by Nick Thorpe
The Serbian government largely turned a blind eye to the migrants travelling across their country. The Serbian police had almost given up patrolling the border with Hungary. If they came across a large group of migrants they would simply check if they had enough water and point them towards Hungary. The parks around the train and bus stations, starting from Belgrade and finishing in Subotica, the town furthest to the north, were full of resting people. International organisations, led by the French medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières, mobilised to help.
A photographer from Dél Magyarország, a regional daily newspaper based in Szeged, filmed Serbian police alighting from a coach on the motorway which runs just a few hundred metres from the Hungarian border, to be followed down by a large contingent of migrants. They immediately set out across the fields, across the drainage canal into Hungary.9
There were three main crossing points from Serbia into Hungary: beside the River Tisza and its oxbows, up a largely disused railway line which stretched through the cornfields between Horgoš and Röszke, and through the scrubby woodland near Ásotthalom. Many migrants gathered to rest at a disused brick factory known as ‘Ciglana’ on the outskirts of Subotica. A crumbling red brick chimney, long low buildings roofed with tiles, and the surrounding fields of wheat and weeds, became home to a transient population of thousands over the next two years.
On an early June evening the sandy tracks around Ásotthalom were full of migrants once again. Where I had seen mostly Kosovar Albanians in February, now the largest number were from Syria and Iraq, closely followed by Afghanistan. The Syrians had the best mobile phones and were the best organised. In the village of Horgoš on the Serbian side I sat with a group of them. They didn’t want their faces to be filmed, but we could record their voices, and the backs of their heads, as they set out up the railway track to cover the last 3 kilometres to the Hungarian border.
On the Hungarian side, a wide road of mud and sand had been cleared of trees and undergrowth as far as the eye could see. The fence began as an experiment, supported by concrete posts in some places, timber ones in others, with one coil of razor wire along the bottom, and another along the top. At regular intervals there were white signs with the words, ‘state border’ in three languages. And the Hungarian flag.
In a quiet moment, the cameraman I was working with, Mark Hewitt, who had served in the army, struck up a conversation with the soldiers building the fence. What did we think of it? they asked, clearly rather proud of their handiwork. ‘In the British army, they taught us to cross these things in about three seconds,’ Mark told them. They were crestfallen.
A glass bottle of perfume with a silver screw top lay in grass flattened by human bodies. A colourful striped shawl in pastel reds, browns, purples and yellow lay nearby, either lost in the hurry to leave or placed carefully for others to find, to mark the easiest place to cross the narrow Körös-éri canal which marks this section of the Hungarian-Serbian border. I picked it up, as a souvenir, then thought better of it, and put it carefully back in its place in the morning dew. The grass beside it, leading to a parting in the reeds on the overgrown canal, had been trodden flat. And the water shone clear in the daylight, marking the path. Patrin is the Gypsy word for signs left behind as waymarks for those who follow. It means leaf. But there were no Gypsies here. Through the trees on the far side were the occasional red tiled roofs of Serbian farmsteads. As there was no one about, I took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my trouser legs and waded through the water, into Serbia. The soil seemed better there, richer and browner, in contrast to the sand on the Hungarian side. A field of sunflowers grew in orderly rows. I crossed back, illegally, fearing detection, but there was nothing to fear, only the flies which buzzed around my mouth and eyes. A warm breeze brushed the hair of the long grass.
Biscuit wrappers and other litter, discarded after a hurried snack before dawn, were strewn across the track which led inland, towards the main road. Lost things from a long journey. The canal bristled with sword-shaped leaves, and willows leant over it protectively, as though to hide what was going on here from prying eyes. At one point, the canal was crossed by a small bridge, just big enough for a car to cross. But it was decorated, long ago, with thick steel cables, to prevent car smugglers using it to take their stolen vehicles in one direction or the other. Now the cables had rusted, they looked like loops of spaghetti left on a child’s plate. Beyond the canal, white-painted concrete border stones stood out in the grass, with metal plates with the letter M for Magyarország on one side, RS for Serbia on the other. There was another plaque on the side with the number 432 – 432 kilometres from somewhere. There were no border guards, no police, just the din of birds and frogs, and the traces left by refugees. On the far side, in the distance, maize plants, already knee high, added another shade of green to this mostly green world. In the Hungarian language, corn is known as tengeri, meaning sea, because it came from beyond the sea, from the Americas. Other fields were already dotted with the cylindrical shapes of hay bales, winter fodder for the animals. In the middle of a field of sunflowers, already as tall as a man but with their flowers still tightly shut, a lookout tower rose like the turret of a Gothic castle. Halfway up the tower had a sort of belt made up of concrete flames. Above that what looked like a house, with windows and sloping grey roof, but no doors, was suspended, and rising from that, instead of a chimney, another square tower bristling with aerials. The whole peculiar structure appeared to be abandoned.
A maze of sandy tracks riddled the woods on the Hungarian side of the border. Close to the village of Ásotthalom, there were storks’ nests atop telegraph poles, and stately black and white birds minding their chicks while their mates cruised gracefully among the open fields between the woods for food. Wild daisies grew everywhere, and crude purple flowers with leathery leaves I did not recognise. The woods were mostly spindly poplar, freckled with shrub acacia. No tall or stout trees graced these woodlands – the result of Communist-era forestry practices which favoured mass planting, and mass cutting. Thirty years later the same approach was the norm. Near the main tracks, fir trees thrived in the sandy soil.
‘Don’t bother to go down there and get eaten by mosquitoes! Just wait on the main road, the migrants will come to you!’ advised a friendly local man. He was staying with his wife and daughters in an outlying farm. There was a swing in the yard, a blue plastic slide, and behind the house on the edge of an open field, three wooden lookout towers for hunters, side by side, each with eight wooden steps. People here must be selling them, I thought.
What did he think of all the people, from far flung corners of the world, traipsing down the path beside his house? I asked. His face darkened. ‘I’m a hunter – and they disturb the wild animals,’ he grumbled. If I give him my phone number, would he text me if he saw another group of migrants coming?
‘No mobile phone coverage!’ he complained. On the map in the village hall in Ásotthalom, this area is called ‘the accursed forest’ – a reference to the lack of water, or perhaps now to the lack of mobile coverage. Driving back to the main road, two deer crossed my path, almost lazily, then watched me from a clump of acacias, oblivious to the danger of men with guns. I passed a signboard advertising the presence of other mammals. There are three kinds ground-dog (Spalax leucodon), the Transylvanian, the Hungarian, and the Southern Great Plain variety. All three can be found in this region, but the latter is the most endangered, with only 300 individuals left. In the picture below, it looked like a small otter, 15 to 25 centimetres long, brownish-grey, with a flat head. Completely blind, without earlobes or tail, it lives its whole life underground. Forestation, deep ploughing, and the destruction of the grasslands beneath which it builds its shallow burrows, are wiping the animal off the face of the earth. There was also an appeal to save the poor animal from extinction. Anyone who sees one should ring the nearest branch of the national park.
Just off another sandy track, watching suspiciously from her front porch, a middle
-aged woman replied in short sentences to my questions. She had lived in this neighbourhood all her life, and had a son aged twenty-six and a daughter of sixteen.
The situation is bad. They knock on my door at night. I don’t dare let my daughter out in the evenings. Sometimes they call out to her. Once they threw gravel. I’m more afraid for her than she is for herself. And this has been going on for almost a year already.
Mostly we see them at dawn. Some ask for water. Others just walk past our gate. I never let them in, And I don’t give them anything either.
There was a time when the police patrolled here, in March and April, then the migrants kept their distance. But now the police had disappeared, and more and more migrants were coming. Mostly in groups of five or six young people, around five in the morning. She’d seen three groups already today. They shook her garden gate but she hid inside. They called out for water or shouted ‘police’ in English. And her dog, and all the dogs on nearby farmsteads, barked from evening till morn. Would a fence help?
‘That’s what we need,’ she said. ‘It would protect us . . . but what we really need is for the Border Guard to be reestablished.’ Ordinary police took over the Hungarian Border Guard’s duties in border areas. There was no solution in sight. She just wanted the migrants to stop coming.
I needn’t have worried about finding refugees. They were already resting at the roadside when I reached it. Almost all those in this first group were from Africa. The Hungarian police in their smart blue uniforms and red caps stood guard over them, like peacocks guarding wild, migrating birds. But there was no desire to escape. They had reached what they hope would be the promised land. Hungary. And they were very, very tired.
Eric was twenty-one, from a village near Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He had been walking for four months, across Turkey, Greece, Macedonia and Serbia. He was wearing a red and white baseball cap, denim shorts, and a grey hoodie jacket. He had a short beard, which helped him look older than his real age. In Istanbul he teamed up with the fifty or so people he was with now. ‘We are all together.’
They crossed from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos on a small rubber dinghy – he gesticulated just how small it was between his two hands. The boat journey was too hard. ‘Like death itself’ his travelling companion interjected. The French word for death, la mort rebounded between them like a ball on a table tennis table.
From the island of Kos, they took a ship to the Greek mainland at the port of Athens, Piraeus, then continued northwards, on foot. Eric had a Refugee Certificate from the UNHCR in Turkey.
To whom it may concern. This is to certify that the above named person has been recognised as a refugee by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, pursuant to its mandate. As a refugee, he is a person of concern to the Office of the UNHCR, and should, in particular, be protected from return to a country where he would face threats to his life or freedom. Any assistance afforded to the above named individual would be most appreciated.
The document was dated Ankara, 1 November 2011, when Eric first arrived alone in Turkey, a few days after his sixteenth birthday. The last sentence reminded me of the beginning of ‘Paddington’ by the British children’s author, Michael Bond. A bear arrives at Paddington station in London from ‘darkest Peru’, with a small suitcase containing marmalade sandwiches, and a sign around his neck: ‘Please look after this bear.’
What did you know about Hungary before you came? What kind of welcome do you expect? ‘C’est la paix, quoi’ – it’s a country at peace! – he replied, and that was quite enough.
He fled war and mistreatment by the authorities in Congo, he explained. As we spoke, the radios of the policemen guarding them crackled into life. The southern Hungarian dusk was deepening. The headlights on the police van were turned on and the Africans exposed, as though on stage. On his radio, one officer related how many were in this group, while another reported how many had been caught somewhere else. The tone in which they spoke about the migrants was not racist, rather pragmatic. Twenty here, ten there, a straggling group of six or seven somewhere else. All spotted at the roadside and told firmly to sit down and wait. They could easily have run away – the police were at full stretch, with just two or three guarding thirty of forty migrants, but they had no reason to run. They felt they had arrived somewhere and were actually keen to be registered. The first question many asked was, ‘Where can I find the police?’ The influx already represented a logistical problem for the authorities, who didn’t have enough buses.
Life has always been difficult in Africa, I suggested to Eric. What was the final straw, what propelled him to leave? ‘So many of my friends were killed in the street.’ He said so quietly, gazing at me, his eyes gleaming white in the peaceful European roadside dusk. I was ashamed of my question. A horse and cart passed, the old Hungarian peasant looked down from his seat, uncomprehending – an emotion shared by the asylum seekers as they watched him slowly go by. Had they really fled to a country where people travel by horse and cart? A police helicopter hovered overhead like an angry dragonfly, then flitted away over the tree tops. The Africans were silent. The only chatter was from the birds, settling down for the night, and the police, who wished they could too.
Another man from Congo, called Israel, said he left his country because he wanted to live in peace. ‘In Congo there are so many political problems, so much manipulation. Corruption and theft are huge problems.’
‘The police surrounded the area and accused me and my friends of being bandits, delinquents, but that was not true. We were just petty traders.’ He described his terror when he saw his friends killed by the police. ‘That’s why we came here, to look for a life free of fear.’ What would have happened to you and your friends if you had stayed in Congo?
‘I would have died. You cannot live all your life in terror. When they follow you, and accuse you of something you didn’t do, that is very hard to take. And when they come for you, and take you away, very few survive to tell the tale.’ He left his brother and sister behind in Greece, where he met Eric and the others. They crossed the country, sleeping rough as they went. They were registered by the police, but never ‘admitted’. There were no humanitarian centres where they could find shelter, or food. Without money, they collected scraps of food from dustbins.
‘Sometimes we give fingerprints, sometimes we don’t.’ They would prefer not to, because the big fear of most is that they will one day be deported back to one of the poor countries on their route, like Greece, or Hungary.
Most of the people from Congo spoke French but another man in the group, Omar from Mauritania, spoke English too. He had left his country five years earlier by plane to Turkey and had travelled on foot ever since. He spent more than four years in a refugee camp in Greece but left when his request for asylum was rejected.
‘This is my family now!’ he laughed, putting his arms round Issa and his wife, Fatouma, from Congo. ‘We came together from Thessaloniki!’ He was a Peulh, also known as Fulani. ‘In my country the white Moors are in power, and the black, like me, are shut out of everything.’ He would be twenty-five in February.
Did he have a profession? I felt like a job interviewer.
‘I have three professions!’ He grinned. Information technology, plumbing and electricity. When did he last drink water? ‘The police gave me some, when they caught me. I felt so happy in my heart!’
Later I looked up his country on the internet. The fresh water beneath the capital, Nouakchott, is expected to run out in around 2054, and is already expensive.10 The Fulani number 40 million, spread across West and Central Africa; 13 million are nomadic, the largest pastoral nomadic people in the world.
The first European to ‘discover’ Congo, or the source of the River Congo at least, was the Hungarian László Magyar, an adventurer from the western Hungarian town of Szombathely.11 He died in Ponte de Cuio, Angola in 1864. A prolific linguist who spoke five European and five African languages, his writings
are most valued for his descriptions of the people whom he travelled among, and their customs. He was known as ‘Mister What-is-this?’, on account of his insatiable curiosity.
Our roadside conversations were cut short by the arrival of a white police bus. The Congolese picked themselves up wearily from the side of the road, and dragged themselves towards it, Issa supporting his pregnant wife on his arm. On the steps, a policeman with a torch noted gender and nationality. Forty-eight people in all. As they waited, I talked to Sefala Han, twenty-six, from Jalalabad in Afghanistan. He fled first to Pakistan, where he stayed two or three years. There were big problems there. Then he travelled for four or five months through Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria and Serbia. At home he worked as a sales assistant in a sweet shop.
‘If your country will give me refuge,’ he said, assuming I was Hungarian, ‘I will stay here.’ He had lost track of the rest of his family, who fled in another direction. ‘I am very happy to reach Hungary, insh’allah, with God’s help.’ Among this mostly African gathering, there were just four Afghans, including two children standing slightly apart, looking too young to be here, a brother and sister. Salman was twelve and Zahra fifteen, from Afghanistan. Their mother was very ill, in Athens. They teamed up with the Africans somewhere in the Balkans. I wanted to ask more, but the police were impatient to leave. A policeman called Norbi called the countries on his list, like football scores. Pakistan 2, Afghanistan 4, Cameroon 1, Congo, 48. Fifty-five people in all. The Mauretanian had clearly gone unnoticed among the Congolese. Thirty-six men, eighteen women and one child. Zahra was counted among the women. Only her brother was a child now. The bars on the inside of the bus clanged shut. Through the small windows, the refugees made little V for victory signs to me, as they were driven away to the blue hangar and white tents of the camp at Röszke.