by Nick Thorpe
‘Put crudely,’ wrote The Economist, ‘citizens of these seven countries obtained protection in the EU over half the time they applied. How many of these people are reaching Europe? The UNHCR says that Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq account for nine in ten of the quarter-million-odd migrants detected arriving in Greece this year.’ Meanwhile, on the central Mediterranean route, people from Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan ‘comprise 41 per cent of the 119,500 arrivals in Italy, and another 6 per cent come from Syria. In other words, citizens from countries that usually obtain protection in the EU account for fully 75 per cent of illicit arrivals by sea this year.’
To be fair, The Economist added, migration is a complex business, with a wide range of motives. What of those who had already fled war and persecution, had found safety in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan or even Greece, then decided to travel on to Western Europe in search of a better life? This was the crux of the Hungarian government’s argument: the 1951 Refugee Convention said you had a right to safety, but not to choose in which country you would be safe. This was the central point too in the new Hungarian legislation which declared Serbia, Macedonia, Greece and Bulgaria, among others, ‘safe countries’. ‘Let them stay there then, whoever they are,’ was Orbán’s line.
‘Crunch the numbers further and we find that at least 81 per cent of those migrants entering Greece can expect to receive refugee status or some other form of protection in the EU,’ concluded The Economist.
As the summer drew to a close, tempers were fraying along the affected borders. On the last weekend of August, 30-kilometre tailbacks developed at the Austrian-Hungarian border at Hegyeshalom, as Austrian police stepped up their vehicle checks. Angry holidaymakers, many of them Turkish Muslims returning to their homes in Germany, stewed in their cars in the heat.
Down at the border near Röszke there was growing frustration both among the migrants and the police who were supposed to be guarding them. There were still no big tents, too few toilets, too few buses, too little water. The UNHCR had been pressing the Hungarian government for months to allow it to provide large tents. The government refused. To allow the UNHCR to pitch large tents would have looked too much like a welcome, while its own policy was one of deterrence.
Over that last weekend in August the Hungarian defence minister Csaba Hende announced that the fence was finished – two days ahead of schedule. It was an optimistic assessment. There was indeed some kind of razor-wire obstacle all along the 175-kilometre border with Serbia. The chief of police, the mild mannered and professional Károly Papp, was sending 3,000 extra police officers, some of them on horseback, backed up with dogs and helicopters at the government’s request, to patrol the fence. But the flimsy structure was already decorated in many places with the torn strips of blankets, sleeping bags and clothes left behind by refugees as they crossed through, under or over it. Even this new ‘fence-crossing sport’ was based on a misunderstanding. No information was provided by either the Serbian or Hungarian authorities to the tens of thousands of migrants pouring north through the Balkans, that there were still crossing points open. Those who did find the openings were informed either by friends and relatives, or by the smugglers. Most had no documents, so they could hardly go to the official road or rail checkpoints. So there was no need to risk injury crossing the fence, there were still plenty of points where the River Tisza or its oxbows, or the railway line, at Röszke or Kelebia, meant that the fence could not be completed. Completing the fence in just six weeks was a logistical achievement, but Viktor Orbán was not impressed. A few days later, the defence minister resigned – the first and only political casualty of the crisis.
On Monday 31 August, while Angela Merkel was addressing the press conference in Berlin, I drove up to Budapest for the first time in more than a week, to see the situation. There were big crowds of refugees around all three main entrances to the east station. As we arrived, the police stood aside briefly to allow hundreds of migrants to board trains bound for Austria and Germany. The police lines soon re-formed, limiting access to anyone who looked like a refugee.
Outside the Thököly street entrance, I photographed a man praying quietly by himself beside his blue tent on a small patch of grass. He wore a black vest and had spread a yellow towel on the grass as his prayer mat. As he knelt to make his prostrations, he glanced sideways, saw my camera, and froze. I felt ashamed, intruding on the privacy of his faith.
A little Syrian girl in a bright pink T-shirt waved at two giant Hungarian policemen. Both had tattoos and close-shaven hair. One softened his hard expression and grinned back, the other frowned his disapproval. Camera crews mingled with the crowd. For the first time since 1989 my country, Hungary, was the centre of the world news.
The technology available to us as journalists helped us bring our listeners and viewers into the square. With a 3G MiFi box in one hand, a laptop and a microphone in the other, I gave one radio report while I was crossing the main road, walking towards the station. I stood on a raised platform giving hourly updates for the television news. Once during a TV live slot, a man stepped into the shot behind me and started shouting and swearing in Hungarian into the camera. I took him firmly by the shoulders, pushed him out of the frame, then carried on answering the question. Police formed lines, some in riot kit but most without, then dispersed, only to re-form. Volunteers were everywhere, carrying food, telephone charging equipment and donations.
The policemen in their maroon caps seemed even younger than the migrants. Many wore green face masks and blue rubber gloves, like surgeons in an operating ward. The pro-government media were brimming with stories of what infectious diseases, from AIDS to hepatitis, the migrants might be carrying. Other police, perhaps more sympathetic to the migrants or at least hoping for easier communication with them, kept their masks in their bags. The giant yellow bearded face of an old man, sculpted above the side door of the station, depicting Father Danube himself, gazed on the scene with amazement, a dark grey pigeon perched on his head.
On the steps at the front of the station, policemen and women in white T-shirts and dark glasses kept the crowds back. One family with three children slept at their feet on a brown blanket, while the children’s father searched for his smugglers on his phone or rang his family in Syria. Some of the refugees had managed to get hold of a megaphone. There were occasional demonstrations, groups of fifty to a hundred people moving through the crowd, chanting ‘Freedom’, or ‘Germany’, or ‘Angela’. One group of men had improvised a large cardboard flag of their country, Afghanistan, and carried the black, red and green tricolour proudly through the crowd. Like poor people the world over, they wore the misspelled copies of expensive brand names on their clothes. The young lad carrying one end of the Afghan flag had the word ‘Convease’ above a picture of a training shoe, on a blue and white shirt which should have spelt ‘Converse.’ The riot police in their dark blue, heavily padded uniforms, clutched their helmets and fingered their pepper spray canisters. They stood poker-faced, mostly in wrap-around shades, and tried not to betray any emotions. They appeared to have been chosen for their height. The refugees looked puny and defenceless beside them.
Strange scenes such as these became usual very fast. In the park named after Pope John Paul II nearby, I met a distraught seventeen-year-old Afghan boy who had lost the thirteen-year-old younger brother he was travelling with. Both were on the phone to their mother in Kabul but could not work out where the other was. A word kept coming up which he could not understand, which I realised after a while was ‘Nyugati’ – the west station. Suddenly everything was clear. I opened a map and explained to the older boy that his brother must be at the other station. On double checking, via their mother, that proved to be the case, and a much-relieved boy set out with my street map to recover his sibling.
A little Iraqi girl in yellow pyjamas with pink sheep designs played hide and seek with me beneath a bicycle rack.
As the drama developed in Budapest, the BBC rented rooms at a small, modern hot
el in Forget-Me-Not street, just to the side of the station. That gave us a base to store camera equipment, recharge phones and batteries, and even rest for a few minutes when it all got too much. In the street outside I met a distressed elderly German man from Bavaria. His mobile phone had completely run down, he had lost the rest of his group, and for several hours he had been trawling the little cafés and restaurants around the station searching in vain for an empty socket where he could charge his phone. As a result, he had lost contact with the rest of his tour group. I took him into our hotel, gave him one of our sockets, and sat him down in the lobby with a large beer. He felt better straight away.
When I asked him what he thought of the refugees, he started crying. ‘I feel so sorry for them,’ he said. ‘I was a refugee too, after the war.’
On 1 September around 2,500 mostly Syrian refugees who had been stranded in Hungary arrived by train in Munich, where they were greeted by cheering crowds with flowers, welcome banners, food and drink. For many in Germany, as well as for the refugees themselves, this was the high point of the crisis, the moment of maximum euphoria, reminiscent of a victorious football team returning to their home town with their latest trophy.
The next day, 2 September, Angela Merkel met Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy in Berlin. At the joint press conference afterwards, she answered questions about her 31 August remarks. Syrian refugees arriving in Germany would ‘in all probability’ be granted asylum, she said, ‘which is hardly surprising, given the situation in their country.’ Other European countries should do the same, she suggested.
Fabrice Leggeri, the head of Frontex, pondered the potential terrorist threat from the arrival of so many people from war zones in an interview on French radio. The value of Syrian passports had increased, he said, now that Syrians could almost automatically get refugee status in Europe. False Syrian documents were being manufactured in Turkey, but ‘there is no evidence at this time . . . that potential terrorists are getting into Europe in this way’.5
After Monday’s brief respite in the tension at the east station in Budapest, the mood darkened rapidly again, as the police sealed off all entrances to people who looked like refugees. In the streets nearby they carried out identity checks as shopkeepers and smugglers looked on.
On the steps of the station Mohammad Omar Heydari, a seventeen-year-old refugee from Afghanistan showed me the single-page document he had been given in Szeged. Issued by the Csongrad County Police Headquarters, it gave his name and the time and date he had been apprehended in Hungary – 11.10 in the morning on 31 August. Everything on the paper was in Hungarian.
‘I acknowledge that I illegally entered Hungary from Serbia,’ read the statement. ‘I declare that I want to make an asylum claim in Hungary.’ Beneath he had circled the IGEN (Yes), rather than the NEM (No) word. The squiggled, illegible signature of an interpreter was below that. Both the migrants and the authorities were still playing out the Dublin fiction. In order to get the twenty-four hours he needed in order to flee Hungary westwards, Mohammed had to pretend he wanted to stay in Hungary and the police and the OIN had to pretend that they wanted him to. At the bottom of the page, in capital letters were the words:
I WARN YOU THAT YOU HAVE 24 HOURS FROM THE RECEIPT OF THIS PAPER TO PRESENT YOURSELF WITHOUT FAIL TO THE REFUGEE CAMP AT SAMSON STREET 149, DEBRECEN.
On the back of the page was a list of contact details for seven NGOs including Amnesty International, and also of the Police Complaints Authority.
Nearby, I watched a small refugee boy escape his mother’s attentions and set out to befriend the policemen along the front steps of the station. These were the everyday policemen, not the padded riot police. He was explaining something in his own language with words and hand gestures. One policeman stroked his chin and tried to follow what he meant. Others smiled, then looked awkwardly away.
On the same day a photograph of a small, three-year-old boy in a red T-shirt, dark blue shorts and trainers lying dead, face down in the sand, spread around the world.6 The picture was taken by the Turkish photographer Nilufer Demir on the Ali Hoca beach near Bodrum on the west coast of Turkey. Alan Kurdi and his family had set out in the darkness a few hours earlier in an overcrowded rubber dinghy to reach the Greek island of Kos, just 4 kilometres away across the water. They must even have been able to see the lights of the island.
It was a journey I had made from Bodrum myself, on a small sailing boat, many years before. But the small dinghy with twelve people on board capsized in high waves just 500 metres out to sea. Alan, his brother Ghalip and mother Reyhan all drowned, despite the efforts of the father, Abdullah Kurdi, to save them. Twelve adults and children from this and another boat, which sank nearby, died in the tragedy.
The family’s story, published over the following weeks and months, illustrates the fragile threads on which the lives of so many refugees and migrants hangs. The family were from Kobani on the Syrian-Turkish border, like many of the families I had met in the cornfield at Röszke the previous week. Originally from Damascus, the Kurdi family moved first to Aleppo in 2012, then to Kobani, and finally to Turkey in 2013. They tried returning to Kobani in early 2015 but fled again in June 2015, when IS launched a new offensive to take the strategically important town. After making their way to the west coast of Turkey, with hundreds of thousands of others so far in 2015, they paid a Pakistani smuggler for the crossing. They were trying to reach Canada, where Abdullah’s sister Tima worked in Vancouver as a hairdresser. She had made applications for them to join her there, but these had been turned down by the Canadian immigration authorities in June because of missing data. She regularly sent them money, to help them reach Europe anyway. Abdullah accompanied the bodies of his wife and two children back to Kobani for burial. ‘I wish I had died with them,’ he said.
The next morning, Thursday 3 September, I was in the middle of a live TV broadcast in front of the east station at 7.40 when I heard a commotion behind me. Without warning, the police cordon along the top of the steps simply melted away. There were shouts in the crowd. Everyone started running towards the station. It was mayhem again.
We managed to film the next few minutes, live inside the station, in the middle of a throng of people. On platform 8, a green and yellow German train was labelled the 09.20 departure for Vienna and Munich. Within moments, it was overrun, with every available seat and standing space full, and the doorways so overcrowded that people looked in danger of being forced back out onto the platform. Each wagon proudly proclaimed fifty-six seats, but there must have been at least 500 people in the four carriages. After trying to persuade the people to get off with loudspeaker announcements, the train finally pulled out of the station, about half an hour behind schedule. There was a mood of euphoria among the crowds of refugees now thronging the station. One train had gone, but there would be more. Surely Hungary wouldn’t close the exit again? Many brandished tickets, costing hundreds of euros, they had just queued for and bought, to Munich or beyond. There was a sense of victory in the air – they thought they had overcome the Hungarian government.
Viktor Orbán set out for the airport to fly to Brussels just as the station was reopening to refugees. If he had opened the gates of the station later that day, it might have seemed that he was giving in to pressure from Brussels. As it was, his message seemed to be: ‘You want these people? You can have them!’ In Brussels, Orbán held talks with all the presidents he could find there – of the European Commission (Jean-Claude Juncker), the European Council (Donald Tusk), the European Parliament (Martin Schultz) and the European People’s Party (Joseph Daul). Then he addressed the press.
The migrants were ‘a German problem, not a European one,’ he told reporters, as the destination country for most of them was Germany. He added that he would not allow them to leave his country without registering. He had come to Brussels because, from 15 September, a new border policing system would be in place in Hungary, he said. The regulations would be passed imminently by the Hungaria
n Parliament, giving the police and army new powers to stop migrants entering the country. This would be done in full compliance with the rules of Dublin, Schengen and Frontex. Under Schengen, Hungary had not just the right but the duty to defend its own borders and, at the same time, the external Schengen borders of the EU. Hungary had tried to fulfil the requirements until now but had not been successful. Thousands of migrants had crossed the border illegally. This cannot continue. ‘I asked all my counterparts today whether they had a better idea than the fence. All replied that they did not, but that they disliked this arrangement. This is also my opinion.’
Later in the same press conference, a German reporter asked him how he would compare his new fence with the old Iron Curtain. ‘If we have to compare the two, we must say that the new Iron Curtain is not against us, but for us,’ he said bluntly. ‘We don’t want to live with a large Muslim community – we had that already for 150 years.’7
That morning, the Wall Street Journal published details of the European Commission’s plans to relocate 160,000 asylum seekers across the EU. The sheer scale of the crisis, and the added urgency provoked by images such as those of Alan Kurdi and the ‘biblical scenes’ at the borders of Serbia and Macedonia, Hungary and Serbia, were finally propelling Europe’s sluggish leaders into action. Angela Merkel and François Hollande conferred by telephone and the French president dropped his earlier opposition to the compulsory quota plan, which Juncker would officially unveil on 9 September. Orbán said no concrete numbers had been discussed in his talks with leaders that day, but in any case, he dismissed the plan as a bluff. ‘Even its authors know it won’t work,’ he said.
Back in Hungary, the train with over 500 asylum seekers on board which struggled out of the east station after 10 a.m., got only as far as Bicske, 27 kilometres down the line.8 There, riot police lined the platforms and the tracks. The refugees were told to disembark to be taken to the refugee camp. They refused and a stand-off developed.