, which are usually referred to by the French word refoulements.4
How safe were Greece and Bulgaria for refugees? In December 2014 the UNHCR declared Greece unsafe, because of poor facilities and ill-treatment of refugees.5 The UNHCR and human rights groups also judged the Bulgarian response to the needs of refugees seriously lacking.6 The Hungarian government was either unaware of such reports or chose to ignore them.
Serbia was also regarded internationally as unsafe for refugees, despite the relatively friendly official attitude to migrants. ‘Reception conditions were inadequate for the numbers arriving, and insufficient care was provided to vulnerable individuals . . . Police continued to ill-treat and financially exploit refugees and migrants,’ wrote Amnesty International.7
Turkey was a special case. The country’s leaders had signed the 1951 Refugee Convention in 1962 but imposed a geographical limitation on the 1967 protocol to it, under which it could only be applied to European citizens. In practice this meant that not a single refugee or migrant from the ongoing wave could legally be returned there.
On 18 June in Geneva, the day after the new Hungarian fence was announced, the UNHCR released its annual Global Trends report.8 A record 60 million people around the world were displaced in 2014, up from 51 million in 2013, and 37.5 million in 2003. O
f these, 13.9 million were newly displaced. The report listed the outbreak of fifteen new conflicts in the past five years. Eight in Africa (Côte d’Ivoire, Central African Republic, Libya, Mali, north-eastern Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan and Burundi); three in the Middle East (Syria, Iraq and Yemen); one in Europe (Ukraine) and three in Asia (Kyrgyzstan, and in several areas of Myanmar and Pakistan).
‘Worldwide, one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. Were this the population of a country, it would be the world’s 24th biggest.’ It would fall between Italy and South Africa on the list. A refugee nation.
Before the Hungarian fence was announced, 400 migrants a day were crossing through the narrow bottleneck between Ásotthalom and Tiszasziget. That number doubled by the end of the month to over 1,000 a day. Why did you come and why now? I asked those I met at the border. ‘We set out because we heard it would be much harder in the future,’ they told me in the second half of June and July. The sparkling new razor-wire fence acted as a magnet for the tens of thousands of people it was supposed to keep out. For those agonising over whether to brave the dangerous journey to Europe, and the uncertainties and indignities of life as a refugee, news of Viktor Orbán’s fence tipped the balance.
The response of other European countries to Hungary’s fence and the new rules was swift. Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dačić warned the Hungarian government that it risked creating a ‘human tragedy’ at the border, as migrants piled up in makeshift camps, unable to cross. Much was still unknown about how the push-backs would happen in practice. Once construction began, fence-watchers noticed that small gates were being left in the fence, every 500 metres, presumably to enable people to be deported without the trouble of reaching prior agreement with the Serbian authorities on the other side.