Around 70 Kosovar immigrants were flown back from Budapest to Prishtina on a flight organized by the Ministry of Interior of Kosovo.
The passengers were a wider group of Kosovar migrants to countries including Austria, Sweden, Germany, Slovakia, Finland and Hungary whose temporary asylum status in these countries had expired.
They were sent to Budapest and flown from there to Prishtina. Most will not be part of the reintegration program that the Kosovo government is offering to the latest wave of EU-bound migrants – which includes medical help and assistance and mediating in finding employment in Kosovo.
Betim Uka and his wife, Fexhirije, a young couple from Podujevo, who were held in a camp in Hungary for 40 days, said conditions in the camp were difficult but he still planned on leaving Kosovo once again as soon as possible.
“I’ve tried to leave Kosovo three times. There is nothing I can do here,” Uka said. He said that many young people were in the camps as well as families. “We were treated very harshly by the Hungarian authorities,” he added.
His father, Sahit, was waiting at the airport in Kosovo for him with his mother. “There is no perspective from Kosovo for my son. There are 10 of us in this family, and none of us is employed,” he said.
Sahit Uka said that although the family owns some land and works it, they are unable to make a living from farming. He said they had nothing to do with Betim’s flight. “We didn’t give our son any money for the trip, he had his own. We tried to prevent him from leaving, but he can’t find himself here.”
Nikola Mihajlovic, a Kosovo Serb from the divided northern town of Mitrovica, was also returned on the flight with his wife and two children. He had spent two years in Germany with his wife and even had an apartment there. However, he was then notified that his asylum request had been rejected and that he needed to come back.
“They returned us because they say the situation in Kosovo is safe. They said people in Kosovo have no chance of getting asylum documents,” Mihajlovic said. People from Kosovo and the Balkans had no chance of getting asylum in the EU, he added.
Ahmet Kurteshi, from Kmetovac, a village near Gjilan, was living in an apartment in Sweden for 18 months until he, his wife and their young daughter were sent to a camp in Sweden and then flown to Budapest, to be sent back to Kosovo. He could barely afford his trip back to Kmetovac, so the Ministry of Interior organized his travel back to the village.
Beqir Kajtazi and his family left Kosovo on January 29 and were caught on a train on their way to Budapest. Soon after, they were placed in a camp. “We spent around 2,000 euros on the whole trip. First we paid 300 or 200 euros per person to get the smugglers to help us cross the border but then people tried to take more money from us on the other side,” he said. “Some people were confronted by Syrian refugees crossing the border and robbed of their possessions,” Kajtazi added. “We crossed the river on foot, in the cold. I carried my son Ardi on my back across the Tisza River,” he recalled.
He also reported difficult conditions in the Hungarian camp. “We would get a pastry or two slices of bread for the whole day. The sheet were unclean, it was cold and there was very little hygiene,” Kajtazi said.
Media have reported extensively on the grim conditions awaiting Kosovo migrants in Hungarian asylum camps. Hungary has confirmed that a two-year old girl, Arza Mustafa, whose family left Kosovo in the hopes of getting her treatment for Downs Syndrome, died in a camp.
After a sudden spike in the number of illegal migrants from Kosovo trying to enter the EU via the Hungarian border, a number of EU countries have imposed harsher restrictions on migrants seeking asylum in their respective countries.
Germany has announced that it is expediting the procedure for asylum seekers from a couple of months to two or three weeks. The Austrian interior ministry said that it will be sending Kosovars back home at least every 14 days.
