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Small children sleep on bags. Women sit on suitcases, folding chairs or simply on the ground by the roadside. A policeman, with a look of exhaustion and helplessness on his face, makes sure the children do not run into the street. These images are currently circulating in the Hungarian media. The photos are from the city of Koç in northwestern Hungary. On Wednesday morning (August 21, 2024), nearly 100 Ukrainian refugees, almost all women and children, were forced to abandon their shelters and found themselves on the streets, suddenly homeless. They spent the night outside. Hungarian NGO workers unsuccessfully sought emergency shelter on Wednesday and continued their search on Thursday.
Suddenly homeless: This is becoming a reality for more than 3,000 Ukrainian refugees currently in Hungary. Because on August 21, 2024, a government decree announced by Viktor Orbán at the end of June came into force, massively restricting aid to Ukrainian refugees. According to the decree, only Ukrainian refugees from “war zones – administrative units of Ukraine directly affected by military operations” can receive state funds and live in temporary shelters. In this case, the decisive factor is the data subject’s current registered address in Ukraine.
In the future, state funding for shelters will be time-limited, from the date of registration of refugees granted temporary protection until the end of the following month. In the future, the Hungarian government will redefine the list of direct war zones every month.
“Only those who love can take care of themselves”
According to estimates by Hungarian non-governmental aid organizations, the decree will cause more than 3,000 Ukrainian refugees to lose state-funded housing in cities and municipalities. Most of them come from the Zakarpattia region in western Ukraine or other western regions of Ukraine and have an official status of “temporarily in need of protection”. Most of them are Roma. Almost all shelters are collective housing centers, such as vacant houses or large private dormitories. In Kochi, nearly 100 refugees are housed in private dormitories. State funding for their accommodation expired on Wednesday (August 21, 2024).
Norbert Pal, the Hungarian government’s commissioner for refugees fleeing Russia’s war in Ukraine, justified the restrictive aid measures in an interview with the pro-government daily Magyar Nemzet in early July: “After two and a half years, this is a reasonable and appropriate change, because during this time, those who wanted to take care of themselves in Hungary could have already done so.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Foreign Minister Gergely Gulyas said at a press conference on Thursday (August 22, 2024) that “it is unacceptable that abuses occur” when the state spends huge amounts of money every month on people who could help them work. Gulyas did not explain the content of the alleged abuses.
The Low Point in Hungarian Immigration Policy
Non-governmental aid workers currently dealing with homeless refugees dispute the Hungarian government’s claims. “It is claimed that if the affected people do not find shelter, they themselves are to blame,” Andras Lederer of the Helsinki Hungarian Committee told DW. “But the fact is that in many of the affected families right now, the men are working elsewhere. However, the families cannot afford their own rental apartment or simply cannot find one.”
The Hungarian Helsinki Committee has been providing legal advice and other assistance to refugees for years. Lederer described the current decree and the situation of homeless Ukrainian refugees as “a new low in Hungarian immigration policy”. The Hungarian government’s approach is “shameful and outrageous” because the people affected not only come from war countries, but also have the official status of “persons in need of temporary protection”. “Therefore, depriving them of housing and leaving them on the street is a violation of Hungarian and international law.”
Anti-Ukrainian propaganda
At first glance, the decree is part of a long list of anti-Ukrainian measures and statements by the Orbán government. For many years, Hungary’s relations with Ukraine have been extremely bad. After the outbreak of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine in February 2022, bilateral relations deteriorated further. Hungary is the only EU member state that still maintains friendly relations with Russia. After Hungary took over the presidency of the Council of the European Union in early July, Viktor Orbán immediately went to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin on what he called a “peace mission” after visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. It was met with dissatisfaction and strong protests.
Hungary does not participate in military aid to Ukraine and refuses to send weapons to its neighbor through its territory. It is also the only EU country not to participate in the current EU economic aid to Ukraine. Orban supports ending EU sanctions against Russia, has repeatedly called Russian aggression a “fratricidal Slavic war” and described Ukraine as a “no man’s land”. Pro-government Hungarian media broadcasts and publishes pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western propaganda messages on a daily basis.
Selective measures against Roma?
In fact, the decree contradicts the Hungarian government’s previous propaganda in several aspects. Viktor Orbán and his government want to emphasize the protection of Hungarian minorities in Hungary’s neighboring countries, including Ukraine. According to the previous government, the Hungarian minority in western Ukraine was “forcibly recruited” as a result of the war, which made the protection of Hungarians there a particularly important concern for the Hungarian government. However, conscription in Ukraine is carried out only through normal channels, and members of the Hungarian minority do not make up a high proportion of the Ukrainian armed forces relative to their population proportion.
The background of the current decree may be that most of the people who need protection are Hungarian-speaking Roma from western Ukraine. Viktor Orbán and other representatives of the Hungarian government constantly make indirect or direct discriminatory statements against the Roma. For example, in recent years, Orbán has repeatedly said, in reference to the Roma or activities related to them, that “everyone should live by decent work” or “no one should live by crime”. For many years, one of the purposes of the Hungarian government’s reduction of social measures has been to target the Roma.
However, Helsinki Council staff were puzzled by the reasons for the decree and said it was not a cost-cutting measure. “The monthly housing costs for Ukrainian refugees are around 1 million euros,” Helsinki Council member and lawyer Zsolt Szekeres told DW. “This year it will cost five times as much just to set off the fireworks in Budapest on August 20.”
Szekeres said that the Helsinki Committee filed a complaint against the decree after it was published and notified the EU institutions. The Hungarian court has not yet made a decision, and unfortunately the EU has not responded. “However, it must be said that the Hungarian government has once again deliberately provoked a humanitarian crisis situation and deliberately made thousands of people who are entitled to protection homeless” / Deutsche Welle
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