Mass exodus ‘is going to go down in history’
Chaotic scenes as refugees in Hungary walk en masse, take buses to Austrian border
BUDAPEST, HUNGARY— Thousands of refugees who have been bottled up in Hungary, demanding passage to the West, will be allowed into Austria and Germany, the Austrian chancellor said late Friday.
After several days of chaos and civil disobedience by the migrants, Hungarian officials threw in the towel and allowed the people living in a squalid encampment in a belowground plaza outside the city’s main train station onto more than 40 buses headed for the Austrian border, as they had been demanding.
“On the basis of the current situation of need, Austria and Germany agree to allow in this case the onward journey of these refugees into their countries,” Chancellor Werner Faymann of Austria wrote on his Facebook page.
Earlier on Friday, hundreds of migrants stormed out of the Keleti train station in Budapest on Friday and set off on foot toward Germany, choosing a 480-kilometre walk over spending another night in a country where they are not welcome.
“This is going to go down in history,” said Rami Hassoun, an Egyptian migrant from Alexandria helping to corral the crowds on a six-lane highway to Austria, where the migrants were accompanied by a police patrol.
Elsewhere, hundreds of migrants remained locked in a standoff with police at the Bicske station outside Budapest, demanding that train service to the west be restored so they could continue their journeys to more prosperous European countries, such as Germany or Sweden.
Hundreds of others stormed out of a reception camp in the country’s south, highlighting their desperation to flee.
The chaos in Hungary reflected the inadequacy of an asylum policy across the 28-member European Union bloc that has forced migrants to register or apply for asylum in the country where they arrive — though in many cases that becomes the country where they are discovered or detained by authorities.
Once they register and apply, they must remain in that country — even if that country, like Hungary, is so hostile to migrants that it is building a 175-kilometre fence on its border with Serbia to keep them away.
On Friday, as the humanitarian crisis involving tens of thousands of migrants continued, lawmakers introduced changes to its penal code that would impose tougher measures on migrants — including a new law that makes crossing or damaging the fence punishable by prison or expulsion.
So flagrant is Hungary’s apparent animosity for migrants that the UN said its leaders had refused to accept assistance from the agency that supports refugees, including for migrants at Keleti, the main Budapest railway station, where thousands have been stranded in recent days without adequate food, lodgings or water.
Hungary’s centre-right prime minister, Viktor Orban, has said he intends to enforce the EU rule about asylum, which he has been doing since he was criticized earlier in the week for just pushing migrants through the country. At the same time, he has referred to the migrants as “illegal,” regardless of their perilous journeys from strife or civil war, warned against an influx of Muslims and insisted on Friday that Europeans risked becoming a minority in their own continent.
“The reality is that Europe is threatened by a mass inflow of people, many tens of millions of people could come to Europe,” Reuters quoted Orban as saying on public radio.
“Now we talk about hundreds of thousands, but next year we will talk about millions and there is no end to this,” he said. “All of a sudden we will see that we are in minority in our own continent.”
Orban’s comments underlined divisions in Europe over how to respond to the migration crisis: While British Prime Minister David Cameron said on Friday that his country would take in thousands more Syrians, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said it is a legal and moral imperative for Europe to provide sanctuary, some countries, including Britain, have responded reluctantly, while others such as Hungary have been downright hostile.
Clashes over how to deal with the influx of migrants from Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere dominated a meeting of European Union for- eign ministers on Friday in Luxembourg, with no concrete resolution. France and Germany have backed a radical overhaul of the way European Union members share the responsibilities of coping with the crisis, suggesting that countries take in migrants according to their relative wealth and populations. But others have balked at the proposals.
Representatives of the so-called Visegrad group of countries — the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia — meeting in Prague on Friday to forge a common approach, appeared to rally behind Orban, with Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka railing against quotas and saying that the “chaos” caused by the migration crisis was undermining the confidence of European citizens.
The leaders cited concerns about public safety and the threat of terrorists sneaking in along with the many escaping war and conflict — a worry shared throughout Europe in the wake of terrorist attacks, some carried out by those who have returned from war zones in the Middle East.
Eastern and Central European countries, which had relatively modest levels of immigration under Communist rule, have been struggling with how to integrate immigrants into society amid fears that a sudden influx of migrants could undermine the European economy and their way of life.
The local news media reported that up to 300 migrants escaped from a camp at Roszke, in southern Hungary, on Friday morning, running into a field and crossing a highway with police chasing them.
The police said they had detained more than 3,000 people crossing the border illegally and 11 suspected of people smuggling. Asked about a video by the New York Times, showing people identified as police officers pepper-spraying migrants about to cross the border with Serbia, Balazs said they were investigating the episode.
Indifference to migrants has not been limited to Hungary, with internal politics — the spread and growth of right-wing, anti-migrant parties — framing many of the European leaders’ responses to the crisis.