by Nick Thorpe
Ussamah listened to Viktor Orbán’s comments on the Charlie Hebdo terror attack in Paris in January 2015, with dismay.
Everyone went to Paris to mourn the dead, but Orbán went to declare his movement against refugees, against Islam. A few weeks later I took part in a TV discussion on ATV, when I tried to explain the danger of Orbán’s speech, where it might lead. When I heard him I knew: we will have to leave Hungary.
I still love this country. I feel like I am at home, so it was a very difficult decision but we have to make it because we didn’t feel comfortable here after that speech. We have foreign names, we felt like we didn’t feel at home any more here, so we decided to look for some place to live peacefully.
I am a respected doctor in my town, but elsewhere no one knows who I am. They just notice that I am a foreigner like any other refugee they have been forced to hate.
Neither he nor his children had been the victims of physical violence since Orbán’s ominous speech, he said, but they had been exposed to verbal abuse. One of his daughters worked at the reception desk of a company, and on several occasions when she answered the phone, the person on the other end asked to speak to ‘a Hungarian’. Amira, aged 22, had just got a degree as a food scientist. She also had a part-time job as manager of a café in a business district in downtown Budapest.
Some customers were quite rude. At the start it was not a big deal, and I didn’t pay it much attention. But when all those posters were put up by the government, people became more rude day by day. The first one I clearly remember, I had a name badge with my full name on it, like all of the staff. A customer started asking me where I come from, and why I speak Hungarian so perfectly. I told him I was born here.
‘No, I was asking where you come from,’ he said, really aggressively.
‘I was born here, so I think I’m Hungarian,’ I told him. ‘I’m the manager here.’ Then he accused me of stealing the job from Hungarians. And so on.
Me and my workmates joked about it at first. But the second one was meaner. We made different sizes of coffees. I asked a customer whether he wanted a medium or large cappuccino, and he said in a horrible voice he wants a Hungarian cappuccino, and that I should understand that because I am in Hungary right now, I should learn how to make a Hungarian cappuccino.
After that, such comments became an almost everyday occurrence, so she left. ‘The most surprising part is that most of them were working in nearby offices, they were considered smart, well-educated, not poorly educated people.’
Wasn’t she afraid the same thing might happen in post-Brexit Britain? I asked.
Not at all. It’s an absolutely different world, I’ve worked there for six months, everyone is so nice. They accepted the fact that I come from another country and I am there to serve them, so they were really kind and polite, even when sometimes I didn’t understand the Manchester accent. But they were really helpful, everyone. I can’t think of one time when someone was rude to me.
‘There’s a big difference between what the government and the people think,’ her father added. ‘Of course, there are people in every country who dislike strangers, but the big problem here in Hungary is that the government itself distributes the hatred.’ His wife and the other four children were already working in England, Ussamah said. He just needed to finish his English language exams, then he too would be gone.
*
The year 2016 ended with a truck attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, and a shooting in an Istanbul nightclub. The perpetrator of the Berlin atrocity was a Tunisian asylum seeker who had been rejected and then disappeared before he could be deported.
On 11 January 2017, Barack Obama gave his last speech as president, a bid to console supporters appalled by the victory of Donald Trump. His speech was also a challenge to ‘autocrats’ including Viktor Orbán.
A faith in reason, and enterprise, and the primacy of right over might allowed the United States to resist the lure of fascism and tyranny during the Great Depression, and build a post-World War II order with other democracies. That order is now being challenged. First by violent fanatics who claim to speak for Islam; more recently by autocrats in foreign capitals who see free markets, open democracies, and civil society itself as a threat to their power. The peril each poses to our democracy is more far-reaching than a car-bomb or a missile.
On 20 January, as Donald Trump was sworn in, he received a letter from Pope Francis, suggesting the new president should not forget the great tradition of US compassion for the downtrodden: ‘Under your leadership, may America’s stature continue to be measured above all by its concern for the poor, the outcast and those in need who, like Lazarus, stand before our door.’13
In the Balkans, those standing at the door had to endure the coldest winter for many years.14 Six thousand people squeezed into overcrowded official camps, while up to two thousand lived rough, in an abandoned warehouse behind the railway station in Belgrade, in the ruined brick factory on the outskirts of Subotica, in the makeshift camps at Horgoš and Kelebia. Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors of the World, and a loose network of NGOs and volunteers like Fresh Response did their best to care for them, treating frequent cases of frostbite, of burns from the open fires the refugees tried to keep warm beside and cook over, and of dog bites and truncheon injuries from Bulgarian and Hungarian police.
‘For months we have called on the EU, UNHCR and Serbian authorities to put in place long-term solutions to avoid this catastrophic situation,’ said Stephane Moissaing, head of Médecins Sans Frontières in Serbia.
The collective failure of these institutions has left even the most basic needs uncovered, exposing already vulnerable people to even more suffering. Several people have already died of hypothermia at the borders of Serbia and Bulgaria, we cannot simply sit and update the number of those who die during the dangerous border crossings or fall victim to violence since the closure of the Balkan route.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BORDERLANDS
I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever: with my mouth will I make known thy faithfulness to all generations. For I have said, Mercy shall be.
Psalm 89
Ildikó Farkas drove the big 4×4 with confidence through the snow and deeply rutted tracks of the Tánya világ – the world of poor, isolated farmsteads around Mórahalom. For fourteen years she had been taking food to the elderly and disabled in these flatlands, scattered along the Hungarian-Serbian border. She could navigate each track and clump of trees, each tumble-down farm with her eyes shut.
In the back of her pick-up were nine sets of tupperware dishes, with the name of each recipient written in capitals on the handles – István, István, András, Edit. There was a slice of pork in one, kohlrabi stew in the second, meat soup in the third. The food came from the kitchens of the old people’s home in Mórahalom. The lunches cost $2 a day, five days a week – $40 a month. Those people on the farms living on under $100 a month got them for half-price – $1 a day.
Ildikó also delivered firewood and took children to school. The farms she visited were all close to the fence, and her customers had some experience of the refugee crisis.
András felt sorry for the refugees. He used the word refugees, not migrants. Hundreds passed his farm in the summer of 2015. Some he found sleeping in his barn. He gave them cool water from his well in the summer heat. He still lives in the same small house where he was born in the bitterly cold winter of 1947. The midwife who delivered him, ‘and it was a hard birth, for my poor mother’, ended up staying with them for several days.
Several tracks away in the snow, eighty-four-year-old István lived on his own too. He had no sympathy for the migrants. He’d had a hard life, he told me, an orphan, adopted by a well-off peasant whose lands were taken away by the Communists after the Second World War. His punishment for being the adopted son of a ‘kulak’, as the better-off farmers were called, was to be sent to work in the coal mines. He fully supported Viktor Orbán and his fence-building ende
avours. Nothing endeared the newcomers to him: ‘They left a trail of plastic bottles and rubbish wherever they went.’
He saw no parallel between his own suffering, and theirs. ‘I survived everything that happened here, and stayed.’ As they filed down the track next to his house, he exchanged not a single word with them. They were folk from another planet, ‘like ants’, he explained. Thin and agile despite his years, he cooked up coffee for us in his humble kitchen, glowing from the heat thrown out by an old Vesta wood-burning stove.
We drove on, past dogs on chains and piles of scrap machinery, sheds with gaping holes where pigs were once kept, a lone donkey marching up and down on too short a tether, and two cats curled up together on a short plank to keep warm.
In one house a lady of ninety-one asked when the cold weather would end. I counted ten packets of pills beside her on the bed. Wherever we looked we saw grinding poverty and broken health. One man explained how much the government’s €33 Christmas bonus meant to him. Another complained that the 1.6 per cent yearly increase in his pension was a joke. In one of the better-kept farms, a cockerel welcomed us loudly. There were certificates on the wall in recognition of the bravery and dedication with which local people helped their community in the terrible flood in the Tisza valley in 1970.
Tompa was half an hour’s drive west on Route 55. The road was resurfaced just before the refugee influx, and now functioned as the main supply road for police and army vehicles patrolling the border. We met Sándor in front of the town hall in Tompa, for a guided tour of the old defences. Long before the refugees, these peaceful villages braced themselves to defend their land and honour from a ‘Yugoslav invasion’. Tito’s Yugoslavia, unlike the Eastern Bloc, was not subservient to Moscow, and young Hungarian conscripts spent their military training preparing for a Third World War fought on the southern, as well as the western, borders.
Tompa, Sándor explained, was a product of the 1920 Trianon Treaty. The village grew originally as the ‘garden district’ of Subotica, 12 kilometres to the south in Serbia, an important, multicultural cathedral city of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When Subotica was swallowed up in the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918, Tompa was left with just a line of houses and no zone of attraction, no local heart to reach out to.
Sándor drove us through the streets, pointing out concrete bunkers built in the early 1950s, when the Hungarian Communist Party quarrelled with Josip Tito’s Yugoslav Communist Party. The border fence is not a solution, he said, just a stop-gap measure. ‘If a big group of determined migrants wanted to break through it, they could – unless the border guards could use live rounds – and then what an international scandal there would be!’ Migrants from the Arab world could certainly not integrate in Europe, he believed.
‘Look at our own Gypsies! Though I’ve got nothing against people of a darker skin colour . . .’
We drove up to the border crossing. On either side of the road were small restaurants, petrol stations with forecourts full of broken vehicles, trading companies either closed or in a state of permanent decline. During the Yugoslav wars, this had been a great place for smugglers. Many of them were local men, he said proudly.
*
Tibor Varga is a Protestant priest who has a reputation in Subotica as a man who helps everyone in need. He has a small office down some steps just off one of the main boulevards. As I arrived to meet him, an elderly Roma woman dropped by to ask if he had any spare blankets – or bananas, she added hopefully. She didn’t leave empty handed. The office was stacked with provisions. Tibor is a pastor for the Golgotha Christian community, an offshoot of the American Calvary Hill Church. He’s a big man, driven by his faith, his enormous energy, and his firm conviction that he is doing God’s work on earth. In the past three years most of his energies have been spent on helping the refugees who live in the woods and the abandoned buildings around Subotica. He collects and spends about €500 a week on them. The gifts come not from him, he explains carefully to everyone he meets, but from God.
We went shopping together in one of the large supermarkets on the edge of the city. He bought the cheapest of everything – great sacks of potatoes, onions, garlic, bags of rice and flour, litres of milk, twelve packs of sunflower oil, 25-kilo sacks of dried beans, kilo bags of sugar and vast numbers of teabags – he had €200 in his pocket, and at least 200 hungry refugees to feed. The only ‘luxuries’ were a dozen whole chickens which the refugees would cook on their open fires, and packets of turmeric, ginger, spicy paprika and curry powder. If he had more money, he said, he would simply buy more, not different products. Many refugees suffer from bad shoes and a lack of clothes as the weather gets colder. Sometimes he can help, from donations. But mostly he just supplies the basic necessities of life.
‘What I admire most about the refugees is their determination, their stamina,’ he said, as we pushed an ever heavier trolley between the aisles of the supermarket.
Another thing is that, unlike the Roma, they only take what they need, and say no to items they don’t have an immediate use for. The Roma scoop up everything they can.
These people are outside the system, away from the camps. In any case, if everyone went to the camps, they would be overcrowded, and they would be sent back to Preševo – on the Macedonian border. People don’t want that. They don’t want to lose the progress they feel they’ve made on their journeys. They would rather put up with hardship in the woods.
You don’t need so much money to make people happy. In summer I love to see their faces when I bring them watermelons. Watermelons are so cheap here then. I take a lot of them.
They have often invited him to share their meal and, no matter how much of a hurry he is in, he cannot resist such expressions of gratitude.
By the autumn of 2017, the second layer of the fence on the Hungarian-Serbian border was finished, with a service road down the middle restricted to Hungarian police and army vehicles. There were cameras with night-vision equipment fixed every few hundred metres along the outer fence. The second fence was electrified, like the old Iron Curtain, but not with sufficient voltage to harm anyone, just to send a signal to the security forces.
Refugees calculated that they had about three minutes, from the moment they cut through the outer fence and began to scramble over the second, before the soldiers and police arrived in force. The only way to succeed, they learned through hard experience, was to arrive at the fence in groups of about fifteen. They cut through, then divided into five groups of three, running in all directions. Then they lay low. This worked relatively well during the summer months, when there was still foliage on the trees and bushes, and crops in the fields. Some told me that after crossing, they lay still for as long as five days, not moving, without food or water, before they dared to carry on. And all the while the Hungarian police were searching for them, with dogs and sometimes helicopter support. They called this ‘gaming’.
Those who were caught said they were often kicked and beaten by the police, as they lay on the ground. They only felt safe when German or Austrian police, deployed as part of the Frontex mission, were present. Then the Hungarians were on their best behaviour, they said.
First stop with Tibor was a derelict building in Palić, just off the main road, close to the once beautiful lake and tourist resort. As our car came bumping down the dirt track, we saw sudden movement in the bushes, as people tried to run away. They came back, sheepishly, when they saw it was Tibor. Furtive, thin, haggard Bangladeshi and Pakistan men hugged the Hungarian evangelical priest like a long-lost uncle. He knew many of them by name.
Hasan was from Bangladesh and had once got as far as Györ in western Hungary before he was caught and pushed back into Serbia. The Hungarian police had a rather liberal interpretation of the 8-kilometre rule which came into force in July 2016. Hasan had crossed the fence so many times he had become an expert. He even knew some of the Hungarian police on the other side of the border by name. He had a host of anecdotes about his
experiences in Hungary. Once, when he was on the metro in Budapest, he heard the announcement, in Hungarian and English, ‘next stop, Astoria’. For one marvellous moment, he thought the announcer said: ‘Next stop, Austria.’
Tibor opened the back door of his truck, asked how many people were living in the ruined building, and distributed food accordingly. It should last them three or four days, until he or another NGO helping the refugees, called BelgrAID, visited them again. On metal sheets over an outside fire, we could see traces of the flat breads they had eaten earlier that day and the remains of a pot of curried beans. Inside the building were pitiful little piles of blankets in the dust and broken glass. The doors and window fittings, the wiring and plumbing had been ripped out by previous raiders.
As the nights grew colder what the men really needed was sleeping bags, they explained. Tibor replied patiently that he did not have such funds. Perhaps next time. The men nodded stoically. They did not complain if their requests could not be met. They just asked, in case. On the floor of one of the rooms, I found a faded postcard, written in Hungarian in a sloping, old-fashioned hand, to the former owners of the house, with Easter greetings. I could just make out the date: April 1964.
Hasan had crossed the Hungarian fence twenty-five times, he said, and had had enough of it. Now he was waiting for relatives in Bangladesh to send him more funds via the Western Union. This time he was going to try to reach Italy through Croatia and Slovenia. There was no fence there, but the River Danube was a big obstacle and there were many police and army patrols. The going rate with smugglers to Western Europe was €3,000.
Unexpectedly, for a man who is doing so much to help Muslim refugees reach Western Europe, Tibor Varga shared some of the Hungarian prime minister’s views. ‘This clash of civilisations is hard,’ he explained. I challenged him on this. Doesn’t Samuel Huntington’s theory ignore the overlap of civilisations, how much different civilisations have contributed to and shared with each other over the course of history? Doesn’t the theory suggest, on nebulous grounds, a permanent war, or inevitable conflict?