CHRISTIANIZATION OF REFUGEES IN HUNGARY
Just a few days ago in the vicinity of the border with Hungary, we met a young man from Morocco. With his hair shaved completely off, noticeably in a bad mood and with a sprained ankle, he shared with us a story explaining the reason why he had felt humiliated and sad for a while.
A few days prior he had tried to cross the Serbian – Hungarian border with a group of his countrymen. According to his testimony, shortly after they crossed the border fence, the Hungarian police found them and rounded them up, and proceeded to beat them for a few minutes. They kicked them, and beat them with police batons. The first instinct of the men from his group was to lie on the ground and try to protect themselves by curling up. After the physical violence, the police started taking away their personal belongings. In a backpack of the men who we spoke to, they found a razor machine, and decided to use it. “They turned the machine on, held me tightly so I couldn’t move and shaved off a cross over my head. Then they started laughing while kicking me on the head. When I was finally let go, I just wanted to shave off all of my hair.”
In all these years, we have witnessed a lot of atrocities, but recently the reports on the brutality of the Hungarian police and examples that people on the move share, have reached a new level beyond anything a common sense can grasp – people on the move are shot at at the border with rubber bullets, they are kicked off the border fence by police cars driving into the fence as if they were stuffed dolls, they are dragged by their feet from the barbed wire fence leaving blood of the people on the move on the fence, while they continue their journey with wounds, they are stripped completely naked and made to walk back to Serbia like that, and now – they are shaving their hair in the shape of crosses.
Refugees remain scared (which is presumably the goal of the Hungarian police violence) and all they want is to forget what they have been put through as soon as possible, they do not trust there is anything that can be done to stop the Hungarian police brutality – not thousands of violence testimonies, or photos of the humiliation, broken limbs and other injuries inflicted by the police will not help, unfortunately, according to what the men from the group we have spoken to in the field believe. Regardless, the man from Morocco shared his photos with us hoping that such a humiliation will never be done to another displaced person.
After all these years, we are also prone to think that such a change is hard to achieve and that the European Union defends human rights only on paper, while in reality it fights for their selective practice – when and how it suits the EU political agenda. So we have an example of a single country which on its north has a humanitarian corridor for “suitable” refugees and on its southern border a barbed wire fence with a variety of modes to inflict injuries and humiliation regularly, to the people who are also refugees who want just one thing wherever they find themselves to be: safety.
