MARK
MACKINNON
SUBOTICA,
SERBIA — The Globe and Mail
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Migrants wait to board a train at Belgrade's main railway station bound for the border with Hungary on June 26, 2015. Hungary, which has seen 60,000 migrants crossing its border this year, said it would build a four-metre (13-foot) fence on its southern border with Serbia through which most migrants come into the country. (Andrej Isakovic / AFP/Getty Images)
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GATEWAY TO
FREEDOM
Their
journey is gruelling. Tens of thousands of migrants travel routes as long as
7,000 km – on foot – exhausted and hungry and sometimes hunted by police, for
havens in Western Europe and even Canada.
The Globe's
Senior International Correspondent Mark MacKinnon spoke with several migrants
along the Serbia-Hungary border in a place called The Jungle and reports on
their harrowing overland journeys
Turn off
the highway that winds among the farms near Serbia’s border with Hungary, walk
into the shoulder-high weeds and you find them: hundreds of people, nearly all
of them young men, clustered in makeshift camps. They’re hiding here – near the
end of epic overland journeys – waiting for the right moment to continue their
march north, toward what they hope are new and better lives in the European
Union, or even Canada.
The
migrants call this place The Jungle, which is more a reflection of the palpable
edginess here than the density of the foliage. The Jungle is just 10 kilometres
from the Hungarian border, and the gateway to the 26 countries in Europe where
people can move across state lines without visas. The migrants have been
dreaming about reaching the Schengen Area since they left their homes in
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and Iraq. Once they get across the Hungarian
border, they feel closer to their goal. They talk of jobs in Germany, distant
relatives in Sweden.
They walked
most of the way here. “It took us six months,” said an exhausted-looking Sajid
Khan, a wiry 18-year-old from Paktia province in eastern Afghanistan who made
the almost 7,000-kilometre overland journey via Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece
and Macedonia with four other young men. Swollen and blistered feet poke out
from their battered plastic sandals.
The
migrants clustered at The Jungle are part of an unprecedented wave of tens of
thousands of asylum-seekers from the Middle East and Central Asia who have
arrived in Europe this year. The overland route they took is the second prong
of the great migration under way from the war-torn regions of the world toward
the relative stability and prosperity of Europe.
The arrival
of more than 120,000 people this year who crossed the Mediterranean Sea to
reach the islands of Italy and Greece has captured international attention and
provoked heated debate within the EU over how to deal with the crisis. However
the flow of refugees overland via the Balkans is nearly as rapid – more than
60,000 migrants crossed from Serbia into Hungary in the first five months of this
year – and just as overwhelming to the countries trying to deal with this new
front in the drama.
“Some of
them were university professors, some of them were poor in their own countries.
It’s a mixture of everyone. It seems like a migration of peoples, of nations,”
Serbian Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic said in an interview at his office
in the capital city of Belgrade. “This is something that hasn’t been seen in
the last several centuries.”
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| Migrants travel on a train bound for the northern Serbian city of Subotica, near the border with Hungary, on June 28, 2015. Amnesty International accused Balkan countries of mistreating migrants passing through their territories on the way to the European Union, saying people fleeing war were being "shamefully let down". (Igor Pavicevic / AFP/Getty Images) |
It’s a situation Mr. Stefanovic said he expects to continue for several years. Serbia is now dotted with impromptu camps such as The Jungle. Two parks adjacent to the main train station in Belgrade – once a stop on the famed Orient Express route connecting Europe to Istanbul and the Middle East beyond – are full most nights with hundreds of sleeping migrants.
While
countries such as Hungary and Slovakia to the north have seen mass
anti-immigrant protests in recent weeks, Serbians have largely remained
tolerant so far. Mr. Stefanovic said Serbs are broadly sympathetic to the
migrants’ plight because many Serbs still remember being forced from their own
homes during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s.
But Serbs
also know the migrants aren’t here to stay; they’re just passing through on
their way north.
Border wall
planned
Across the
border in Hungary, the mood is full-blown paranoia. On the day Mr. Khan was
interviewed in The Jungle, The Globe and Mail followed a pair of green police
paddy wagons as they patrolled the border towns of Morahalom and Asotthalom,
their presence during daylight hours doing more to reassure local residents
than deter the migrants who invariably wait for nightfall to make their move.
“If you
come to Hungary, do not take the jobs of Hungarians,” reads one billboard in
Morahalom. “If you come to Hungary, you must respect our culture,” reads
another. A thousand such signs have recently been erected around Hungary by the
National Consultation on Immigration and Terrorism, a government body launched
earlier this year that has been criticized by other EU governments for its
explicit linking of migration to a supposed threat from “terrorists.” “People
are scared,” admitted a waiter in Morahalom.
Hungary
announced in June that it was suspending participation in a key EU rule
requiring that migrants’ asylum claims be processed in the country in which
they first arrive, a rule the migrants were already going around by avoiding
authorities in EU member states like Greece and Bulgaria along their route.
If you come
to Hungary, do not take
the jobs of Hungarians
If you come
to Hungary, you must
respect our culture
A billboard
in Morahalom, Hungary
Prime
Minister Viktor Orban has further rattled Serbia and the EU by vowing to build
a 200-kilometre wall along his country’s southern border with Serbia. “The boat
is full,” explained Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs. Hungary,
Austria and Germany have also sent border police to help Serbia better patrol
its border with Macedonia.
But the
migrants at The Jungle are confident that a Hungarian border wall wouldn’t stop
them. Not after they’ve come this far, not after all they’ve been through.
“Two people
who were walking with us died in the mountains between Iran and Turkey because
they didn’t have water. I was lucky because I had this much water left,” said
Ali Husseini, a 16-year-old Afghan, holding his fingers a pencil’s width apart
to illustrate his own margin between life and death. He said he’d been walking
for five weeks straight since leaving the Pakistani city of Quetta, where his
family has been living to escape the war in Afghanistan.
The thin
and muscled Mr. Husseini – who worked in a clothing shop while attending school
in Quetta – has travelled nearly 6,000 kilometres since leaving home. He said
he didn’t plan to stop walking until he reached his final destination of
Sweden, which he has heard (correctly) has Europe’s most welcoming asylum laws.
Well aware of the EU’s policy about applying for asylum in the country of first
arrival, he and many others in The Jungle say they plan to keep a low profile
even after they’re inside the Schengen Area.
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| A Serbian border officer finds a group of illegal immigrants from Syria near a railroad close to the border with Hungary, 30 kms east of Subotica, on June 25, 2015. Hungary's parliament on July 6, 2015, overwhelmingly approved the construction of a controversial fence on the border to keep out migrants, under new legislation that also tightens asylum application rules. (Andrej Isakovic / AFP/Getty Images) |
Only when Mr. Husseini reaches Sweden will he walk into a police station and formally declare that he wants political asylum from Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he says he and his family face persecution and violence because they are from the Hazara ethnic minority group.
“We want to
go to Hungary but we want to pass through without giving our fingerprints,” he
said, speaking for a group of a dozen Afghans he was travelling with. Among the
group, only Mr. Husseini spoke English. But Sweden, they’d all heard, offers
free language lessons to new immigrants.
Criminal
abuse
The
migrants’ desire to avoid the authorities makes them extremely vulnerable to
abuse by both criminals and police along the way. Mr. Husseini said men in
police uniforms raided The Jungle one recent night. But rather than detaining
the migrants, or directing them to Serbia’s formal system for asylum-seekers,
Mr. Husseini said the uniformed men took money and mobile phones from those
they caught, then released them to continue their journey.
Losing the
mobile phone was as much of a bother for Mr. Husseini as the stolen cash. Many
of the migrants use apps such as Google Maps to make sure they’re headed in the
right direction across unfamiliar terrain.
Another
English-speaking migrant – a Pakistani who gave his name as “Peter Diamond” –
was sporting two fresh black eyes and a badly cut face the morning after the
raid. Laughing bitterly, he said he’d hurt himself while “hugging a tree.” Mr.
Diamond, who said he was persecuted in Pakistan because he’s Christian, said
his end goal was to get to Canada and then bring his family there.
Both
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have recorded testimonies of
migrants abused by police in Serbia, as well as in Macedonia and Greece,
including bribe-taking and illegal “pushbacks,” where migrants were driven back
over the border they had just crossed and dropped off, in contravention of
national and European laws on the treatment of asylum-seekers.
Mr. Stefanovic,
Serbia’s Interior Minister, said he was aware of the allegations and had
ordered an investigation into the “isolated incidents.” He said that Serbian
and Hungarian police, working together, had broken up 40 smuggling rings in the
past year. “These are the people trying to misuse the bad fortune of the
migrants and take as much money as they can from them,” he said.
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| A Syrian migrant shows his bandaged feet near police station in the southern Serbian town of Presevo, near the border with Macedonia, on July 2, 2015. On the right, another couple sleeps near the same police station. Some migrants make it across the border into Hungary as a migrant family resting on a local road (centre) did. Hungary has been one of the main routes for people hoping to cross into Western Europe in the last two years. (Dimitar Dilkoff and Csaba Segesvari / AFP/Getty Images) |
The overland route to Europe can be as dangerous as the Mediterranean Sea crossing. For those with money, smugglers can be hired to take migrants from one border to the next. But even the rich migrants travelling with their whole families have to dismount and sneak across each border on foot.
“At the
Iranian border [with Pakistan], the police shot at us. I didn’t stop, I just
kept running,” said Mr. Khan, the 18-year-old from Paktia province, speaking in
broken English. Other migrants say the hardest part was wading across the Evros
River that forms Turkey’s border with Greece, where every year police find
bodies of those who failed to make the crossing. Others paid smugglers to take
them across the Aegean Sea on rickety boats. Several migrants admitted they’d
never heard of Serbia, Bulgaria or Macedonia until they were told they were in
those countries.
The route
from the Middle East to the Balkans shifts with the seasons. In the winter
months, migrants who reach Turkey have little choice but to take their chances
crossing either the Evros or the Aegean. But summer has melted the snow in the
Balkan mountain range between Bulgaria and Serbia, opening an arduous alpine
route for the next few months.
For much of
the way, the migrants follow the train tracks, leading to an epidemic of broken
ankles and twisted knees among the travellers. “Most of them have blisters on
their feet, joint pains, bone pains, respiratory issues, skin problems like
scabies, fleas and lice,” said Milena Radosavljevic, a doctor with Médecins
sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders) who gives free consultations at The
Jungle several times a week. “I think they just go on adrenaline. The human
body is not built for this, walking hundreds, thousands of kilometres.”
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| Migrants from Afghanistan gather near an abandoned brick factory in Subotica, Serbia on June 28, 2015, as they prepare to cross the border into Hungary. So far this year nearly 70,000 migrants have crossed into Hungary illegally, most of them coming from Kosovo, Syria and Afghanistan. (Laszlo Balogh/Reuters) |
‘We are not
animals’
In
Belgrade, where the government and police have largely taken a laissez-faire
attitude to the camps near the train station, many migrants pause and gather
intelligence from other travellers about the latest situation at the Hungarian
border and beyond.
“We’d go to
Sweden if we had the money, but we don’t have anything left,” said Ibrahim
Mohammed, speaking in Arabic as he sat sharing crackers with seven other family
members – including three girls under the age of 12 – in the park across from
the station. The family, Palestinian refugees who lived in a camp on the
outskirts of Damascus until the outbreak of Syria’s civil war, all had badly
blistered feet after their 2,800-kilometre overland journey. “Right now we
don’t know where we’re going tomorrow, except to keep going north,” said the
49-year-old Mr. Mohammed, a factory worker in Damascus before the war.
Though the
Serbian government has recorded a spike in official asylum applications – from
5,000 in 2013, to 16,500 last year, to more than 35,000 in just the first five
months of 2015 – only a tiny fraction of those truly want to stay in Serbia. (Serbia’s
official figures do not include the thousands of Kosovars who have also headed
north this year, fleeing economic collapse in their country. Belgrade does not
recognize Kosovo, which unilaterally declared independence from Serbia seven
years ago, as an independent state.)
All the
European countries are safe.
… In England, you go to jail if you
kill a cat or
a pigeon. In my country,
hundreds of people are killed every
day. If you want
freedom, you have
to come [to Europe].
Afghan
migrant Baryal Hussein Khil, 27
Serbia has
been criticized for approving just one asylum request in 2014, while granting
temporary protection to only five others. But Mr. Stefanovic said Serbia –
which is still home to tens of thousands of people who are designated as
refugees from the wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo – can not do
more.
“We do not
have enough space to shelter everybody,” he said. “We are already stretched to
the maximum. We are trying to expand our asylum centres to take some more, but
to be quite realistic many of these people say ‘Listen, we don’t want to live
in Serbia, we are just passing through your country. We want to go to Germany,
Sweden, France.’ Freedom of movement tells us that we have to let them go.”
Few here
believe Hungary’s planned wall will deter that flow of people.
“If they
build it, they [the migrants] will just find a way to cross it. It will raise
the level of corruption, but it will not change anything,” said Jelena Hrnjak,
program manager for Atina, a Serbian non-government organization that works to
combat human trafficking and gender-based violence. “I don’t see how it will
help the situation at all.”
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| Migrants prepare to enter a train to Serbia in the town of Gevgelija, on the Macedonian-Greek border, on July 9, 2015, on their way north to European countries. (Robert Atanasovski/AFP/Getty Images) |
Baryal Hussein Khil scoffs at the idea a wall would keep him or any of the others camped in The Jungle from pushing forward. Remarkably, Mr. Khil is in the middle of his second overland journey from Afghanistan.
The last
time, Mr. Khil said, he made it as far as Wolverhampton in central England,
where he spent two years working at a car wash before he was captured in a
police raid and deported back to Kabul. But the Afghan capital, he said, is
even more dangerous now than when he first fled it seven years ago. So he
started walking again.
This time,
Mr. Khil – his dark hair greying at just 27 years old – said he wants to go
through the asylum process legally. He said he’ll take up residence and look
for a job in any EU country that will take him.
“All the
European countries are safe. … In England, you go to jail if you kill a cat or
a pigeon. In my country, hundreds of people are killed every day,” Mr. Khil
said, mixing expletives with English he learned at a United Nations school in
the Pakistani city of Peshawar. “If you want freedom, you have to come [to
Europe]. We are not animals.”
Follow Mark
MacKinnon on Twitter: @markmackinnon
10/07/2015
