Closing borders pushes migrants back towards Hungary

Though it only has one street and fewer than 100 inhabitants, Rabe commands a view of three countries.

From this remote village, the rest of Serbia stretches away to the south and west, while to the north lies Hungary and to the east Romania.

The location has never been of much more than curiosity value to Rabe, where the only work is in the fields, and the main attraction aside from the “triple border” views is the fierce fruit brandy that locals brew in their backyards.

Rabe has long been poor but peaceful, moving to a rural rhythm that brought little wealth but always offered some assurance as to what each day would bring.

Ripples of change touched Rabe last summer, when a few migrants drifted this way from Horgos, a village 40km to the west. It found itself on the main route for a million people trekking through the Balkans to western Europe.

The ripples were followed by a jolt, as Hungary vowed to stop migrants entering the country by building a 4m high, 175km security barrier along its entire border with Serbia, before extending it along the Croatian frontier.

Soon Hungarian soldiers were driving posts into fields along the northern side of Rabe and erecting a fence topped with gleaming coils of razor wire.

Silent warning

Now the fence runs as far as the eye can see and is monitored from watchtowers, by patrols of Hungarian border guards and, in Rabe, more modestly by a pair of Serb policemen who nose their Land Rover out of the bushes to question anyone lingering too long or taking photos of the vast steel oddity.

If the barrier stands as Hungary’s silent warning to refugees, then Romania is now responding in noisier fashion, by regularly sending a helicopter to swoop low over the fields to search for people sneaking around the eastern edge of the fence.

Of all the disconcerting changes to their quiet life in Rabe, however, it is recent nocturnal activity that most unsettles the villagers.

“Most evenings refugees come through here. We see them, and we hear all our dogs barking in the middle of the night. Usually they come in private cars, which drop them off at the edge of the village, and they walk towards the border,” says Attila who – like all his neighbours in Rabe – asks that his real name not be used.

“It’s picked up in the last two or three weeks,” says his friend, Laszlo.

“I don’t know who’s bringing them here. But if I did I might join them,” he adds with a bleak laugh. “They probably make good money.”

The men say the largest group of refugees arrived in a bus accompanied by Serbian police cars – a story corroborated separately by others in the village.

Their comments chimed with accounts from people working with migrants in Belgrade, who said Serbian police had taken refugees from the Sid camp near Croatia and left them at the Hungarian border, to ease pressure on the facility now that Balkan states are enforcing strict daily limits on admissions.

“There used to be a little bench there, but the migrants used it for firewood,” says Emese, pointing to the now-empty grass verge outside her little cottage in Rabe and across the road to saplings that had been freshly and roughly cut.

“They chopped down those small trees too and made a fire near the church. By morning they were gone. I suppose they tried to get through the fence, but I’ve no idea if they managed it.”

Hungary's fence diverted hundreds of thousands of migrants through Croatia and Slovenia, but now that those countries are sharply restricting entry, more people are trying to breach the barrier: Hungarian police caught 2,398 people entering illegally from Serbia in February, compared to just 553 in January.

Strong objections

Those who are arrested are put through a fast-track criminal court procedure that Hungary introduced specially to deal with migrants and refugees, despite strong objections from rights groups.

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee (HHC) said that under the system "nearly all asylum claims will be automatically rejected as inadmissible in an extremely accelerated procedure".

“Several elements of the new legislation and policy are in clear breach of EU law,” the HHC said, warning that Hungary was heading towards “de facto self-exclusion . . . from the Common European Asylum System.”

In the absence of a co-ordinated EU response to the crisis, however, many countries have followed Hungary’s lead by building border fences and introducing ad-hoc restrictions on the movement and treatment of asylum seekers.

Despite this crackdown, January and February saw 10 times more migrants arrive in Europe than during the same period last year, creating vast demand for traffickers who offer to smuggle them, for a price, through “closed” frontiers.

"Beside the 'legal' route, there are trafficking routes that are hidden," said Tibor Varga, a pastor who has worked for several years with migrants passing through Subotica, a Serbian city 10km from the border with Hungary.

“Around here refugees are now in smaller groups and more dispersed than before the fence was built. But the routes still operate, and everyone takes a cut: the smugglers – local and foreign – the police, and taxi and bus drivers,” he says.

Humanitarian crisis

Amid warnings of a humanitarian crisis in

Greece

, where more than 30,000 migrants and refugees are now stuck, EU and Turkish leaders will meet on Monday to try to resolve Europe’s worst refugee crisis since the second World War.

Prospects for strong joint action are bleak: Hungarian leader Viktor Orban has called a referendum on a German plan to share refugees among EU states and pledged to extend his fence if necessary along the country's border with Romania.

The EU’s dithering has made Orban’s tough stance more popular in Hungary and elsewhere, including Rabe, despite its being on the “wrong” side of his fence.

“The EU told Orban there would be no problem. But his warnings were right, and building the fence was brilliant,” says Attila.

“Orban is defending Europe: if they want to fix this crisis, they should listen to him.”