Hungary threatens to burn migrants

We discovered the unseen plans of Viktor Orbán to create a no place.

In the titled European drama, such as the tale of Oscar Wilde, The Selfish Giant, Hungary has snatched Germany from the role of supervillain. When the struggle we spoke of daily was financial, economic and class, the south was defending itself against the austerity of the north. The baddest bad of that story was Angela Merkel.

An unexpected twist of the plot introduces a new plot arc: Europe disastrously manages the wave of migrants traveling from east to west. In this new chapter, the character of the German chancellor undergoes a transformation due to her attitude of welcome, more generous than that of other countries. Emerges a new villain from the frontier territory: Viktor Orbán. (Even his own name sounds villainous).

Orbán is the Hungarian prime minister. Conservative, populist, protectionist, anti-European, xenophobic and lifesaver.

Viktator, as they call it, bets on what he calls «egyszínűség», the antonym of diversity. Something that fortunately takes us so far that we do not have a word to translate. It wants a non-ethnic Hungary, compact, single-minded, in economic growth.

In order to prevent the migration route crossing Hungarian territory, the Government has been raising its defenses. In June 2015, Hungary erected a 175-kilometer-long, four-meter-high fence on its border with Serbia. In September, he did the same in the territory that separates him from his neighbor Croatia. To crown these walls, there were installed kilometers of concertinas brand Spain, specifically those manufactured by European Security Fencing, proud suppliers of anti-personnel blades from Malaga to the world.

The last cry in border control is the one heard in ten of the kilometers of the fence that separates Hungary and Serbia: «attention, attention, we warn you that you are approaching the Hungarian border!», Scream the loudspeakers in English , Arabic and Farsi. It looks like an airport, with the difference that this transit zone is electrified, illuminated, sensorized, sonorized and recorded. It looks like a TV set. As we read in the newspaper Le Soir, in ten months the rest of the Serb-Hungarian border will have been reinforced and the work will be carried out by prisoners.

If the migrant does not want to die a victim of an electric shock, he / she must go to the access area through which asylum requests are channeled, but only 10 persons per day are allowed. A bottling only comparable to catching a piece of rich and free empanada in the pilgrimage of Santa Margarita.

As if all this armor was not enough, Hungary has passed a package of legislative measures that affect the rights of refugees. For example, the police will be able to carry out what in Spain we call hot returns, but not only at the border but throughout Hungary, to any irregular migrant, without giving him the opportunity to prove that he is a potential asylum seeker. Because the asylum can only be requested by the door of the transit zone. It is as if a car had run over you and, badly badly wounded, you wanted to enter a hospital by the emergency door and the guard of the enclosure told you: I’m boring, but you go to the street and you do that queue of ten days for the Another door, like everyone else. I say ten days to put a deadline in which you sure have died bleeding. And I do not say that it is the fault of the watchman, that here the bad guy already knows who he is.

These measures promoted by Orbán go against the European Union’s asylum system, not to mention human rights, the European spirit and the least decency. This in Spain we know well, as we have legalized this same on our own southern border. And Europe so upbeat.

Asylum-seekers also feel threatened with their rights in Hungary: all those in waiting facilities will be transferred to the transit area, where they will be officially detained, although without an arrest warrant, living in containers. The 28 days of maximum wait in transit zone will become indefinite. All asylum seekers (including vulnerable persons and adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18) will be detained in the transit zone. The maintenance in the transit area is handled by the asylum seekers.

What Hungary intends is to create a no place in that ghostly «transit zone». A place where the people detained there are deprived of their rights, surrounded by a border fence that kills or at least calcina, achicharra, excluded inhumanly, converted in the other, undesirable. And we are talking about Hungary, a country that was admitted 13 years ago in the European Union. That is, we talk about ourselves.

Source.ElPais