Returning Syrian refugee says Hungary is now ‘cool’

BUDAPEST, Hungary: Two years on from sleeping rough here on a perilous trek from Syria to Germany, teenage refugee Yusra Mardini is back in the Hungarian capital competing in the world swimming championships.

“I promised myself I’d come back to Budapest another way,” the 19-year-old told reporters on Sunday after finishing her 100m butterfly heat.

Now based in Berlin, Mardini gained international attention after surviving near-drowning trying to reach Greece in 2015.

A year later she won her heat in the Rio Olympics as part of the Games’ first ever refugee team.During a 25-day journey from her war-ravaged homeland, Mardini used her swimming skills to help drag a leaking dinghy carrying 16 people to the Greek shore, after the engine broke down.

“My sister (Sara) jumped into the water first, then I jumped in after her, (with two men) we had one hand each on the boat and tried to swim and kick to shore,” she said.Afer more than three hours in the water they arrived on the island of Lesbos, and trekked northwards before getting stuck here for a week.

Hungary became a hotspot of the migration crisis in mid-2015, after the authorities temporarily blocked onward travel to neighbouring Austria and Germany, which transformed Budapest’s railway stations into vast makeshift refugee camps.

“I slept on the floor, in the train stations, it was really horrible,” she said.The country’s fiercely anti-immigration Prime Minister Viktor Orban later erected razor-wire fences along the southern borders to keep out migrants altogether.

“Then, I thought that people were really rude, my coach was afraid, when I said I was going to go back (to Budapest) again, but now it’s completely different, so I changed my point of view about the people of Hungary, it’s really cool this week,” she said.  —AFP