Europe’s response to the refugee surge has been skewed. Central to the effort is mobilising moderate Muslims. Bulk of refugees, who have fled the savagery of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, should have little love for either
Of all the European countries, Hungary’s response to the refugee surge from North Africa and West Asia, particularly Syria, has been the most inhuman and ironical. On Tuesday, its Prime Minister, Viktor Orban’s Government declared a “state of crisis” along its borders and further amended its immigration laws to provide for harsh penalties, including imprisonment, for those entering illegally or damaging the border fence. It also includes the creation of “transit zones”— small encampments for holding refugees and evaluating them for entry. According to a New York Times report (September 15), “Hungary Detains Migrants in Border Crackdown” by Helene Bienvenu and Rick lyman, which stated all this, “Other changes still being discussed include activating the military to help protect the border and granting the police new powers, including the ability to enter a private residence at will if they suspect migrants are being hidden there.”
Hungary, which has taken a hard line against the refugees from the very beginning, protecting its borders with razor-wire fencing, erected a fresh barrier on September 15 at a gap in the border fence through which thousands of refugees have walked into the country in recent weeks. As the New York Times report stated, “..new arrivals encountered only razor wire and a line of police officers pointing them back toward Serbia.” It is not Hungary alone. Another New York Times report by Rick lyman (September 4), states, “Razor-wire fences rise along national borders in Greece, Bulgaria and France.”
These countries treat refugees harshly. lyman points out in his September 4 report that in Hungary “hundreds of migrants surrounded by armed police officers were tricked into boarding a train with promises of freedom, only to be taken to a “reception” camp. In the Czech Republic, the police hustled nearly 200 migrants off a train and wrote identification numbers on their hands with indelible markers, stopping only when someone pointed out that this was more than a little like the tattoos the Nazis put on concentration camp inmates.” The report quotes Robert Frolich, the chief Rabbi of Hungary, as saying that images of police “putting numbers on people’s arms” reminded him “of Auschwitz. And then putting people on a train with armed guards to take them to a camp where they are closed inIJ Of course there are echoes of the Holocaust.”
It is not just the Governments. Right–wing leaders fan extreme, exclusivist nationalist feelings depicting refugees “as dangerous outsiders whose foreign cultures and Muslim religion could overwhelm cherished traditional ways.” A camerawoman, Petra laszlo, associated with a news channel supporting a far-right political party, was caught on camera kicking and tripping migrants. She was dismissed, but her action reflected the deep hatred for refugees that many in East European countries harbor.
They are clearly encouraged by their Governments’ stand. While Mr Orban has repeatedly said that Hungary has the right to protect its Christian traditions by refusing to accept large numbers of Muslims, an aide of his, Georgy Bakondi, has been quoted by Bienvenu and lyman (September 15), as saying, “We hope that the messages we have been sending migrants for a long time have reached them, ‘“Don’t come. Because this route doesn’t lead where you want to go.’” I wonder how the 200,000 Hungarians, who fled their country after Soviet troops had crushed the 1956 (October-November) uprising, would have reacted if European leaders had said the same thing to them!
Besides Soviet intervention in Hungary and oppressive post-World War II Soviet domination, Hungary and other East European countries (1945-1991) had also suffered horribly during the holocaust and World War II. The Auschwitz complex, the largest of its kind where 1.1 million people, 90 per cent of them Jews, were exterminated was in Poland, as was Treblinka, the second largest, where 700,000 to 900,000 Jews were killed. According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, Nazis killed 2.77 million ethnic Poles and 2.7 to 2.9 million Polish Jews, slaughtering 1,50,000 to 1,80,000 civilians while suppressing the 1944 Warsaw uprising, and razed the city to the ground. In Czechoslovakia, Nazi atrocities included the complete destruction of lidice, a village north-west of Prague, and the murder of all its men, following the assassination of Reich Proctor Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. Among the worst incidents in Hungary was the massacre of Jews on the banks of the Danube in Budapest.
Eastern Europe has many memorials to Nazi atrocities. Yet, its treatment of the current refugees, including herding them into reception camps, has reminded people of Nazi methods. lyman’s report quotes Gabor Gyulai, refugee programme coordinator for the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Budapest, as saying, “I cannot call them anything other than concentration camps.”
There are certainly reasons for worry. The numbers, for example. Hundreds of thousands, the bulk of them Syrians, have been coming into Europe during a little less than the last couple of years. Besides, there are about 1.9 million Syrian refugees in Turkey and 2.1 million in Jordan, lebanon, Iraq and Egypt. Integrating all of them, and more who will be on their way as the conflicts in Middle East rage, will not be easy. Cultural differences exist and the fear that the Islamic State, Al Qaeda and allied organisations are sending infiltrators along with the refugees is genuine. But then, the US and several European countries already have large Muslim populations and the alarming number among them travelling to join the IS reflects the considerable headway fundamentalist Islamist doctrines have made among them. The West has in any case to find a way of countering the spread of both theologically and administratively. Central to the effort is mobilising moderate Muslims. The bulk of the refugees, who have fled the savagery of the IS and Al Qaeda and the wars they have unleashed, should have little love for either. The narration of their experiences to Muslims already present in the West can have a sobering effect. Many of them can also be mobilised in the multi-dimensional global campaign that has to be accelerated. For this to happen, the feeling of gratitude which many of them feel toward their hosts, should last, and they must be encouraged to identity with their new countries. This will not happen, nor can they be integrated in liberal post-Renaissance European culture, if they are treated as beyond the pale and less than human when they arrive.
