UKRAINIAN REFUGEES IN HUNGARY, REPORTS, UPDATES, REFLECTIONS--BASED MAINLY ON SOCIAL MEDIA REPORTS

(The following is adopted from my Facebook page; it is easier to add updates--for those, see the bottom of the post).

Small insight after the arrival of the first wave of Ukrainian refugees in Hungary.

The Hungarian government has, for all intents and purposes, opened the borders to Ukrainian citizens. So, whoever can actually reach the border checkpoints, can cross into Hungary, all restrictions have been eased. The only exception exists on the other side: Ukrainian citizen men between the ages of 18 and 60 who are banned from leaving the country, due to total military mobilization. So, fathers take their families to the border, kiss their children and wife, the family crosses, father turns around and goes home to wait for the draft.

The Hungarian government has, however, made hardly any any practical preparations for the refugee inflows. Even though Orbán shocked the country by estimating that as many as 600 thousand people might come, there are no government-organized buses, trains or cars to take the people from the border to other parts of the country. There are very few shelters to speak of. Whatever there is, is in terrible disrepair.

At first, the new arrivals' transportation need fell victim to taxi hyenas, charging 500USD for a ride from the border to Budapest.

By now the situation seems to have cleared up somewhat, at least for now. There are plenty of volunteers with cars, warm clothes, sanitary items, food. People fight with taxi hyenas for the privilege to take a family to Budapest--for free. So, the hyenas have apparently been driven away, partly by volunteers who undercut their rates (charging NOTHING for rides), partly by the sporadic police.

Most amazing: there are apparently an adequate number of volunteers receiving refugee families in their homes.

THIS IS POTENTIALLY A FANTASTIC BREAKTHROUGH.

For, the country has been "frozen" for refugee influx by the government's neonazi reaction to war refugees from west Asia and north Africa in 2015. The public sphere has been dominated by government pronouncements about refugees: pure, unadulterated neonazi shite.

That discursive hegemony has been so strong, consensus over the success of the government's propaganda has been so total that even THE OPPOSITION has been spewing anti-immigrant slogans, either because they, too, believe in it, or because they think the population will reject anyone who speaks otherwise. Appearing to be anti-immigrant is one of the handful of issues on which the current opposition candidate for prime ministership agrees with Orbán. (The other is a neoliberal-sadist economic policy.)

The current situation looks very different. This could signal no less than the end of Orbán's anti-refugee discursive hegemony in the country.

On top of that, the fact that the arriving families find temporary homes with ordinary citizens means that there is the possibility (not a certainty, but a possibility--but, for me, that is not a small thing) that normal, person-to-person ties could develop, penetrate the hitherto extreme isolation of Hungarian life by foreigners, especially poorer, more unfortunate people from across the eastern borders of the country. And some of the refugees speak no Magyar, meaning that, for communication to happen in those tiny circles of human connection, that must happen through some other language, most likely elementary Russian or English. Whichever it is, this is bound to inject into Hungarian society the idea that people across the border are human as well.

I can't think of a more effective way to puncture the xenophobic facade of this, remarkably (linguistically as well as culturally and socially) isolated social context.

That is my potentially positive news for the day. I hope I'm right.

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UPDATE 1. A less optimistic coda. This might well be because . . .

- strongly committed followers of the neonazi line of the government are shutting up right now, focusing on the upcoming elections

- a truly drastic application of "race" privilege (the skin color test) works in favor of Ukrainians who are, for the most part, indistinguishable from Hungarians,

- . . . except for Romani Ukrainians and students / trainees / contract workers from the Global South who have been in Ukraine, and, for them, there are much bigger difficulties, including segments of the Ukrainian population, plus more specifically police, territorial guard and border guard sending them back to the end of the queues, as Vimola-Kujenya Kata points it out in a comment to my facebook post, plus

- there is also the case that a portion of the Ukrainians who arrive in Hungary are Magyar speakers (the westernmost region of Ukraine has a sizeable Magyar speaking population, essentially multilingual people who will find it immensely easier to get around in Hungary, kind of like Ukrainian or Belarusian speakers in Poland), and. . .

- a -- to me unknown -- percentage of Magyar speaking Ukrainians already have Hungarian passports (although it is, technically, illegal to have multiple passports in Ukraine). (Which, on the other hand, points our attention to the Donetsk/Luhansk region, where a sizable proportion of people have Russian passports, even though that, too, is illegal in Ukraine. And in the meanwhile Russian border officials report a significant influx of population from the Ukrainian side of the Russo-Ukrainian border, with or without Russian passports, we are talking around 100K people in 2 days). There is that ongoing tragedy as well.

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UPDATE 2. This just in, that the government has introduced a "solidarity ticket" on the state railways in Hungary, providing Ukrainian refugees with free rides to parts of the country away from the overcrowded eastern border region. (No news of central government arrangements for shelter. What exists still comes from private citizens and small village municipalities near the border: a few "culture houses", school gyms have been opened up; neither enough nor adequate.)

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UPDATE 3. Part of the new arrivals in Hungary are interested in going to Poland via Slovakia or to Slovakia, and they are coming this way only because the direct border check points on the Ukraine-Poland and U-Slovak border are horribly slow. Organizing is now coming to the point of becoming transnational. People are seeking connections to similar volunteers in SK and PL, "passing on" the new arrivals at the H-SK, SK-PL borders. This international cooperation is also quite new, as far as I know, and I find it, again, extremely promising.

Some others--essentially Ukrainian citizens who have family in west Schengenland--are moving steadily westward, by public transportation, primarily by buses and train via Budapest.

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UPDATE 4. A group of 240 Indian students--of the estimated 18 thousand who study there--have been evacuated from Ukraine. They crossed the border into Hungary and were flown to Delhi via charter flights organized by the Government of India. (The media of the government of India is making it look like it is the product of the personal warmth and care of the PM.)

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UPDATE 5. Repeated social media report suggest the biggest resource shortage is in language competency. Most of the arrivals speak only Ukrainian and a little Russian; volunteers on the Hungarian side give them English or blank stares. (Compulsory Russian education was canceled in Hungary one generation ago, as an imperial imposition.) People who might live a whopping 100 km from each other on two sides of a border can't seem find a basic lingua franca to convey such complex messages as "Food is here", "Toilets over there", "wait for the bus to the station". Yup, east European semiperipheral social disintegration, in its fullest.

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REFLECTION 1. The outpouring of sympathy toward fresh arrivals from Ukraine on part of Hungarians has, in my opinion, two main components. Neither is particularly "nice" or palatable.

One is an underlying popular-geopolitical sentiment: plain old Russophobia. Refugee relief allows Hungarians to find a positive-assertive way to express their ethno-stereotypic hatred of the Russian other, conflating, in their minds, the authoritarian leader and the people. Then they turn it into a positive sentiment vis-a-vis the people who arrive. That's great--could be much worse.

The other is the perception of the arrivals as "White". This has, by now, clearly been articulated by west European as well as east European politicians and pundits--see some of them in this thread. Even relief volunteers drop "race" grenades (e.g., "these refugees have money, they are not from Africa") here and there. The entire Hungarian--and EU--reaction to the refugee situation is silent about third country citizens. (Implicit meanings and understandings are of course that much more insidious and powerful.) The passing of Ukrainian refugees as "White" puts in sharp relief the situation on Hungary's southern border where a steel border fence has been erected to stop refugees whose "refugee profile" is almost exactly the same as the Ukrainian arrivals, only more so: Foreign intervention has brought a deadly war to them, and has done it for years on, with no end in sight. They had, clearly, suffered immensely more than the Ukrainians who are coming to Hungary now. What is it that makes the west Asian / north African refugees "unacceptable" in the collective mind of Hungarian popular culture while making Ukrainians acceptable: A depressingly simple "race" code.

This is of course not the total picture: there are true antiwar activists out there, and there are also antiracists and committed humans. Plus doctors and other health personnel who are doing their duty as they perceive it.

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UPDATE 6. The "Ukraine Aid" facebook group, operating in Magyar, has grown to 47 thousand in 24 hours. (The country has 9,5 million inhabitants.)

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UPDATE 7. March 1. The city of Budapest has announced that it has a total of 2000 spaces in shelters for refugees. Currently 41 spaces are occupied. There are private offers for housing from small families (who say they might be able to put up 2-3 people) to owners of bungalows / tourist apartments that are unused at the moment. Altogether 400 thousand people have left Ukraine, news portal of the Hungarian weekly hvg reports. Poland has received the largest number of entrants (cca. 176 thousand). The number of new arrivals in Hungary is around 62 thousand. There is talk of opening a large ***hotel next to Keleti ("Eastern") station for refugees as shelter.

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UPDATE 8. March 3. The number of Ukrainian war refugees who have left their country has exceeded one million. That's 2,3% of the nominally 43 million population. And that's despite the ban on the departure of men between the ages of 18 and 60. It would be really important to know who the women are who have (along with their children of course) left Ukraine. Social class background, skills, languages, ethno-regional links, at a minimum. Keep in mind that Ukraine is a very complex society, and that the sociology of migration has demonstrated it time and time again that various groups have different propensities to leave. True for refugee movements as well. Their needs, opportunity structures, etc. will be very different along the way beyond the requirement of refugee relief.

I would also be curious to know how the Schengen countries will react when, once the war is over, part of the, by then, probably 2,5-3 million strong group will petition to stay and bring their male spouses / relatives (who cannot leave right now because of the emergency military draft in place) under a family unification system. That will have a major impact on Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, for sure. (Most likely different impacts.) Are Ukrainians going to become the Turks of east-central Europe?

But that is running too far ahead for now.

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UPDATE 9. March 3. The number of refugees who have arrived in Hungary from Ukraine has surpassed 125 thousand. In Poland (a country with a population 3,6 times greater than Hungary): 4 times more refugees. Of course nobody quite knows how many have gone on to stay with relatives in other Schengen countries or elsewhere.

There are sporadic reports of problems crossing between pairwise combinations of east-Schengen countries: From Romania to Hungary (border guards requiring biometric passports and simply pushing back those who don't have them), Slovakia to Poland (Polish border authorities rejecting entrants who don't pass as White). There are repeated reports of Indian and other south Asian students arriving in Budapest and being clueless as to what to do, how to contact their embassy, in spite of the Indian Embassies' efforts in the region to help them return to India. The general phone number of the Indian Embassy in Budapest is (36-1) 325-7742. 

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