by Nick Thorpe
‘What do you think of all this,’ I asked an elderly local Hungarian woman who was standing among all the TV crews on the far side of the tracks. ‘I feel very sorry for them,’ she said. Her view was rather unusual among ordinary Hungarians, I suggested. ‘That’s because our doctor here in Bicske, Dr Ussamah is Syrian, and we love him very much,’ she replied.
At that very moment, Dr Ussamah Bourgla was trying to mediate between the police and the men, women and children refusing to leave the train. He told me later:
What I felt that day, I would not wish on my worst enemies. It was like a disaster, everyone set out from the east station with the hope that they would arrive in a peaceful place after three or four years of terrible suffering. Then, after 30 kilometres, everything ended and they stayed without hope, with valid tickets, which they bought from the station.
When I heard from a colleague that the train had arrived in my own town, Bicske, I went down to the station and offered my help to the police. At their request, I translated the commander’s words into Arabic. That they should all leave the train. The refugees wanted to know what would happen to them. The police explained that they would be taken by bus to the comfort and safety of the refugee camp nearby. The refugees refused, insisting that the train continue to Germany, as it was a scheduled train, bound for Germany, and they had tickets to be on it. It was a terrible situation. The people were very angry, they felt they had been tricked.
At this point, the group who had left the train to negotiate with the police tried to get back to it. The police blocked them. In the chaos, a woman clutching a child fell or was pushed by her husband down onto the tracks, and the police tried to pull them up. Some international media initially gave the impression that the incident was an example of police violence. The man crouched over the two of them, sobbing. The incident would later become a favourite example cited by the government spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, of the wickedness of the Western media. In fact it was an example of the fickleness of the Hungarian authorities, who had misled the refugees into thinking they were going to Germany, of the desperation of the refugees when they discovered they had been tricked, and of the awful situation into which the Hungarian police were put, caught in the middle of the conflict between the refugees and their own government.
The other refugees managed to regain the train and the stand-off continued. Some began a hunger strike. I watched as police tried to take them bottles of water. One refugee took the whole case of plastic bottles and smashed it down furiously on the platform. Attempts to take them food met a similar fate. Some refugees lined up in front of the train, separated from the platform where hundreds of TV journalists and photo reporters stood, and held up hand-made signs. ‘Thank you journalists,’ read one. ‘No camp, no water, no food, just freedom,’ read another. Along the green fuselage of the train a man wrote ‘No camp, no Hungary’ in large letters with white shaving foam.
The next day, Friday 4 September, the stand-off ended in apparent defeat for the refugees. During an attempted break-out from the train of about a hundred passengers, a fifty-two-year-old Bangladeshi man collapsed, apparently of a heart attack, and died on the spot. Deeply demoralised, the remaining passengers left the train in single file and were escorted by riot police to waiting coaches, which took them to the refugee camp.
Back in Budapest, not everyone tried to board that ill-fated train on the Thursday morning. Many just stood their ground, not daring to board trains, suspecting a trap. Zabihullah Sharifi from Afghanistan was one. He stood with me on platform 7, clutching his one-year-old baby daughter in his arms. She had weighed 12 kilos when they left home, he said, now she weighed only 8. ‘This is my love, this is my health.’
He and his family had been waiting at the station for three days. ‘We are really sad. We say to Hungary, please don’t do it like this. This is very very bad for your country’s name. The president of Germany wants to invite these people, and these people know it. There are doctors among us, engineers, educated people. Please Hungary, let us go.’
An educated man wearing a blue shirt and purple pullover, he had left his wife outside in the underpass with their belongings to find out what was happening. He watched the first train leave, then tried to buy a ticket – ‘but the ticket office was closed to people like us’. In the meantime, he had heard about the fate of the train which ended up in Bicske and was relieved he and his family were not on it. His plan now was to buy a ticket as soon as the ticket office reopened, and board any train he was sure was really going to Germany. ‘We want to respect the law!’ He emphasised.
At around one o’clock on Friday afternoon, seeing their hopes of travelling by train dashed, a crowd of about 1,200 migrants set out to walk to Vienna down the motorway.9 The idea had been bandied about in refugee circles at the station for at least a day. Another factor which possibly influenced their move was fear of violence. Word had spread through the crowds at the station that the Ultras, fanatic supporters of the Hungarian football team, were planning to attack the refugees after the Hungary–Romania match scheduled for that evening.10
The marchers set out towards the Danube, and across the Elizabeth Bridge towards the M1 motorway. Filmed by drones from the air, and hundreds of mobile phones from the ground, the march was an astonishing sight, a modern Children’s Crusade. People were clutching their knapsacks and plastic bags, pushing prams or wheelchairs, or had small children on their shoulders. The police tried to protect them from the traffic but did not try to stop the march. Perhaps there were just too many of them. The previous day, the police had released a statement which explained the humane approach its top brass were trying to take: ‘The police will continue to tackle police tasks related to irregular immigration moderately, taking into account every circumstance, proportionately, legally and professionally.’
As I covered the evolving drama in Bicske, I stayed in contact with Ernö Simon, spokesman of the UNHCR, who was walking with the marchers. By early evening, the column had reached the motorway services at the 23-kilometre mark. I left Bicske to visit them. A long straggling line of refugees snaked along the inside lane and hard shoulder of the motorway, while the police patrolled the middle lane, leaving just one lane for traffic. Hungarian volunteers left their cars on the kerbs of side roads and clambered up the grassy banks of the motorway to bring them food and water.
As darkness fell, the whole scene was lit by the flashes of the press photographers and the top-lights on TV cameras, and by the headlights of police cars and passing traffic. As the wearier fell behind, the crowd of migrants had turned into a long, uneven line stretched along several kilometres of highway. I interviewed several people as they walked, then left my colleagues at a motorway service station to edit and send my report and hitch-hiked back to Budapest. I had to give a talk on a luxury cruise ship on the Danube.
A car with a Slovak registration plate stopped. The woman at the wheel and her teenage son offered me a lift to the capital. They were British and rather hostile to immigrants – despite their kindness in welcoming me, a stranger into their vehicle. As they launched a tirade against all migrants everywhere, my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a journalist colleague, with the astonishing news that the Hungarian government had just announced it was laying on buses to take the motorway marchers to the Austrian border.
Then my phone buzzed again. It was Haneen, the Syrian girl staying with her family at my friend Viktor’s flat near the east station. She was in trouble. In a series of terse, panicky WhatsApp messages, she told me what had happened. She had gone on her own by taxi, against my and Viktor’s advice, to a hotel on the road out to the airport, to meet a smuggler. He harassed her. She ran away. I told her to get back to her family in the flat. And I told her that the government were now laying on buses. She and her family needed to get to the motorway services 23 kilometres from Budapest as quickly as possible. Then I rang Viktor. He ordered two taxis in his own name, to pick up Haneen and her family. Because of the threat
of prosecution for people-trafficking, it was harder and harder for refugees to get into taxis at all. The taxis took them to the motorway services, where they caught up with the tail end of the march.
Soon after midnight, a fleet of 105 buses picked up around 2,500 people along the motorway, at the services where they were resting, and even those left behind at the east station, and took them to the border. But there were still a few misunderstandings to iron out. The refugees initially refused to trust the government. After what had happened at Bicske, they suspected another trick. So they refused to board the first bus. Just a few people went with it, as a test. It was then driven to the Austria border, from where the passengers rang or texted the others, that the government was keeping its word – they would be allowed to leave the country. Then the others boarded the buses and the convoy set out.
There was one final hurdle. At 3.15 in the morning, Zoltán Kovács, the government spokesman texted me. Now he was asking for help. I rang him back. The Austrians were not letting the people cross, he explained, but the foreign media were blaming the Hungarians! Was I at the border? I wasn’t, but several of my BBC colleagues were, on the far side. I gave him their numbers. Soon the misunderstanding was resolved, and everyone on the buses, including those picked up from the motorway and from the east station, walked across the border into Austria.
The next morning, we set out early down the motorway. The trail of litter left by the march was still visible for the first 30 kilometres out of Budapest. Further on, in a parking area, we found five dejected Syrian and Iraqi refugees. They had gone on ahead of the main group, had stopped to sleep sometime in the night, and then had missed the buses. Would we give them a lift to the border? This presented us with a serious dilemma. Until now, anyone in Hungary, including taxi drivers, caught taking migrants even towards the Austrian border, had been arrested for trafficking. But that very night, the Hungarian government had laid on buses to do just that. And these poor souls had been left behind. Either the government had become traffickers or we were helping the government complete their humanitarian quest of the past few hours. We decided to help the government.
Arriving at Hegyeshalom, the border crossing point, we took the old road, which runs parallel to the motorway. Passing the railway station, we saw hundreds more refugees disembarking from the train from Budapest. The Hungarian railway company, MAV, was now allowing refugees to board trains to the border, but not the intercity trains to Vienna and Austria. Word had spread fast, and those regular local trains were now packed to the roof with happy refugees, allowed at last to continue their journeys. We pulled into a side road to let our own passengers join the throng. As we did so, several local people came out of their houses and started photographing us. This must be what it would be like, I thought, remembering my years in János Kádár’s Hungary, to live in a police state.
We spent the day at the border crossing, which stretched all the way across both the older crossing point and the newer, five-lane crossing point. Since Hungary joined the Schengen zone on 1 January 2008, there have been no border checks here, but the rusting, empty infrastructure of one of Europe’s big borders was still in place. The toilets and offices and antennae, the overgrown verges, the duty-free shops – all empty. Red- and white-striped crash barriers, now preventing nobody from going to nowhere. And the stray dogs, still scavenging.11
The Hungarian Red Cross were out in force in their distinctive red reflector jackets, handing out food, water and clothes. The refugees, as ever, were a mixed bag. A woman in black headscarf, blue jeans and sensible shoes, pulling a suitcase on wheels as though she was just rushing for her flight at an airport. Beside her, two little girls in pink and red tights, one clutching a large mauve toy mouse with a long tail and pink ears, giggling with joy. Young lads larking around with carrier bags they swung between them. Fathers with small wild-eyed children clutching their heads. People pushing small children in pushchairs, or older people in wheelchairs. Teenage girls in tight jeans and T-shirts, gazing into my camera with the confidence of youth, conscious of growing up in an age where the image is everything. Several men on crutches, with pained expressions, and legs left behind in the wars they fled from. A group of five young men, one old man and a woman. The old man was white haired and barefoot, limping heavily. They flashed V for victory signs at me as they passed. Nearly everyone was smiling or laughing. Young couples, who’d maybe fallen in love on the journey, like Hungarian freedom fighters on the barricades in 1956, holding hands shyly. There were big puddles from the rain of the past days. Reflected in them, the numbers of refugees seemed to double. Hungary had become, like Serbia, a refugee pipeline to the West. And beside them all, just a few metres away, a steady line of tourist and business traffic, the usual commerce of the world, gazing open-mouthed at the unusual scene.
CHAPTER SIX
THE CLOSING OF THE CURTAIN
In spite of our fragility, our self-perceived weaknesses, today it is Europe that is sought as a place of refuge and exile. It is Europe today that represents a beacon of hope, a haven of stability in the eyes of women and men in the Middle East and in Africa. That is something to be proud of and not something to fear.
Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission1
The political fallout from Viktor Orbán’s decision to let the refugees go was enormous. But why did he do it? Orbán tried to ring the Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann several times on the evening of Friday 4 September 2015, and also sent him an official note, but Faymann’s staff replied that he would only speak to Orbán after 9 a.m. on Saturday morning. The men would finally speak at 11 p.m. that night, after all the decisions were made.
Through the evening, János Lázár, the minister in charge of the prime minister’s office, oversaw a meeting of the National Security Committee in the Parliament building. Shocked by the images from the motorway, the east station, and earlier in the day at Biscske, they knew they had to reestablish control of the situation. Laying on buses to get all these troublesome migrants and refugees out of the country was the logical way to do it. Lázár rang Orbán, who was perched in the VIP box in a Budapest football stadium, waiting for the 20.45 kick-off of the Hungary–Romania match, to pass on the proposal. Orbán made a snap decision: go ahead. Buses should pick up all the people on the motorway and those left behind at the east station and take them to Austria. His treatment of the migrants had made him the butt of criticism for months in the German and Austrian media. If they wanted these people, let them have them.2
The decision was communicated to his ambassadors in Berlin and Vienna. The Hungarians suggested there would be 4,000 to 6,000 people in more than 100 buses. ‘Hungary is no longer able to guarantee the registration of refugees,’ József Czukor, the Hungarian ambassador in Berlin, wrote in an email to Peter Altmaier, Merkel’s chief of staff, and Emily Haber, state secretary in charge of refugee issues in the German Interior Ministry. Altmaier rang back immediately.
Back in the stadium, Orbán got on with the real business of the evening: watching the match. Just before half time, the home crowd roared as Ádám Szalai’s long-range volley looked set to give Hungary the lead, only to be tipped round the post by the Romanian goalkeeper Ciprian Tătăruşanu. Haneen heard the clamor as her taxi passed the stadium on the way to her dangerous meeting with the smuggler at the Hotel Omnibusz.
At 21.00, János Lázár instructed the Budapest and national transport companies to immediately organise buses and coaches. Then he informed the media about the decision.
Angela Merkel, attending a CDU party gathering in Cologne before flying to Munich, spent a busy evening on the phone to Faymann and her own ministers. Though he was avoiding speaking to Orbán, the Social Democrat chancellor trusted Merkel. Austria would accept the buses – what about Germany? A legal team working for Foreign Minister Franz-Walter Steinmeier told him that under EU law, a country can allow in as many asylum seekers as it wishes. Sigmar Gabriel, the German vice-chancellor, also appro
ved Merkel’s decision.
Merkel rang Faymann back: ‘Die Balken müssen auf. Wir müssen diesen Menschen helfen,’ she told him. ‘The barriers must be raised, we must help these people.’3
This was a reference to the red and white barriers at the official border crossings. ‘Balken’ is also the word used in the New Testament for the ‘beam’ in someone’s eye, as in St Matthew’s gospel: ‘Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother’s eye.’
‘In this emergency situation, we decide that the barriers should be raised. We will not leave people in the lurch,’ proclaimed the Austrian chancellor. But he also explained that what they were talking about was not an overarching solution, but simply a way to solve the dramatic situation of the previous night.
‘The police will perform their duties in the framework of the existing laws and with particular attention to proportionality,’ read the statement from the Austrian police. ‘If an asylum application is submitted, it will be accepted [for consideration],’ a spokesman for the Austrian Interior Ministry told Die Presse, adding that ‘complete control will not be possible’. The authorities in Vienna and at the border post at Nickelsdorf braced themselves for the impact.4
The end result was that 18,000 refugees passed through Austria to arrive in Germany over the weekend, of whom 10,000 disembarked at Munich station. There they received a rapturous welcome from well-wishers, who lined the platform to applaud. Many refugees carried crumpled portraits of the German chancellor – their unlikely heroine. The German federal government announced an immediate €3 billion in aid to help the German states accommodate the new arrivals, and another €3 billion to pay for later expenses like social security benefits.5