The last year has changed Fitsum, an eloquent young Eritrean, from a law-abiding student into a refugee with a criminal record in Greece and a Serbian medical certificate detailing injuries allegedly inflicted by Hungary's border police.
His voyage from Africa has been costly and dangerous, but the budding computer engineer perhaps suffered most in the place he hoped to find safety, when he briefly set foot in the European Union one recent night.
"The smuggler cut open the border fence and pushed us through, even though the Hungarian police were coming and shouting not to cross," Fitsum said a few hours later at a Serbian camp for migrants near the border with Hungary.
“We ran but the police caught us,” he explained in fluent English. “They started beating us, especially me for some reason. I didn’t kick anyone or steal anything or burn anything. I was just trying to cross the border, like anyone would in our position.”
According to Fitsum (26), the Hungarian police returned him and the nine Pakistanis in his group to the Serbian side of the border, where he sought help at this state-run transit camp on the outskirts of the border town of Subotica.
The staff immediately sent him to a local hospital, where doctors said his ribs were badly bruised but not broken.
The account given by Fitsum – who asked for his real name not to be published – could not be verified, but it chimes with recent accounts of Hungarian police brutality from major international rights and aid groups, Serbs working with migrants and refugees at the border, and asylum seekers themselves.
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban has been a fierce critic of a German-led push for a liberal migration policy and distribution of refugees around the EU, and he frequently links immigration to terrorism and other security threats.
Transit zones
Orban erected fences along Hungary’s frontiers with
Serbia
and
Croatia
last autumn to divert migrants away from his country, and border guards allow only 15 asylum seekers per day to enter each of two “transit zones” built into the fence.
Several major rights groups complain that these zones exist in a legal limbo, and breach Hungary’s commitments to people fleeing war and persecution.
Criticism of Hungary grew louder this month, when its police began returning to Serbia any illegal migrants caught within 8km of the frontier – compounding fears for the safety of thousands of asylum seekers who are still trying to cross Balkan borders that were officially closed to them in March.
“In the last months, an increasing number of our patients reported cases of violence and abuse and showed physical trauma directly associated with violence.
Many of these cases were allegedly perpetrated by Hungarian authorities," said Simon Burroughs, head of the Médecins Sans Frontières mission in Serbia.
“We strongly condemn the use of excessive force and we urge the Hungarian authorities to take the necessary actions for these practices to stop.”
Human Rights Watch said recently that people “who cross into Hungary without permission, including women and children, have been viciously beaten and forced back across the border”.
At the Subotica transit camp, Dr Branko Milicevic said many migrants still try to cross the border at night, and return injured and in failure soon after.
“We see lots of wounds from barbed wire. And in the last two months, we’ve seen 50 or 60 people who say they’ve been wounded by the Hungarian police, and with injuries indicative of beatings and the use of pepper spray.”
Hungary’s tighter border controls and “pushbacks” are starting to put a strain on Serbia, where more than 2,600 migrants are trapped.
The Subotica migrant centre was built to accommodate about 100 people but now houses 500, and some 800 people are living amid rising squalor and searing heat in tents and makeshift shelters near the two transit zones in the border fence.
"I got into Hungary once with smugglers, but I was caught," said Mohsin Shah (35) from Afghanistan, who has been living by the border fence for three weeks. "When the police sent me back into Serbia they gave me two electric shocks with some kind of baton, and shouted 'Hungary is not for you!'"
Humane manner
Hungary’s interior ministry denies mistreatment, insisting that the country “proceeds in a humane manner with those who are actually in need, and the people who are waiting at its borders and in its territory receive fair treatment”.
In Subotica, Fitsum recalled how life had unravelled when his father died, his family had to leave Saudi Arabia for troubled Sudan, and he quit his studies in Malaysia to join them. Now the family is scattered, and Fitsum's siblings are in Sweden.
His bid to join them involved a risky dinghy crossing from Turkey and a stint in a Greek jail for trying to use a fake passport, even before his alleged beating by Hungary's police.
“Afterwards, I just hoped they would say the word ‘Sorry’. But they didn’t,” Fitsum said.
“I was looking for some compassion, from one human being to another. They could see that we are desperate people.”
