Daily Times

Pale, thin but in high spirits, Yemeni engineering student Wesam Al-Hadrami emerged from the unlocked gate of a new migrant centre in Hungary on Friday to take his first walk after nine months of detention. Behind him lay a cluster of white buildings, recently renovated with funds from Switzerland and the European Union. A few unarmed private security guards looked on as migrants filed out into the sun and children kicked a ball around. “This is the first day after nine months that I go on the streets,” Hadrami said. “I might start running for kilometres. It’s so good to feel free.” The newly opened centre at Vamosszabadi is a far cry from the machine guns, dogs and wide military perimeters of Hungary’s so-called “transit zones”, where Hadrami spent the preceding months before the government shut the last one on Thursday. “It was awful. The place, the environment… we basically lived in dirt… it was like prison, basically,” Hadrami said. During the peak of Europe’s 2015 migration crisis, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government sealed Hungary’s southern border, blocking a route for hundreds of thousands of migrants trying to reach western Europe.