Return to Transcripts main page
Amanpour
Europe's Morality on the Line; Hungary's Former Prime Minister Opens Home to Refugees; World War II Refugee "Heartbroken" by Europe's Refugee Crisis; Imagine a World. Aired 2-2:30p ET
Aired September 03, 2015 - 14:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[14:00:00]
(MUSIC PLAYING)
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST (voice-over): Tonight: the heartbreaking scene that sent a message around the world.
Will this tiny victim spur our leaders into more action?
The former British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, tells me the U.K. must also do more to help the refugees.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DAVID MILIBAND, PRESIDENT AND CEO, INTERNATIONAL RESCUE COMMITTEE: I think that it's essential that Britain recognizes that it has to play a
role in solving what is frankly a European crisis, not just a German or a Greek crisis.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR (voice-over): Plus Kafka must be turning in his grave; as the Hungarian prime minister keeps refugees stranded in limbo, his
predecessor takes them into his own home.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FERENC GYURCSANY, FORMER HUNGARIAN PRIME MINISTER: . I do not understand what is the motivation of my government because these people do
not need a lot of things.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(MUSIC PLAYING)
AMANPOUR: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Christiane Amanpour.
The moral promise of Europe is on the line as the continent fails to unite to help refugees who are desperately seeking safety on these shores.
The now-iconic image of 3-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi lying lifeless on a Turkish beach has dominated the worldwide front page. His
devastated father weeps after identifying his son's body in the morgue.
The French president says the image of Ilan calls upon Europe's conscience and his country, along with Germany, are today sending proposals
to the E.U. on how to manage this crisis.
Hungary remains unwilling to show much compassion. These pictures you're seeing show Hungarian police forcibly removing a family from the
train tracks, where they lay in protest and fear of being shunted off to border camps.
In a moment, we'll hear from the extraordinary former prime minister of Hungary, who's caring for refugees in his own home.
But first, what about other countries, like here in Britain, which refuses to accept Europe-wide refugee quotas and has so far taken in only a
few hundred?
And tonight Downing Street says they'll likely take just a few hundred more.
As David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee and the former British foreign secretary tells me, the hard-won rights of refugees
are now at risk of being lost.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
AMANPOUR: David Miliband, welcome from New York.
MILIBAND: Thank you very much, Christiane.
AMANPOUR: The British government is really coming under a lot of pressure for the very measly number of people they've taken in in this
humanitarian crisis.
What do you think this government should be doing right now?
MILIBAND: Well, I think Britain, like every other European country -- in fact, every other civilized nation around the world -- needs a two-
pronged approach to this.
First of all, there needs to be a fair sharing out of the number of refugees who've landed in Europe. It's not tolerable for Greece, Italy and
Germany to take them all. And Britain should be playing its part; frankly, it should be playing its historic role, which is to be a leader in this
area.
And the second thing that's obviously essential is that the problem of refugee flow from Syria needs to be tackled at source.
This is a clarion call, this crisis, not just for more moral leadership in Europe but also for more political leadership when it comes
to the Syrian crisis, that has already produced 4.5 million refugees and untold misery and needs far more political and diplomatic muscle behind it
to bring the fighting to a close.
AMANPOUR: Let's talk about Syria in a moment, because, as you say, that is absolutely crucial.
But, in the meantime, we've had this tragic image of this young Syrian boy, barely 3 years old, on a tourist beach in one of the loveliest parts
of the Turkish coast, trying to escape with his family to freedom.
You've had these horrendous pictures of people trapped on trains; I mean, the worst kind of memories are evoked from these pictures that are
happening in Hungary.
And yet still this government says that it can't really do any more. Even members of your own party, Yvette Cooper, who's running for
leadership, says they should take at least 10,000.
As a former Foreign Secretary, what would you do right now?
MILIBAND: I think that it's essential that Britain recognizes that it has to play a role in solving what is frankly a European crisis, not just a
German or a Greek crisis. So it's absolutely correct that at least 10,000 is the number that Britain needs to put on the table.
I think that I'm right in saying that only 216 Syrians have been admitted as refugees to Britain this year; Britain needs to move from tens
--
[14:05:00]
MILIBAND: -- of refugees to tens of thousands of refugees as part of a coherent European plan.
And, frankly, given that Britain has negotiations with the rest of Europe on other matters, this would be a good way of winning friends and
allies rather than stirring enmity.
I'd also say, though, that Britain needs to be part of a wider global response. But of course, the United States has a responsibility, too; only
1,200 Syrians have been admitted to the U.S. in the whole of the Syrian conflict.
AMANPOUR: The countries you mentioned -- the United States, Britain, Hungary -- they're also riven by domestic politics. They apparently think
that it's good politics not to be drawn into further acceptance of "the other," of immigrants, of refugees, of whatever you want to call them.
And yet, even in Britain now, there is a petition that has been signed -- and we're watching the numbers climb -- by over 200,000 people trying to
pressure the government to at least debate this and a wider open door in Parliament.
How much pressure do you think will work on this government?
MILIBAND: Well, I've actually signed the petition, since I'm still a British citizen.
But I would say that, in your question, you referred to immigrants, refugees, whatever you call them -- and, of course, what you call them
really matters, not for reasons of political correctness but for reasons of correctness, because there is a major difference between a refugee and an
immigrant.
And a refugee is someone who, in international law, has a well-founded fear of persecution and has rights associated with it and there are
responsibilities on states for how they treat them.
An immigrant is someone who -- an economic immigrant is someone who's seeking a better life, perfectly legitimately, but doesn't have the same
rights as a refugee.
And one of the most dangerous things in all politics -- not just in Britain, but elsewhere -- is when the idea of a refugee and the idea of an
immigrant becomes confused.
And I think it's very, very important that we don't, in the course of this conflict or in the course of this debate, allow the very idea of a
refugee to be undermined, because the rights of refugees were hard won after the Second World War. And it will be a terrible tragedy if they were
lost.
AMANPOUR: David Miliband, other media, lots are doing their usual thing, collating sort of what's happened in the past.
And you rightly say that Britain has had a long and proud history of accepting refugees ever since Huguenots, you know, hundreds of years ago.
We've got the pictures down through the Spanish Civil War, World War II, on and on and on.
You've mentioned and you've clearly explained the difference of what they are; refugees are under legal obligation to be helped.
Why cannot the politicians therefore make precisely the case that you have just made?
MILIBAND: Well, I think that some politicians are making that case, to be fair to Ms. Merkel, to Mr. Gabriel --
(CROSSTALK)
AMANPOUR: No, they are. They are, sir. They are. They are. And they're showing the moral clarity right now.
But this country is not.
MILIBAND: The truth about the refugee crisis is that it has been lost over the last couple of years in a couple of other questions.
First of all, the Syrian crisis has been defined in military terms rather than in humanitarian terms; the debate, including on media, has been
about Assad, has been about ISIS, has been about military campaigns.
Secondly, the European debate about refugees and about migration has come third in the European questioning of the Greeks, the Greek euro crisis
and, secondly, the Ukraine crisis. And I think that the truth is the politicians haven't had their eye on this ball.
But we've been warning over the last year -- the International Rescue Committee is not just helping people in Greece, where we have teams in
Lesbos, but also we've been warning from the situation in Lebanon and Jordan and Turkey and Iraq that these countries were coming under
intolerable strains, that the conditions in which refugees were living, more than 4 million of them in the neighboring countries, the conditions in
which they were living were increasingly dire and that more and more of them would seek to flee.
And I'm afraid that this crisis in that sense has crept up on people, whatever -- on the politicians, whatever their warnings. And the important
thing now is both to act on the number of people who are in Europe. You're right about the scenes at Hungarian railway stations.
But also to remember that if the flow of people is not dealt with, wars that seem never-ending in Somalia, in Congo, where there are U.N.
peacekeeping missions that are underfunded, but also the Syrian crisis, which is a suffering from a terrible lack of diplomatic and political
attention, unless that is attended to as well, then the politics will only get worse.
AMANPOUR: Well, let's go to that, because you raised it at the very beginning, how to end the Syria war, not just the Assad violence against
his people, but the ISIS violence as well, which is spiking.
I spoke to Secretary of State John Kerry yesterday and I asked him about this. And he said, like you, that these refugee tides would not be
stopped unless Syria was addressed.
And he also said that it -- he agreed that it would take a ground force to defeat ISIS. Listen to what he said to me.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOHN KERRY, SECRETARY OF STATE: You are correct; there will need to be people on the ground. I am convinced there will be at the appropriate
moment. And --
[14:10:00]
KERRY: -- I believe that that pressure will increase and is increasing, even as we're talking, in many different ways.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: So he was careful to say the U.S. has not made that kind of decision yet about their own soldiers.
But don't you agree, again, as a former foreign minister and as a current leader in the humanitarian field, that all of this talk right now
is lovely, humanitarian talk but not a hill of difference unless the war is stopped and unless some serious intervention happens from Western leaders
and others in the region?
MILIBAND: Well, I don't agree that the humanitarian talk is for nothing because, frankly, there are lives at stake. But if you're saying
that the humanitarian talk needs to be backed up by political and diplomatic action at source, then, of course, you're absolutely right.
My own sense is that the options are becoming worse with each year that this conflict goes by.
And the options are becoming worse, not just for the U.S. or for the U.K. but also for the traditional supporters of Assad and, notably, for the
Russians, who've always had fear of what they perceive to be dangerous Islamic extremism on their doorstep, but also in some ways for the Iranians
as well.
And I think that the time for very hard talk between the U.S. and the Russians is now; because if they were on different sides of the fence four
or five eyras ago when this war stated, when the Geneva process broke up, there is now an overriding case that they've actually got common interest
in stabilizing the situation, which would obviously bring humanitarian benefit but could also bring political benefit as well.
AMANPOUR: David Miliband, thank you very much indeed for joining us from New York.
MILIBAND: Thank you very much, Christiane.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
AMANPOUR: And as more heartbreaking stories and pictures fill the media, public support for the desperate refugees is actually surging. The
truly tragic image of a toddler face down on the seashore joins standout images that have shifted momentum throughout contemporary history.
The young and naked Vietnamese girl, fleeing a napalm attack, helped shift opinion in the United States against the Vietnam War.
Pictures of emaciated Ethiopians in 1984 launched We Are the World, Live Aid and a ton of help to end the famine there.
Up next, a vision of humanity: as Hungary plays the villain in this refugee drama, its former prime minister takes refugees into his own home.
That's next.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(MUSIC PLAYING)
AMANPOUR: Welcome back.
Refugees desperately fleeing to safety are still stuck in Hungary. Some have been sitting in a stifling hot train outside Budapest for most of
the day. Others continue to languish in the capital's train station.
As the suffering continues in broad view, Hungary's prime minister has a message to migrants: just don't come.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
VIKTOR ORBAN, HUNGARIAN PRIME MINISTER: So the moral thing is to make clear, please don't come. Why do you have to go from Turkey to Europe?
Turkey is a safe country. Stay there.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: But of course Turkey is full to the brim with more than 1 million refugees and while the current prime minister is taking this hard
line, a former prime minister is welcoming refugees with open arms into his own home.
[14:15:00]
AMANPOUR: Ferenc Gyurcsany joined me earlier from his home in Budapest.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
AMANPOUR: Mr. Gyurcsany, welcome to the program.
Can you tell me how many refugees you're housing?
We have a beautiful picture of you here with a family of refugees.
And what made you bring them into your own house?
GYURCSANY: It depends on the days. There are some nights when we hosted 12 people; for today, for tonight, we are waiting for 14 people.
But two days ago, we had two very nice guys from Afghanistan.
It depends how the NGO activists are organized and how many people they find who need some kind of assistance.
AMANPOUR: And what made you bring them into your own house?
GYURCSANY: You know, I do what I can do. For a while, we took food and drink to these people and it became very clear for the family that it's
not enough. There are many, many families in a very bad condition.
And we talked to our children. And finally we decided that, if we have opportunity -- we do have a relatively bigger house, according to the
Hungarian standard -- this is my task, opening the house.
AMANPOUR: And what do you do for them?
Do you cook for them?
Do you wash and clean for them?
What do you do?
GYURCSANY: You know, you can imagine the very normal things. We got the message, somewhere between 6:00 pm and 10:00 pm, that there are eight
or 10 or 12 people. We called a couple of friends to help us to bring them to my house. And I start to cook.
When they arrive, we introduce to each other; we give them some warm food, some drink -- vegetables, fruits. I learned that chicken is the most
favorite food for this kind of people. We can give them a bathroom and, if they need, we offer washing and drying their clothes by the other morning.
It depends what they need; sometimes we have to take them to doctors. We had a 4-months-old very nice boy, who was suffering some flu this
morning. We took him to the doctor. We have had two pregnant women, who were all checked by the doctors at the last couple of months.
AMANPOUR: Do they even know that you're the former prime minister?
Do they have any idea who's their host?
GYURCSANY: Not at all, not at all. I think it's not important in this case. There is two different story.
On the one hand, I'm a politician. I'm -- I do my job. I hold some press conference, as I did this afternoon. We had some communication and
so on.
This is my private story. It is provided by my family, together, my children
I think it's interesting; for two days, this is the way how the media works. I understand. But after two days, it will not be interesting. But
we will continue this kind of service.
AMANPOUR: Well, you're wrong; it'll be interesting for a long time, especially because you have said I'm a Hungarian; I'm a politician. But
I'm a human being first.
And sadly, we are watching the current Hungarian government behave in a very different way than you are behaving. These people are stranded at
the train stations. They're stuck on trains. They're being treated very, very badly by your government.
GYURCSANY: I honestly have to tell you that I do not understand what is the motivation of my government because these people do not need a lot
of things. They just would like to have a very normal life.
When they are waiting for the opportunity to leave their country, basically to work, to Germany or Denmark, they need some basic things like
water, like some food, having some shadow, not standing for a day under the sun and something like this.
And I do not understand because it's not a question of money. It's a question of some kind of humanity.
And I think that this is some kind of rivalry between the Hungarian governing party, which considers --
[14:20:00]
GYURCSANY: -- itself as a right-wing party. But they have a very strong opponent from extremist Right and we are -- they are competing for
new and new and new waters.
AMANPOUR: Sir, thank you very much indeed for joining us today. Your own personal humanitarian gesture really makes people realize that at least
some Hungarian people are doing their bit.
GYURCSANY: You can be sure that hundreds and hundreds of Hungarian people would like to help these people, they -- by full heart and very
normal people here in Hungary around us.
AMANPOUR: Fantastic. Thanks for joining us.
GYURCSANY: Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
AMANPOUR: And perhaps it's worth recalling again that while giving the cold shoulder now, countries like Great Britain wore their humanity on
their sleeves during World War II, taking in those desperately fleeing Hitler's horrors. Many of then were children, helped by Britain's
legendary Nicholas Winton and his Kindertransport.
John Fieldsend was one of them, who arrived here in 1939. And to this day, he told me, he remains eternally grateful.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
AMANPOUR: Thank you for joining us from your home there.
Can you tell me what must be going through your mind as you see these really heartbreaking scenes, the trains stuck in Hungary, the little boy
who was drowned on the shores of Turkey?
What are you feeling, given your experience?
JOHN FIELDSEND, WORLD WAR II REFUGEE AND KINDERTRANSPORT SURVIVOR: Well, I think my first reaction is one of extreme gratitude to Britain for
allowing me and so many other refugees in in 1939 on the Kindertransport. I feel very privileged.
And I feel just heartbroken for the people who were trying to get out of Syria now and get into places of safety. I feel really heartbroken for
them and the suffering that they're undergoing at the moment.
AMANPOUR: What do you think would have happened to you if you hadn't had that chance to flee on the Kindertransport and be accepted with open
arms here in England?
FIELDSEND: Well, I know what would happened. I would have shared the fate of my family: my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nephews,
cousins all died in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt, Dachau. I'd have just shared in the fate of the rest of my family.
AMANPOUR: What would you say to Prime Minister Cameron, if you could, about this issue?
FIELDSEND: Well, I'd ask him to stop saying -- you know, he's so committed to long-term planning; whereas, he's got to take some action now.
AMANPOUR: And finally, sir, what must be going through your mind, when you consider what happened in Germany to your family back during the
Second World War, and the complete sea change, how Germany is leading the humanitarian acceptance and welcome for the refugees today?
FIELDSEND: Well, I'm really heartened by it because, although I suffered -- my family suffered much at the hands of the Nazis, I still have
a deep love for, respect for Germany. And I'm heartened by what they're doing.
I know that there's a certain amount of self-interest because they're experiencing a population drop and probably feel they can afford to do
more.
But I'm really heartened by what's happening in Germany. And I hope the rest of Europe can do something similar.
AMANPOUR: John Fieldsend, thank you so much for your unique perspective on this crisis of our time. Thank you for joining us.
FIELDSEND: My pleasure.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
AMANPOUR: So many extraordinary stories and the United Nations now says more than 13 million children cannot go to school because of the wars
in the Middle East. And next, we imagine a world where some of them find a musical refugee in Jordan. "Oliver" in Amman -- that's next.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[14:25:00]
(MUSIC PLAYING)
AMANPOUR: And finally tonight, imagine a world where one of the most beloved orphans of all time inspires even a generation of young refugees.
The crisis enveloping Europe started in camps bordering Syria, which are packed with 3.5 million refugees. Jordan has taken in about 600,000. And
it's in the capital, Amman, that an extraordinary version of the Dickensian story, "Oliver," is taking place right now; in this musical version, the
vast majority of the cast are Syrian refugees.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
(MUSIC PLAYING)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: The struggles of the orphan boy are all too familiar to the young actors who've struggled with hunger, survived crippling poverty and
have made the arduous journey to safety from Assad and ISIS back at home.
It's the brainchild of a British, Charlotte Eager and William Sterling. And the aim is to combine drama with therapy, letting children,
scarred by their journey, become kids again.
They've also helped to raise the profile of refugees -- and as a bonus, it's a big success. The play is earning a standing ovation, even on
its first night. Even a few fights for tickets broke out at the box office. And the pair used art to imitate life and to inspire the actors
and their families and perhaps remind us all that refugees are people, too.
That's it for our program tonight. Remember you can always see the whole show online at amanpour.com, and follow me on Facebook and Twitter.
Thank you for watching and goodbye from London.
END
