“FREEDOM FOR AHMED!” / Borbála Trencsényi
A large black-and-white badge, of less than outstanding quality, which shows a man with a huge pair of wire cutters in his hand, surrounded by the inscription: No one is illegal – No borders – No nations.
I received this badge from my newly made young acquaintances at Széchenyi Square in Szeged in September 2016, in front of the courthouse building. I went to Szeged to see the “terrorist trial” with my own eyes, as at the time I already had good reasons not to trust the reports in the government-owned media. I knew that it was my citizen’s right to attend the trial (which was not a closed one), but the guards would not let me into the courtroom for a while, under all kinds of false pretexts.
Waiting for hours on the corridor, I met those bright-eyed Turkish, Finnish, American, German, Serbian, and Hungarian youngsters who came here to show solidarity. When the defendant was led out of the room, the activists raised their banners and sang a beautiful, very sad prison song. The police and security guards on the corridor had already eyed them with thinly veiled hostility even when they had been standing around in silence.
When I was finally let into the room halfway through the trial, a botched show trial was unfolding before my eyes. Ahmed Hamed, arrested by the Counter Terrorism Centre after the border incident at Röszke in 2015, and cast in the role of an Islamist terrorist bogeyman, was conspicuously unsuitable for this role: the Syrian entrepreneur had a valid passport and had lived on Cyprus for ten years with his Christian wife, where his daughters attended a Christian school; he did come into contact with an Islamic religious organisation during his trip to India, but this organisation (which was founded back in the colonial era) regarded making peace as its mission. Nor did the testimonies of the police officers prove that Ahmed incited to violence the weary migrants who had crossed the Balkans with difficulty. Unfortunately, when the crowd, who had been waiting with patient hopefulness, finally “lost it”, Ahmed also threw a few objects towards the police (who were wearing protective clothing from head to foot).
At the end of the trial on 30th November, Mr. Hamed was sentenced to 10 years in prison for terrorism. (Months later, when his case was heard again, the sentence was reduced to 7 years.) I was not allowed into the courtroom at this time, either: I heard the news on the corridor, where I was waiting together with the youngsters. I considered the sentence deeply unjust, and I voiced my indignation, as did the youngsters. As I learned later, our actions caused “shock and alarm”, and amounted to “disorderly conduct”. Charges were brought against us on this account, against those bright-eyed half-children and a retired teacher.
