Violence at the border between Serbia and Hungary continues

In just one of the field visits to a squat near the village Horgoš, we met several people with limb injuries – a man with a broken arm, another one with an injured jaw, a man with a head injury and three men with broken legs. All of the injuries were created as a consequence of physical violence inflicted on the refugees by the Hungarian police – according to the men’s testimonies, they were beaten with batons, kicked, dragged down from the barbed wire fence and shot at with rubber bullets.

All of the injuries they tended to themselves or in the ER of a hospital in Subotica, after being pushed back to Serbia by the Hungarian police. An exception was the case of a man from Morocco with a broken arm – he was provided medical care in a hospital in Szeged (a city in Hungary), where he was operated at and spent 12 days hospitalized, after which he was picked up from the hospital by the Hungarian police and pushed back to Serbia. He told us he had broken his arm while jumping down from the fence at the border. Even though he was in excruciating pain, he continued walking with the group he was travelling with. After a two hour walk, they were intercepted by Austrian police. “They spoke German among themselves and they had an Austrian flag on their uniforms.”, the injured man told us. He was then driven to the hospital in Szeged, while the rest of the group was returned to Serbia, as he supposed. “The Austrian police is better than Hungarian in the sense they are less physically violent towards us, but they also do not allow us to continue our journey, they push us back. Simply, that’s how the Game is.” (“The Game” is a slang term used by people on the move to refer to an attempt to cross a border.)

He also told us that he spent 12 days in the hospital recovering from the procedure he had on his broken arm. He showed us a hospital bracelet name tag he was still wearing on his wrist. “I did not want to be returned to Serbia, I wanted to stay in Hungary, to apply for asylum and complete the recovery process for my arm. But the policemen said: “No asylum! Go back to Serbia!” and then they drove us to the border with Serbia and pushed us back”. He explained that during his hospitalization there were another six refugees who were all pushed back at the end. He recalls: “A man from Syria, another one from Pakistan, four men from India and me. All with broken arms or legs. I shared the room with one of the men from India. He had a serious leg injury, I took a photo, look! He spent nights crying out from the pain. He was also pushed back to Serbia at the end. He tried to enter a camp in Subotica, I don’t know if he was accepted there.”

A broken arm of a man from Morocco who shared his testimony of being pushed back to Serbia by Hungarian police after receiving medical care in Hungary.