By the end of the course these young people were often bored by yet another rendition of a

By the end of the course, these young people were often bored by yet another rendition of a rites-of-passage novel or a poem about child abuse, and preferred the challenge of a sonnet.If those in a position of authority continue to refuse to take the initiative and accommodate to the obvious attractions of pandering to the lowest common denominator, we are in trouble. Ask any class of 17-year-olds to choose between Chaucer and Bridget Jones’s Diary, and they go for the latter. But when teachers look to students for relevance, and students have nothing profound to look to teachers for, the tendency is towards mind-numbing stasis. The tyranny of relevance can lead only to a culture of Teletubbies for adults.. IT WOULD be the irony of all ironies to savour, were it not so terrifying.

Could it be that, where fire-breathing Soviet regimes tried and failed for 70 years, the blundering, pitiably weak successor of the Communist state will succeed ? For, just maybe, Russia will prove to be the straw which snaps the camel’s back of capitalism at the very moment when the creed seems to have conquered the planet. It is, I hasten to add in the interests of readers’ nerves, merely a possibility, and a fairly remote one at that. “Once they get to Budapest the people-smuggling organisation takes over. Most of them don’t know anything about where they are; they are handed from person to person and put into hotels.”From Budapest they are taken to the border in taxis, trains or buses, and there are people waiting to take them across. The people-smugglers take their papers and these are returned if they are successful. They take their papers, because if we catch refugees without papers we cannot prove who they are, and so cannot prove that people-smuggling is going on.”The emigrants get different levels of help according to their financial background.

The rich ones get high-quality forged documents; the poorer ones have much less security. The amateurs try to cross the Danube in boats.”Many of the refugees, who are often drawn from poor and isolated villages, have little idea about how difficult life can be in the West. But still it draws them like a magnet, says Istvan Dobo, of the Budapest Office for Refugees and Migration. But while officials discussed how to stem the human tide, the people-smugglers signed up ever-more desperate refugees, promising them safe passage to the West.More than 25,000 illegal immigrants a yearpass through Hungary In 1994 border guards arrested 138 people smugglers By July of this year they had detained 226. And if Vienna is out of reach, then life in Budapest is certainly pleasanter than Kabul or Pristina.”Hungarian law is much more liberal,” he explains, “in the sense that all applications for asylum have to be properly considered. They call it, and the whole process of illegal emigration begins. They say which city they would like to go to; they are told how much they must pay, what are the conditions of travel and where and when to go, usually as part of a group.”Many citizens of developing world countries such as Russia, Ukraine and Romania do not need visas to enter Hungary, so Budapest, just an hour and a half’s drive from the Austrian border, is a natural collection point for the people-smugglers.”They can come as far as Hungary legally, but from here they cannot enter Austria,” says General Novaki.

The Hungarian press is daily filled with reports of dozens of victims of failed-people smuggling operations, mainly Albanians from Kosovo.”International organised crime realised the opportunity in this wave of migration. Now people smuggling is organised like a package tour, using tourist agencies as cover organisations,” explains General Balazs Novaky, of the Hungarian border guard.”Say there is a Turkish person who wants to go to Germany They are given a telephone number in Istanbul or Ankara. “There is no war in my village yet, but there is already fighting nearby between the KLA and the Serbs.”Conditions at the Gyor camp have been condemned by UNHCR inspectors from Vienna. Inmates live in cramped and stuffy rooms, and must use dirty toilets and bathrooms. It is a black trade in human misery.”I wanted to take my children out of the war in Kosovo,” says Ibrahim. They are highly organised, using the best technology, the most modern transportation networks and information systems,” says General Balazs Novaki, chief of the Hungarian border guard.In the middle of this battle are caught the migrants themselves, dazed and confused after days-long journeys, who have been stripped of their papers and possessions by the people-smugglers before being abandoned to the authorities. They either cross through the green [ie, open countryside] border, or use forged documents or secret compartments in the vehicles.”Lined up against these powerful international criminal networks are the Hungarian border guards, with their rickety Lada jeeps and obsolete computer equipment.”The people-smugglers are professional businessmen and they want to preserve their business.

They steal the emigrants out of the camps, and sometimes even give them their money back if they don’t get through. With its driver using night-vision goggles, a forward reconnaissance unit scouts the path ahead, looking for border guards while continually reporting back to the convoy leader A rear-guard vehicle watches the back of the convoy At the border the local members take the convoy over. He waved his wife and children forward, looking out for the promised flotilla of boats.Except that these were not the people-smugglers. Instead, the men wore the uniform of the Hungarian border guards.