Migrants take long, winding road to reach EU gateway Hungary
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — From a Budapest hilltop overlooking a panorama of central Europe, Jean-Paul Apetey reflects on how far he's come, how improbable and unexpected his journey has been — and yet how many miles he still must go.
The 34-year-old from Ivory Coast has spent years searching for a new life. He has piloted a migrant-packed boat from Turkey to Greece even though he'd never been at sea; lost his belongings evading police during a 200-kilometer (125-mile) trek through Macedonia; escaped from a band of Bangladeshi smugglers beating and raping his fellow travelers; stared down knife-wielding thugs in Serbia; and reached Hungary thanks only to an unlikely act of kindness from a Frenchwoman who fancied his dreadlocks.
Symbolic of much of why the West is dying.
Apetey and the dozens of other West Africans who have made it this far finally can take a breath of relief and hope that the worst of their odyssey is over.
Hungary will never be Apetey's home; as everyone in the jaded asylum system knows, those seeking refugee status in Hungary do not stay to pursue the paperwork. This country is merely the most popular back door for tens of thousands of migrants annually who want to breach the perimeter of the European Union without obvious risk of death. Their long journey through the Balkans, often on foot and at night, has proved to be full of disappointment and danger, but not the mortal peril of a North African sea crossing to Italy — a journey that has produced more than a thousand dead in the southern Mediterranean this month alone.
For Apetey, "The stress is gone. I am in Europe!"
But not the right bit of Europe, not the part with large immigrant communities and work opportunities and greater freedom. By this time next week, he and most of the more than 2,000 migrants currently in Hungary's asylum shelters will be traveling to the wealthier west, their flea-bitten Hungarian beds taken by a new wave of Asians, Arabs and Africans. ...
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