Everything continues

Just when we think we had seen it all in the field and that the violence cannot get any worse, the reality hits back strongly. This week, our team visited squats in the area of Sombor, a city near the Serbian – Hungarian border, where there is a high number of refugees at the moment, sleeping rough. Many of them walk around with a little left of their feet – some have their feet skin so crawled that it looks horrifying, and as if they might never fit in a regular shoe again. The condition is a consequence of long walking for days on end in inadequate shoes on wet lands, and is exacerbated by the securitization policies of EU, specifically in this case members of Hungarian and Croatian border police who often beat people on their feet too.

As if this was not bad enough, Bulgarian and Hungarian border police started using dogs to deter refugees from their borders again. During the field trip, we met a man who had his arm beaten by a dog in Bulgarian, and a boy travelling alone who had his leg beaten by a dog when he was trying to enter Croatia. These people feed an unusual mixture of anger and acceptance of the situation they are in, many state they were humiliated by way police treated them: “After the dog bite us, the policemen spray the dog’s moth as if to clean it, as if the refugees will spread some kind of disease to the dogs.”

The violence continues and is normalized and one does not seem to be able to see the end to it. In our next post we will share how Hungarian built up its fence on the border with Serbia.