Discarded Syrian passport near Subotica, Serbia. Taina Renkonen/All rights reserved.Last month, the planned Hungarian fortification of their eastern border with Serbia claimed its first victim. A displaced person, desperate to evade the border police, drowned whilst attempting to cross into Hungary from Serbia by swimming across the Tisza, the long, snaking river that flows from Ukraine, through Serbia, and towards the Schengen areas of Central Europe.
Rather than attempt rescue, the Hungarian border police stood motionless on the banks of the river in the city of Szeged. This tragedy on the Tisza marks the first fatality to follow from the Hungarian government’s attempt to stem the flow of refugees reaching its borders from the Western Balkans. Hungary’s proposed wall has entered its first phase; miles of razor wire fencing bolstered by stalking patrols of ‘border hunters’.
Whilst it remains a less perilous route than the notorious Mediterranean marine crossing, the Serbian - Hungarian border crossing is the third most travelled route into the European Union after Greece and Italy. According to the EU Border Agency, Frontex, in 2012, 6,290 refugees and migrants took the Western Balkans route towards the Hungarian border. By 2014, that number had risen to 43,360. Many of that number remain in a state of limbo in Serbia; their long journey having come to an abrupt and indefinite halt. The failings of the European community to commit to a programme of transnational aid and protection for those migrants compelled to make the journey, in light of the clear responsibility that it has to protect those displaced by war and societal upheaval, are, therefore, explicitly exposed.
