The Road Before Me Weeps

by Nick Thorpe

  With the gates to Europe wide open, the Austrian chancellor began talking about how to close them. ‘The chancellor could not say how long this exceptional situation will last, or how many refugees will travel to or through Austria,’ added Die Presse, laconically. From 5 September to 16 October, in an act which looks very much like revenge on the German and Austrian governments, Hungary did not register the tens of thousands of new arrivals on its borders with Serbia and Croatia.

  The new focus of EU leaders would be quotas. But should they be compulsory or voluntary? After the lukewarm response by national governments to voluntary quotas in the spring of 2015, many leaders felt the time had come for compulsory measures. ‘Exceptional circumstances require an exceptional response. Business as usual will not solve the problem,’ the UNHCR chief António Guterres said on 4 September. ‘Europe cannot go on responding to this crisis with a piecemeal or incremental approach. No country can do it alone, and no country can refuse to do its part.’6

  Angela Merkel’s decision provoked uproar in Germany. ‘There is no society that could cope with something like this,’ said Bavarian Premier Horst Seehofer, the leader of the Christian Social Union. He had not been informed of the unfolding events on the fateful evening because he was on holiday, and had turned off his mobile phone. Merkel’s partners in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) leapt to her defence. SPD Secretary-General Yasmin Fahimi called it ‘the only right thing to do’. ‘We had to give a strong signal of humanity to show that European values are also valid in difficult times. Hungary’s handling of the crisis is unbearable,’ Fahimi added. Sunday’s Bild am Sonntag bore the banner headline ‘Merkel ends the shame of Budapest’.7

  Merkel’s move was also widely popular in Germany. Of those asked by the ZDF Politbarometer programme, 66 per cent said they agreed with the decision to give refuge to asylum seekers stuck in Hungary while 29 per cent disagreed.8 Of those polled, 62 per cent believed Germany could cope with arrivals of large numbers of refugees in general, while 35 per cent did not.

  Viktor Orbán was busy giving interviews too, over the weekend. The Times of London, Associated Press and ORF, the Austrian broadcaster, all got a bite at the cherry – if that is a fair description of the increasingly rotund Hungarian leader. Asked whether his armed forces would be instructed to open fire on refugees, Orbán said no: ‘It is not necessary because there will be a fence that cannot be crossed. Whoever wants nevertheless to cross the fence must be arrested and prosecuted. No use of arms will be necessary.’9 ‘We are protecting Europe according to European rules that say borders can be crossed only in certain areas in a controlled way and after registration,’ he told ORF.

  Hungary now stopped registering new arrivals. Orbán might have lost the battle of the east station, but he was determined to win ‘the war on illegal migration’. The next step would be the closing of the remaining gaps in the new Hungarian fence, notably on the railway track between Horgoš and Röszke, and the introduction of a package of measures passed by parliament on 4 September, which were due to come into force on 15 September. Two ‘transit zones’, were established at Röszke and Kelebia, built into the new fence, where refugees would still be able to apply for asylum in Hungary, nominally fulfilling Hungary’s obligations under the 1951 Geneva Convention.

  Internationally, the quota issue was the next political challenge – the magic bullet the crisis needed, according to the European Commission, a bullet in the foot or even the brain of the EU, according to the Hungarian leadership: ‘If Europe’s outer border is not blocked off it makes no sense to speak of quotas. When we have sealed the outer border and thus stopped the illegal migration we can talk about any solution.’ Privately, Orbán told my colleagues, Hungary would be open to voluntary quotas. But the German-led rush in Europe was now overwhelmingly in favour of a compulsory solution, imposed on the reluctant East Europeans by a qualified majority. That embittered a Fidesz leadership which often felt it was treated arrogantly by the big European powers.

  The numbers for the EU quota system were shaping up. France should take 24,031, Germany 31,443, Spain 14,931, Poland 9,287, Romania 4,646, Hungary 1,294. On 9 September, Juncker made his annual State of the Union address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg. It was long, emotional, and concluded with his proposals to resolve the crisis.10 He told MEPs:

  It is time to speak frankly about the big issues facing the European Union. Because our European Union is not in a good state. There is not enough Europe in this Union. And there is not enough Union in this Union. We have to change this. And we have to change this now.

  We Europeans should remember well that Europe is a continent where nearly everyone has at one time been a refugee. Our common history is marked by millions of Europeans fleeing from religious or political persecution, from war, dictatorship, or oppression.

  The nub of the new European Commission proposal was for the ‘emergency relocation’ across Europe of 160,000 asylum seekers from Greece, Italy and Hungary, in the spirit of solidarity between members. The decision should be taken at the Extraordinary Council of Interior Ministers meeting on 14 September. Parallel to this ‘carrot’, the ‘stick’ was to speed up the deportation procedures for those who failed to qualify for asylum. A list of safe countries to which people could be returned should be agreed at the EU level. Such a list should include all candidate countries in the Balkans. More steps should be taken to streamline asylum procedures in all member countries. More joint efforts were also needed to strengthen the outer borders of the EU by reinforcing Frontex. A diplomatic offensive was needed to address the crises in Syria and Libya. And an emergency trust fund, worth €1.8 billion, would be set up to tackle the crises in the Sahel and Lake Chad regions, the Horn of Africa and North Africa.

  At the east station in Budapest, the number of refugees camping fell considerably, allowing cleaning staff to hose down the floors. But there were still hundreds of people there, funnelling up from the southern border, or the refugee camps at Kiskunhalas or Debrecen. Now they were resting in Budapest on their way through. For now, there was no further attempt by the Hungarians to stop them leaving.

  In the underpass, a man with a Rasta hairstyle and flowery shirt wielded a metal loop with both hands, with a net attached, from which streamed the biggest and most magnificent bubbles. Someone wrote ‘Köszönjük Magyarok’ – Thank you Hungarians – in chalk on the floor inside a giant pink heart. Girls sat cross-legged on the paving stones with pencils and crayons. One woman handed out flowers. There was a mountain of red, summer apples in one place, handed out from supermarket trolleys, and a great pile of shoes in another. I asked a tall, thin, sad-looking twelve-year-old boy from Syria what he was drawing.

  ‘A new flag for my country.’ It was a horizontal tricolour, with blue at the top, white in the middle, green at the bottom. In the middle of the white band were three hearts, each filled with tears. He held it up shyly, to be photographed. Alam means flag in Arabic.

  The news that Hungary’s tough new migrant legislation, approved by parliament on 4 September, might at any moment close the last loophole in the fence, spread down the track at Röszke and put a new urgency into the step of the migrants flooding up through the Balkans. Government commentators might express their dislike for the ‘military-style’ speed of the migrants, but the truth was that that speed and organisation was provoked by Hungarian government moves. They were running to get in before the portcullis crashed down at the main gate of the Hungarian castle. Likewise, the Hungarian authorities expressed their disgust at a new ‘aggression’ among the migrants towards them. Presumably the migrants were supposed to embrace them for standing in their way, when Germany had made clear that everyone who applied would get a fair hearing.

  Through the first two weeks of September, the numbers coming up the railway track increased each day. On 12 September, a Saturday, 4,000 came in according to police figures, but one had the impression that they were losing count, or at least the will to count. At th
is eleventh hour, the infrastructure which would have been needed from the first day, was finally taking shape. The UNHCR at last obtained permission from the government to set up three large tents on the field beside the cornfield. A farmer’s hothouse was converted with plastic sheets into a storage facility. More mobile toilets arrived, increasing the number from three to twelve, in a space catering for thousands of new arrivals each day. Greenpeace set up a solar-powered tent where refugees could charge their phones. Official charities like Caritas, the Reformed Church and Baptist groups, the Maltese charity, which had until now been active in official refugee camps but not in official collecting points at the ‘point of impact’, now miraculously appeared here too, where a week earlier a single MigSol tent stood – among the hundreds of makeshift small tents carried by the refugees themselves. The police finally got enough buses to transport people from the field to the registration point in the famous blue hangar. The UNHCR spokesman told me the government had admitted to him that they had failed to handle the situation here until now.

  One morning at dawn near Röszke I asked a large, jovial policeman who had been up all night, what he really thought of his duties. ‘It’s like Monty Python, isn’t it!’ he replied, cheerfully. Impressed by his knowledge of British comedy programmes, I asked if he had any particular episode in mind. ‘The Ministry of Silly Walks’ he replied, without hesitation.11

  Beside the railway track in early September, I encountered two men in civilian clothes, watching the scene. They had light overcoats with the word ‘Police’ on them, which they had put to one side. They refused to say which part of the state apparatus they belonged to, or to offer any comment. Unperturbed, I offered to tell them what was going on, and how the Hungarian state was failing the refugees, and putting their own police in a difficult situation. They listened politely and glanced at each other. ‘I can agree with a lot of that,’ one told me. Now, at least, the infrastructure was being built. Hungary had what could pass as a chaotic, but relatively well-managed refugee camp. The irony was that, within three days, the flow would be stopped.

  The situation through the Balkans was volatile, changing every few hours. The Macedonian army and police tried in vain to block 7,000 people, who then broke through their lines. In Hungary, the registration system, painstakingly established over the past months and weeks, had partially collapsed. The quick pre-registration centres, run by the police, were still working at Röszke. These included fingerprinting machines. But the OIN centres, which involved a much longer registration process, at Kiskunhanhalos, Debrecen, Vámosszabadi and Bicske, appeared to have stopped. The head of OIN, Zsuzsanna Végh, told state radio that 80 per cent of those coming were from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and that 95 per cent of them spent less than two weeks in the country before moving on.

  There was still a gaping absence of communication between the authorities and the refugees themselves. Few Hungarian police speak English, and the refugees’ English was often merely rudimentary. There were comic moments. A Syrian man came up to me, pleading for help to get his heavily pregnant wife across the road to the doctor’s tent on the far side. He was prevented by a cordon of uniformed police, who lined the road in order to try to keep it open for traffic. I explained his predicament to a police officer, who immediately agreed to help. The police line parted to let the man and his wife cross the road. Then, to my horror, thirty more women, children and men proceeded to join them, crossing the road. The police officer started shouting at me – who are all these people? I demanded an explanation from the man. ‘They are my family too, they must come with me,’ he shouted back. I translated. For a moment it looked as if, by trying to help, I was about to create a major confrontation. Then the police stood aside. The thirty relatives and the man, and his wife, all made it to the police tent. The first joint BBC–ORFK (Országos Rendőr-főkapitanysag, the Hungarian Police) operation of the crisis ended happily.

  On 8 September, another incident in the same field won Hungary terrible publicity. A few dozen police had been instructed to stop the thousands of refugees in the field from wandering off before the buses came to take them to be registered. A big group got fed up with this and decided to break out of the field. The police tried to stop them. In the mêlée, Petra László, a young female reporter from N1, a small nationalist TV station, was filmed deliberately trying to trip up refugees as they ran, including Osama Abdul Mohsen, carrying his son, and a young girl. Posted on Twitter by a German journalist, the footage went viral round the world.12

  N1 made a statement: ‘An employee of N1TV today showed unacceptable behaviour at the Röszke collection point. We have terminated the contract of the camera woman with immediate effect today.’ A few days later, Petra László publicly apologised: ‘I am very sorry for the incident, and as a mother I am especially sorry for the fact that fate pushed a child in my way. I did not see that at that moment. I started to panic and as I rewatch the film, it seems as if it was not even me.’ But the damage had been done.

  During the same incident, I also witnessed police running after refugees, tripping them up, and dragging them back to the holding point, using considerably force. One man in particular, who was partly disabled, sobbed violently throughout. It took three policemen to catch him and bring him back. On his T-shirt was a picture of a bear with a ‘help’ sign, and the words, ‘Live with care, save the bear.’

  The volunteer groups worked all the time. Mark Kékesi’s old brown Mercedes estate was everywhere, bringing supplies from Szeged. Anarchist groups turned up from several countries, distinguishable by their ‘No Borders’ slogan. A blue banner was hung on the side of a white transit van, with a picture of butterflies, soaring over a fence: ‘Ain’t no European border high enough – no papers, no fear.’

  At the beginning of September, local media had published a screen-shot of instructions from the managers of the state TV, MTVA, asking news teams not to show children – because they aroused too much sympathy in viewers, it seemed.13 To justify government policies, pro-government media were instructed to emphasise at every opportunity that the vast majority of the ‘illegal immigrants’ were single men. According to official, EU figures, of the 1.26 million first-time asylum seekers registered in the EU-28 in 2015, 365,000 were under eighteen. In my own, first-hand experience, filming every day at the border, it was hard not to film children – there were simply so many of them.

  Huge white clouds billowed across the wide blue skies of the Hungarian plain. I asked a photographer from the Magnum agency what he was going to look for today. ‘Just biblical scenes,’ he said, in a daze, ‘biblical scenes.’ There were plenty of those: the headscarved women, the toddlers, the summer heat and dawn chill, and the police playing the role of tall Roman centurions, in their dark blue body armour, green face masks, sunglasses and red caps.

  At the Szeged County Court, all criminal cases had been suspended until further notice, in order to prepare for a massive influx of criminal cases, from 15 September. Anyone who so much as laid a finger on the fence would be prosecuted. Crossing illegally into Hungary was about to be transformed from a misdemeanour into a criminal offence. The fence along many sections had grown taller – 3.5 metres, with razor wire along the base and top; 3,800 soldiers had been deployed to help police guard it. More and more dog teams, policemen on horseback, soldiers with semi-automatic rifles, and ever more frequent helicopters appeared each day, to drive home the message. There could be no doubt, a massive crackdown was coming.

  14 September was a Monday. I watched men in the pale blue T-shirts of the prison authority, standing on ladders, add new sections to the fence, right up to the railway line, and attach razor wire to the top. More and more police units were visible, many of them with riot helmets clipped to their belts. The soldiers started patrolling in hard helmets. That day, nearly 10,000 refugees entered Hungary, most of them down the railway line.

  At dusk, a single, rust-red railway carriage suddenly appeared on the track, pushed up the rail
s from Röszke by a diesel locomotive. It was a shock to see something resembling a train on the track, we were so used to just seeing people on it. Along the top and sides and bottom of the wagon, razor wire was coiled, like a grotesque decoration. There was even a bit of greenery, like camouflage, as though to conceal the razor wire underneath. Or perhaps it had just caught on the wire, from an overhanging tree. In the brilliant glare of the television lights, the wagon rolled into place, to block the track, and complete the fence. Viktor’s new Iron Curtain was complete. Thirty metres down the fence, also on cue, a dove flew up onto the wire and stayed there, silhouetted against the dying light.

  On 16 September, Boris Kálnoky, my colleague from Die Welt, published his interview with Viktor Orbán.14 Asked whether he was ‘satisfied’ with his fence, Orbán replied. ‘Satisfaction is for the Rolling Stones. Who would be crazy enough to express satisfaction, when numberless migrants are coming, and one has the thankless task of having to stop them?’ Off the record, Orbán told Boris and the other journalists present that Hungary might be willing to accept some kind of quota in future, but only on a voluntary basis. This was a position also echoed by Polish and Czech diplomats in the coming days.

  Meanwhile, in Szeged, the first of some 200 people arrested so far for crossing the fence, went on trial. I was in court with Ahmed, aged twenty-one, from Aleppo in Syria, a student from the Mamoun University of Science and Technology. The man seemed stunned. ‘I respect the Hungarian law. I did not know it was not permitted to cross.’ Aywa Taleb Suadi, from Iraq, was next. ‘We saw a hole in the fence and climbed through it. Altogether we were in a group of eight.’ The judge was unimpressed. If Hungary had gone to the trouble of building a fence, he suggested, the authorities had clearly not put it there in order for it to be climbed over.