by Nick Thorpe
Close to midnight on Tuesday 11 August, two Kurdish cousins watched the headlamps of their bus pull into the station at Dohuk in northern Iraq. It was more than three hours late, and they were irritated and nervous. The delay had given their relatives more time to try to persuade them not to leave. But now nothing could stop them.9
Semian Nasser Mohammed, twenty-five, and Nashwan Mustafa Rasoul, twenty-five, boarded the bus from Dohuk to Istanbul. Both had fought in the Kurdish Peshmerga army against IS, especially in Tel Asqof, a Christian village north of Mosul. Both were disillusioned and frustrated by conditions in Iraq, according to Rasoul’s older brother, Sarbast. They had not been paid for three months and wanted to get to Europe to start a proper life. Mustafa sold his car for €14,000 to finance their trip.
In Istanbul they met a man called Sediq Sevo, an Iraqi Kurd from Zakho, to whom they had each already paid €6,600 for the through-trip to Munich, before setting out. ‘I have been working for more than seven years in the smuggling sector,’ Sediq Sevo told reporters from the Reuters news agency. ‘I used to take people from Kurdistan to Turkey and from Turkey to Greece all on foot and by car.’ This time he arranged transport for his clients to the Turkish-Bulgarian border. The cousins walked for at least seven hours across the mountains, then were met by Bulgarian smugglers on the far side who took them to Sofia.
After several days hidden in a Sofia apartment they were driven to the Serbian border, trekked through more mountains and were registered by the Serbian police at Dimitrovgrad. From there, a bus took them to Belgrade. After several days in an apartment they were driven by car to Horgoš on the Hungarian border. On the night of 24 August they followed the railway track into Hungary, accompanied by an Iraqi Kurdish smuggler called Bewar.
Two brothers, also Kurds from Iraq, thirty-four-year-old Hussein and twenty-one-year-old Raman Khalil, left their hometown of Qamishli in 2013, also fleeing IS. After two years in Turkey they continued their journey to Europe through the Balkans. They met Semian and Rashwan either on the railway track near Horgoš, or at the rendezvous point just inside Hungary. Just before dawn, the four of them and fifty-five other men, eight women and four children squeezed into the back of a small refrigerated meat lorry with the word HYZA on the side. It was to be standing room only, all the way to Munich.
The Volvo meat truck was driven by Bulgarians of Roma ethnic background from the Humata district of Lom in north-west Bulgaria. The usual driver was sick that day, so another man drove the truck, who did not understand how to keep the doors only partially shut, in a way that air could still come in. He inadvertently sealed the migrants into the airtight container. Half an hour after leaving the border area, the two men in the cab heard muffled banging from inside. They rang their Afghan boss. ‘Ignore it, and just keep driving,’ he told them.
One of the Bulgarians, Mitko, aged twenty-nine, had started in the used-car business, first repairing then driving minibuses full of Bulgarian migrants to workplaces in Western Europe. He was always in a rush, according to people who knew him in Lom, to make money and get home to Bulgaria. He ran up speeding fines in Austria and Germany and never paid them. When he was finally caught, he lost his driving licence. He robbed a filling station, was caught, and spent time in prison. There was always easy money to be made smuggling cigarettes across the Serbian border into Bulgaria. When the influx of refugees and migrants gained momentum in 2014, Mitko’s band and others like it shifted their business to human trafficking.
‘Arabs in Turkey organise everything,’ a Bulgarian smuggler from a rival gang told me. ‘They have their own people everywhere. Mitko was very close to one of them.’
The truck headed up the M5 motorway towards Budapest, round the M0 ringroad, then out on the M1 towards Vienna. By now the banging in the back had stopped. The pictures of cheerful hens and Slovak writing advertising fresh meat on the side, and the ‘Z’ registration plate showing that it had recently been imported into Hungary, lifted the truck above the suspicion of Hungarian police trying to intercept minibuses and taxis full of migrants. The temperature that day rose to 35 degrees Celsius.
Each day the Hungarian police intercepted Lithuanians, Romanians and Serbs with vehicles packed with asylum seekers. Some had been picked up directly at the border, like those in the Hyza, without being registered and fingerprinted first, but most had already been through at least a preliminary identification process.
The Hyza lorry was found abandoned beside the motorway near Parndorf, 30 kilometres inside Austria, on the morning of 27 August. Motorway maintenance workers who first noticed it thought it had broken down. Then they noticed fluid leaking from the back and a terrible stench, and called the police. The truck was driven to the border crossing point with Hungary at Nickelsdorf, where the gruesome task of disentangling and identifying the bodies began. The work was done so meticulously, that only one of the victims could not be identified. €2,000 in notes soaked in body fluids, extracted from the pocket of one of the victims were returned to one family. Some Syrian and Iraqi families paid €6,000 for the return of the bodies to be buried in their home soil – a similar sum to that paid by smugglers to get them to Austria alive. Twenty-nine were from Iraq, twenty-one from Afghanistan and fifteen from Syria. The last fifteen victims, mostly of Afghans whose families could not afford to pay for the return of the bodies, were finally buried in October, in a Muslim cemetery in Vienna.10
On the day of the discovery of the truck, European leaders including the German chancellor Angela Merkel were meeting in Vienna for a routine gathering to discuss the enlargement of the EU, which turned into an emergency summit on the refugee crisis. Commenting on the discovery of the lorry at Parndorf, Angela Merkel said the leaders were ‘all shaken by this terrible news’. She called on Europe to act together to solve the migrant crisis.11
The Austrian interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner called it ‘a dark day’. Europe needed to work together to fight people smuggling, she said. ‘The solution is not to make more border checks. We need a solution to protect the refugees and I think the best way is to build legal ways through Europe. With legal ways we can protect the refugees and the criminals have no chance for the business.’
Austrian and Hungarian police moved swiftly to catch those responsible. Acting on Austrian police information and their own intelligence on the traffickers plying the Hungarian-Serbian border, four men were arrested within twenty-four hours. Three Bulgarians aged twenty-eight, twenty-nine (Mitko) and fifty, and one Afghan, aged twenty-eight. On Sunday 30 August they appeared in court in Kecskemét in central Hungary, the town where the lorry was registered.12 The men arrived in the courthouse in a convoy of black police cars on another hot August morning. They looked bewildered as they were led down a corridor packed with photographers and cameramen. They were charged with aggravated human smuggling. All pleaded not guilty.
Later, Police Colonel Zoltán Boross of the Hungarian National Investigative Agency (NNI) told me some more of the background of the case. ‘That vehicle required a very serious logistical background, with very serious money and a very serious circle of people able to carry out their tasks. We know this was not the first trip they organised, and not the last either.’ Even after the Parndorf tragedy, other members of the network kept working. The money was too good to give up.
Throughout August the numbers of those reaching Greece by boat from Turkey, and from there pressing on through the Balkans towards Hungary, continued to grow: 50,000 migrants arrived on the five Greek islands by boat in July alone – the same number as for the whole of 2014. Nine out of ten were Syrians. Many were fleeing directly from Syria, but some had grown weary of an uncertain future in Turkey or one of the other refugee-hosting countries and decided the time had come to try to build a new life in Western Europe.
Operation Poseidon was organised by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex in the Aegean to help the Greek authorities police 15,000 kilometres of borders, including all 200 islands. Frontex
had eleven coastal patrol boats, one larger offshore patrol boat, two helicopters and two planes – all the property of national services, temporarily donated to the organisation. Just what they were authorised to do during their daily interceptions of overcrowded dinghies full of migrants on the choppy waters between Turkey and the Greek islands was a moot point. International law is laid down in three main documents: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue (SAR Convention), and the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS Convention).13 The obligations on all states were pretty clear: to rescue all those in trouble at sea. This fact was played on by the smugglers – ironically, the less safe the boats on which they sent people across, the more chance the boat had of reaching its final destination. They were simply asking to be rescued. The UN Convention also made clear that it referred to ‘any person’ in distress. So no difference could be made between a supposed ‘economic migrant’ and a refugee. Any ship’s master finding people in distress at sea has a legal obligation to take them to what is called ‘a place of safety’. Unlike on Europe’s land borders, the law meant that migrants picked up at sea stood a good chance of being taken exactly where they wanted to go – hence the temptation to risk their lives in wretched overcrowded boats on both the Aegean, and the much longer route to the Italian island of Lampedusa in the central Mediterranean.
From mid-August onwards the Hungarian authorities, presumably under Austrian and German pressure, made it harder for refugees to travel on from Hungary by train. They were either prevented from boarding trains in Budapest or taken off them at later stations. The police also tried to prevent them boarding the train at Györ, halfway to Vienna, even if they had bought tickets. According to the single-page document issued to all migrants when they were first registered at Röszke or Szeged, they should report to a refugee camp within seventy-two hours. For years, however, most had simply used that time, and often that piece of paper, as a ticket out of the country towards Austria. There was a sort of unspoken agreement with the Hungarian authorities, that this was how the game worked. Hungary, after all, only had 2,000 places in its refugee camps, and few migrants wanted to stay in Hungary anyway. Ending that game meant that Hungary risked becoming a holding pen for refugees – as other countries further down the route would, later in 2015.
In stark contrast to the state’s mobilisation of its resources to stop migrants, thousands of Hungarian volunteers began tending to their needs. The Hungarian Helsinki Committee, active since the 1980s, had a long tradition of offering legal advice to asylum seekers, as well as to the Hungarian poor.14 Menedék, meaning ‘Shelter’ was established in 2010 and offered practical help including food and clothing.15 Kalunba is a group of Christian aid volunteers, established in the spring of 2015 when the Reformed Church organisation they worked for decided it no longer wanted to work with refugees at all.16 In June, Migration Aid was set up by a small group of volunteers, initially as a Facebook page.17 Within days, several thousand people joined it. In mid-July, the Budapest police chief rang Zsuzsanna Zsohár, one of the Migration Aid founders to ask for advice and offer cooperation. He was soon followed by representatives of the city council. New groups sprang up near existing camps in Debrecen, Bicske, Fót and Cegléd. Official state or church-backed groups, Caritas and the Maltese charity, were slower to react to the crisis, and worked mainly in the official camps, alongside the Hungarian Red Cross. The voluntary groups provided food and cold drinks in the hot summer, hygiene packs for women and babies, and above all information – where to seek help, and advice on how to travel on. They worked in tandem, sometimes hand-in-hand, but often in a state of tension with the ‘official’ charities. The volunteers often accused the charities of working only eight-hour days, and of wearing the same latex gloves and face masks as the police, which suggested fear or disrespect, and hindered empathy. The volunteers worked overnight, welcoming the refugees with sympathy and affection.
Only a tiny fraction of the migrants saw Hungary as their final destination, and they could not understand why the Hungarian state was putting obstacles in their way. ‘They marched across our country like soldiers of a foreign army,’ the Hungarian government spokesman Zoltán Kovács told me, and a similar sentiment was reflected daily in the coverage of the crisis in pro-government media.
While the NGOs criticised government inaction, Jim Knies, a Baptist preacher who had lived in Hungary for twenty-two years, was more appreciative: ‘The volunteer effort is pretty much unorganised, everyone just stepped in,’ he told me in an underpass of the Budapest east station, where more than a thousand refugees were camped out, prevented by police from travelling on.
The needs are incredibly overwhelming, it would be impossible to meet them all. The Hungarian government I believe has done a good job. It has been criticised in the media but it is doing an excellent job in controlling a very bad situation.
They’re setting up transit zones. New ones at the railway station and in the park near here. There’s no danger here, just people trying to find a better life, and Hungarians have been very welcoming.
If you strip aside politics and people’s opinions, everyone believes they’re right. All people want is a better life for their families, just as you or I do, that’s the bottom line.
By government help, he was referring to the actions of the Budapest city council, rather than central government. In coordination with NGOs like Migration Aid, taps were set up in the underpasses at the east station and in the new zone beside the west station, with drinking water and a place to wash, even to shower. Mobile toilets were laid on, but never enough. Volunteers organised clown shows, drawing, bubble-blowing and ball games with the children. The newly renovated underpass at the east station had an air of carnival by day, and a refugee camp by night. It was very colourful, but often tense and certainly unsustainable over a longer period. The city council began to prepare a strip of waste ground not far from the station as a future, more permanent site. Then the rains came.
‘The situation is escalating because this week there was heavy rain in Budapest so everything overflowed. I think the system of the Hungarian Migration Office collapsed,’ Zsuzsanna Zsohár told me. ‘So we have many, many people here without papers, who had to be registered again. The Migration Office computer system collapsed. We had 200 people more than usual on Monday evening, and we had to find them places to sleep, to give them lunch and breakfast and then help them back to the stations.’
She estimated about 100 volunteers worked with Migration Aid alone, plus others who just showed up, or worked with other NGOs. We spoke next to a giant pile of donated clothes. ‘It’s incredible, its chaotic. Everybody wanted new clothes because they couldn’t wash. There are no washing machines in the camps. They are washing here by hand . . .’
Thanks to the cooperation between the NGOs and the city council, hygiene was improving. She estimated a thousand people each night, sleeping at the east station, and hundreds more at the Pope John Paul Park nearby, and at the west station. The ‘transit zones’ established by the city council were very different from those with the same name established later at Horgoš and Kelebia on the Serbian border, built into the fence. Those in Budapest were simply more organised points designed to offer basic services and information to those travelling through, not to police them or restrict their movement. Even simple things like drinking clean water or access to public toilets were difficult for people with no common language or Hungarian currency. The transit zones in Budapest were a temporary, but relatively effective solution.
‘Our message to the government is that you can build a wall, but you should put a roof on it, so there will be some shelter,’ said Zsuzsanna. ‘I think when someone flees from a war, when someone is a refugee, they shouldn’t be handled like animals. It is our goal to help them.’
As the Hungarian authorities stepped up their efforts to stop the migrants, or slow down their migrati
on, the numbers went up and up, as word of the fence-construction spread down the Balkan route. The fence, just as much as news of a possible welcome in Germany, was fuelling the momentum. Many refugees felt it was now, or never – the chance of a lifetime to reach Europe before it became impossible.
I met Omar, aged twenty-eight, from Mosul in Iraq at 8.30 one morning on the Serbian side of the railway track. We stood beside the white stones which marked the Hungarian border. Triple coils of razor wire, stacked on top of each other, reached both sides of the track, but the Hungarian railway authority insisted that the fence not cover the track. In normal times, one cargo train a day came through this way. For now at least, the Hungarian authorities agreed to keep it open, and this passing quarrel between two separate Hungarian state authorities, the railways and the police, transformed a single railway line into the main entry point into Hungary.
Omar wore a thin brown pullover over a T-shirt, sunglasses, jeans, and a camouflage pouch round his waist. He was dejected. He and his friend had just been robbed of €1,500 each by a smuggler who promised to take them to Austria. The previous night the smuggler walked with them in the dark along the railway track, then suddenly disappeared and didn’t come back. They slept the night by the track.
Omar was an English teacher in Mosul when IS troops took over the city, almost without a fight, in the summer of 2014. ‘Come home quickly, there is a problem,’ his father told him on the phone. He picked up a few belongings then fled the city with his university friend Ahmed, crossing Turkey, Greece and Macedonia to get to Hungary.
After our meeting, he and Ahmed hid in the forest near Röszke for two days, with other refugees. They were determined to avoid registration and giving their fingerprints to the police, out of fear of extradition to Hungary later on. Children were crying from hunger and thirst. On the second night Ahmed negotiated with the owner of a petrol station nearby, to drive them to Budapest for €250 each. ‘We knew it was a lot, but we had no choice.’