Extreme violence on a daily basis
And while, to claim asylum in a European Union country, you first need to get there, the way imposed from Brussels to stop people entering is by the violence. Both, at EU borders and outside by the externalization of the borders.
The first one means illegal pushbacks and violence from Hungary and Romania by their national forces. The second one means sending money to Serbia to equip and increase serbian police forces that make the life of people migrating difficult and tense while they are in Serbia, by evicting them from the places they live or by banning people walking freely in public places.
“I fled Syria because of the war. There are clashes every day and I want peace, I want to live in safety and be able to educate my children," confesses the father of two teenagers from Aleppo, a city devastated by the civil war that has been raging in that country since 2011. After years crossing Turkey, Greece, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro, the young man spends his days in an abandoned building, a few kilometers from the border.
With the aim of stopping migration, in July 2015 the Hungarian government of Viktor Orban deployed a 153-kilometer barbed wire fence along the border with Serbia and Croatia with the consent from Brussels. At the same time, the European Union is investing millions of euros in cameras, thermal sensors and drones at different points along its border to catch people.
NNK team collects testimonies from those who claim to have been beaten by Hungarian and Romanian police. The stories speak of injuries caused by the use of batons by officers and even cases in which they were forced to remove their shoes and had to walk several kilometers to Serbia, with subsequent cuts, blisters and infections on their feet.
On the other side, on 13th September a new eviction happened by the Serbian police and the Commissioner for Refugees and Migration in a squat. According to different testimonies, people were forced to get on three buses and transferred without revealing their destination. Hours later they arrived at Principovac Camp. In the process, police broke goods, like phone chargers, from the people.
|