by Nick Thorpe
11 Women at the water tap, Horgoš illegal encampment, Serbia, September 2016. All day women and children filled bowls and water bottles here. Men and women washed their hair, and children played. The two taps remained legally on Hungarian territory … The first 2 metres inside the camp were Hungarian soil (p. 202).
12 Lunchtime at the Horgoš illegal encampment, Serbia, September 2016. Some refugees were heating up tins of tuna on their fires, others roasted sweetcorn they had picked from neighbouring fields or bought in the shop in Horgoš. Everywhere tea was being brewed in blackened tin or enamel mugs (p. 202).
13 A young Somali at Adaševci, with the lists of those queuing to get into the Hungarian transit zones, September 2016. The lists gave the impression of a long queue of people, all jostling to move forwards, some overtaking others, others getting left behind. A young Somali man let me take his photograph in front of the lists. Then he ran his finger up and down the rows in vain. He could not find his own name (p. 216).
14 A Hungarian soldier on guard duty at the Röszke transit zone, September 2016. Along the top of the cabins, police and soldiers patrolled. Life must have become excruciatingly boring for them, after 4 July, with so few migrants to catch. Only a few dozen attempted to get through the 175-kilometre long fence each night. They faced an army of up to 10,000 police and soldiers (p. 202).
15 Haneen on the train from Lübeck to Bargteheide, June 2017. Even now she sometimes notices children staring at her headscarf. But she has not considered giving it up. ‘It’s part of who I am.’ She likes many things in Germany but she needs to stay herself and the scarf is part of that (p. 271).
16 Safaa outside the hospital in Szeged, Hungary, March 2018. Thanks to the mediation of the UNHCR and the goodwill of the Hungarian Immigration Office, Safaa and Hali were placed in Hungary’s last open refugee camp, at Vámosszabadi, while their family reunification request was considered by the German authorities (p. 257).
17 Aidi beside the River Danube in Regensburg, Germany, March 2018. ‘First I will go to school, to learn German. Then I will go to university. Because I have one dream. I want to work in an office. I would love so much to work in an office. That’s my dream!’ (p. 263).
Austria had announced preparations for the introduction of border controls at the pass. The resignation of Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann in May 2016, and his replacement by his Social Democratic Party colleague Christian Kern, ushered in a sharp anti-refugee turn in Austrian government policy. Germany, Denmark and Norway also introduced temporary controls on their borders. The old fault lines between nation state were reappearing across the Schengen zone. ‘If the rules are broken, we cannot act as if nothing has happened,’ Matteo Renzi warned Vienna.6
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Zoltán Boross was a hard-headed cop with a face of granite and surprisingly vulnerable brown eyes above a tidy moustache. His name card said it all: Department of International Criminality, Illegal Migration Unit. Illegal not irregular. He muttered rather than spoke, mixing the wooden language of state bureaucracy with the passion of a professional devoted to his job. A typical Hungarian law-and-order product of the late Kádár years, at the soft end of state socialism in the 1980s, he started in the border police in 1993 and has never looked back. He sounded obsessed, or at least full of emotion about the bad men and women he pursued.
They come in all shapes and sizes. In the old days it was just men, but now more and more women are involved. It used to be less educated people, with just primary school education, now there are more and more highly qualified smugglers, with university degrees.
Ten times as many smugglers were active in 2015 as in 2014. The main organisers were in the countries of origin, earning the bulk of the €8,000 it cost, roughly, per person, to get to Europe. Their logistical network stretched all the way across Turkey, up through Eastern Europe and the Balkans to the destination countries. On the way, a cell structure existed, with members of one cell often not knowing the identities of other cells, to minimise the damage of discovery when the police caught the members of one cell. Three systems of payment were used: Western Union, MoneyGram, or other above-board money-transfer systems; the hawala system, under which migrants travelled on credit, with various guarantees for the smugglers that they would receive the money through password-protected pigeonholes once a migrant reached the destination; or simply cash in hand, which was the hardest for the police forces to track.
A few days earlier, a twenty-nine-year-old Afghan was arrested in a Budapest bar, allegedly linked to eight Afghans found in a van on the M1 motorway from Budapest to Vienna. ‘A typical case. The Afghan smuggler was living in Hungary, probably illegally. The migrants were at the camp in Bicske. They got in touch with a Hungarian woman, she organised the route on.’ The Afghan was working with the Hungarian woman. Neither were among the main organisers, and the chain led all the way back to Afghanistan. They were just links near the end of the chain.
International cooperation between police forces was good, but could be much better, Boross said. Hungarian liaison officers work in Turkey. ‘Last year we had good and precise data from the Turkish side.’ There had also been good cooperation with the Serbian police since 2009 when nineteen Kosovars drowned in the Danube on the Hungarian-Serbian border. On that occasion, the whole network of smugglers was uncovered. Now the Hungarian investigators were focusing on improving collaboration with the Macedonians. There were 110 officers in six units working on illegal migration at the Hungarian National Bureau of Investigations (NNI). The increasing number of cameras, mounted on the fence with Serbia, were not a ‘miracle’ system, but rather an early warning one, he explained. ‘The key question is how fast we can react to the information from the cameras.’
Both at Röszke and at Bácsszentgyörgy in the west, local Hungarian people I spoke to alleged that Hungarian border policemen were bribed to turn a blind eye to smugglers. Did he give any credence to those claims? ‘That is an awkward question. There have always been attempts to corrupt border guards. If we come across anything concrete we concentrate all our efforts into tracking down and stopping such practices.’ Such cases were not typical, he affirmed, and any found guilty were no longer in the police force.
The hardest period for him and his officers was at the end of August and beginning of September 2015:
It was a very hard time. Next to the larger, professional groups of smugglers, many amateurs were attracted by the big profits. They were charging €150 per person from Röszke to Budapest, or €300 per person to Vienna. They packed them in their vehicles, and sometimes made three trips a day. Private entrepreneurs moved in on the business, from all over the country. There were days we launched four separate cases. And we caught thirty-six gangs. That was a good result.
Overall, I asked, how successful had the fence actually been so far? ‘It has a restraining influence. For the past month, it has kept the number entering the country illegally down to about 100 a day.’ About 11,000 had been caught in the first four months of the year, after climbing over or cutting through the fence. Some had been put in trial in Szeged. Most had ended up in open camps, from where they quietly continued their journeys to Austria. Once they were safely in the country, how much effort did Hungary actually put into preventing migrants and refugees leaving westwards, to Austria? I asked Boross.
‘It is true that every country tries harder to stop people coming in than going out,’ he admitted. On the wall above his office was a large colourful map of Central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary was in orange, Serbia, Austria and Ukraine in green, Croatia in purple, Romania in yellow, and Italy in red. Criss-crossing the map black felt-tip lines of notorious smuggling routes had been drawn, some thicker than others to show the volume of the traffic. At the centre of the spider’s web, six lines radiated out of Budapest.
As we walked down the stairs to the exit, after an interview which had lasted two and a half hours, I mentioned that we hadn’t spoken much about Romania. ‘Our impression,’ he sai
d carefully, ‘is that the Romanians are not telling us the true numbers of those who are passing through their country. Because they want to get into the Schengen zone of countries soon, and that would be harder if they get a reputation as another gateway for illegal immigrants . . .’
So Hungarian investigators had asked their Slovak and Polish counterparts to tell them if the numbers began to rise on their own borders. One new route from Greece, he suspected, was through Bulgaria into Romania, then into Ukraine, and through Ukraine either across the short and mountainous border into Slovakia – ‘hard to cross, and full of cameras, which the Slovaks are rather proud of’ – and the longer, much more easily negotiable border from Ukraine into Poland.
We stood outside while he lit a cigarette, like a true plain-clothes cop. Other plain-clothes policemen were outside smoking too, lurking at the entrance of an underground carpark. With his long-standing experience of the cruelties inflicted by smugglers and traffickers on those who paid them so much, did he see migrants as victims, or criminals? I asked.
‘I see them as witnesses,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately most tell fairy-tales. They think if they give evidence, they will not get help from the smugglers’ networks later, to travel on. So we look especially for those who have been cheated by the smugglers, or hurt by them in other ways.’
‘Are your actions not pushing more people into the hands of the smugglers?’ I asked. ‘If you just let people through, or laid on transport, as you did last year, wouldn’t that be a more effective way of combatting the trade?’
‘The truth lies on both sides,’ he said, frankly. The police, like the army, had every reason to be pleased with the Fidesz government. In early May, they were granted an extra $205 million (55.8 billion forints) from the budget, to cover the cost of policing the southern border, and improved communications equipment. The counter-terrorism service, TEK, and other intelligence services received the biggest rise of all.
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In mid-April, Pope Francis, spiritual leader of 1.2 billion Catholics and the Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of 250 million Orthodox Christians, travelled together to the Greek island of Lesbos with the Greek Archbishop Ieronymous II.7 The Pope’s first trip after becoming pontiff in 2013 was to the island of Lampedusa, and he had often spoken out in sympathy with refugees. As a Catholic from Argentina, who had worked many years with his fellow Jesuits among the poor in the shanty towns of Buenos Aires, he had a strong sympathy for the poor and oppressed. Lesbos, even more than the other islands, was the Greek bottleneck of the refugee influx, with 850,000 passing through in 2015 – ten times the permanent population of the island. Before aid agencies and volunteers arrived and got organised, the local Greek population did most of the rescuing and caring for the weary and bedraggled, clambering up the beaches.8
‘On remote Greek islands, grandmothers have sung terrified little babies to sleep, while teachers, pensioners and students have spent months offering food, shelter, clothing and comfort to refugees who have risked their lives to flee war and terror,’ read the petition organised by a group of academics, who nominated the people of the Greek islands for the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to help refugees.9
The situation of migrants on Lesbos deteriorated sharply with the EU–Turkey deal. The three main aid organisations – International Rescue Committee, Norwegian Refugee Council and Oxfam – which had been active until then, all decided to leave rather than be associated with a policy of mass expulsions. The camp at Moria turned from being an open place where refugees could rest after the sea journey and prepare for to travel onwards on large passenger ferries, into little better than a prison camp. An atmosphere of gloom and despair had descended on the inmates. Another positive aspect of the Pope’s visit was that the camp was given a spring clean. Walls were whitewashed, showers repaired and clean clothes distributed, before the religious leaders arrived.
‘Does Europe have the capacity to accept so many migrants now?’ the pontiff was asked by a reporter from the French Catholic magazine, La Croix, a few days after his visit.10
That is a fair and responsible question because one cannot open the gates wide unreasonably. However, the deeper question is why there are so many migrants now . . . The initial problems are the wars in the Middle East and in Africa as well as the underdevelopment of the African continent, which causes hunger. If there are wars, it is because there exist arms manufacturers – which can be justified for defensive purposes – and above all arms traffickers. If there is so much unemployment, it is because of a lack of investment capable of providing employment, of which Africa has such a great need. More generally, this raises the question of a world economic system that has descended into the idolatry of money. The great majority of humanity’s wealth has fallen into the hands of a minority of the population.
Coming back to the migrant issue, the worst form of welcome is to ‘ghettoize’ them. On the contrary, it’s necessary to integrate them. In Brussels, the terrorists were Belgians, children of migrants, but they grew up in a ghetto. In London, the new mayor [Sadiq Khan, a Muslim] took his oath of office in a cathedral and will undoubtedly meet the queen. This illustrates the need for Europe to rediscover its capacity to integrate.
The religious leaders visited Moria, a camp where 3,000 migrants were now detained, awaiting deportation to Turkey if their asylum applications failed. They spent five hours on the island, touring the camp and talking to the migrants.
I am here to tell you, you are not alone . . . The Greek people have generously responded to your needs despite their own difficulties. Yes, so much more needs to be done but let us thank God that in our suffering he never leaves us alone.
We hope that the world will heed these scenes of tragic and indeed desperate need, and respond in a way worthy of our common humanity.
The religious leaders said prayers for all those who had died on the journey there, then the Pope took three families of twelve Syrian refugees back to the Vatican with him. Six were children, and all were threatened with deportation, though they had arrived on the island before the deal came into effect. In Italy, they would be cared for by the Sant’ Egidio charity.
For the thousands left behind, the picture looked bleak. After weeks or months of waiting for an interview with the EASO officer, asylum seekers were no longer asked about the conditions in their home countries, or why they fled in the first place.11 Interviewers were suddenly only interested in conditions in Turkey. If they had been tolerable, now that Turkey had been declared a ‘safe country’ by the EU, they were considered suitable for sending back. The only remaining safeguard was a comparatively strenuous appeals procedure. In the year from 20 March 2016 to 20 March 2017, only 916 people were actually deported from the Greek islands to Turkey. Being on appeal in the Moria camp was a mixed blessing. Migrants were clinging by their fingernails to their fragile position on the inside edge of the EU. But their situation was neither stable, nor comfortable.
Another criticism of the EU–Turkey Statement came from the Hungarian-born financier and philanthropist George Soros.12 In an article in the New York Review of Books published in April 2016, he identified four main flaws. That it was a German plan, imposed on the EU, rather than a common European approach. It was underfunded. It imposed quotas, which many member states opposed, requiring refugees to live in countries where they didn’t want to be. And, finally, it transformed Greece into a holding pen for refugees.
The EU–Turkey deal could, nevertheless, be made to work, Soros suggested, if enough funding was thrown at it. What was needed was what he called ‘surge funding’ – large sums, made available at the moment of need, deliberately targeted – rather than the current EU policy of putting in too little money, continuously.
Most of the building blocks for an effective asylum system are available; they only need to be assembled into a comprehensive and coherent policy. Critically, refugees and the countries that contain them in the Middle East must receive enough financial su
pport to make their lives there viable, allowing them to work and to send their children to school. That would help to keep the inflow of refugees to a level that Europe can absorb. This can be accomplished by establishing a firm and reliable target for the number of refugee arrivals: between 300,000 and 500,000 per year.
These refugees would be coming to Europe by invitation, not wasting their frugal resources on the smugglers who exploited them, often brutally, at the moment. ‘This number is large enough to give refugees the assurance that many of them can eventually seek refuge in Europe, yet small enough to be accommodated by European governments even in the current unfavorable political climate,’ Soros continued.
There are established techniques for the voluntary balancing of supply and demand in other fields, such as with matching students to schools and junior doctors to hospitals. In this case, people determined to go to a particular destination would have to wait longer than those who accept the destination allotted to them. The asylum seekers could then be required to await their turn where they are currently located. This would be much cheaper and less painful than the current chaos, in which the migrants are the main victims. Those who jump the line would lose their place and have to start all over again.
He calculated that €30 billion a year would be needed to make the scheme work and suggested that the sum be borrowed on the financial markets, exploiting for the first time the EU’s triple A credit rating. The sum should be enough to help Turkey and other front-line states improve their facilities for refugees, for the funding of an efficient EU asylum agency and security force, tasked with protecting the external borders, and establishing common standards across the EU for the reception and integration of refugees, he wrote. It might sound expensive, but it would certainly be cheaper than allowing the Schengen system of free trade to collapse. The cost of that had been estimated by the Bertelsmann Foundation and the French government as potentially more than €100 billion a year, in lost GDP.