‘Refugees can’t pick country’
BERLIN/MUNICH: German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said refugees streaming into Europe should not be able to choose where to settle, as authorities said thousands more were on the move across the continent yesterday.
Germany, Europe’s largest and richest economy, has been a magnet for many people fleeing war and poverty in Syria and other parts of the Middle East and Africa.
Police said around 13 000 refugees arrived in Munich alone on Saturday, and another 1 400 yesterday morning.
In an interview with German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, de Maiziere said refugees given protection in Europe should accept that they will be distributed across the bloc.
“We can’t allow refugees to freely choose where they want to stay – that’s not the case anywhere in the world,” he said.
“It also can’t be our duty to pay benefits laid out in German law to refugees who have been allocated to one EU country and then come to Germany anyway,” he added.
Interior ministers from the EU’s 28 member states are meeting in Brussels today to discuss proposals from the EU’s executive commission to redistribute about 160 000 asylum seekers across the bloc.
Authorities in neighbouring Austria said they were expecting thousands of new arrivals yesterday – many in the past have headed straight on to Germany. Tensions are rising in Germany, where states have complained about the growing burden of coping with Europe’s worst refugee crisis in decades.
German rail operator Deutsche Bahn was expected to reserve one train from Munich to Berlin yesterday for asylum seekers, Christoph Hillenbrand, senior administra- tor of the Upper Bavaria district around Munich, said.
From today several hundred seats will be reserved for refugees on several regular train services from the Bavarian capital, he said, adding that there would also be special train services to North Rhine-Westphalia and northern Germany on Monday to free up some emergency accommodation in Munich.
Since August 31 around 63 000 refugees have arrived in Munich and Hillenbrand said the city could not continue taking in such numbers.
De Maiziere said Germany, which has, since last weekend been ignoring European rules that state refugees must register for asylum in the first EU country where they arrive, needed to quickly return to “orderly procedures”.
But he said Germany needed to prepare itself to deal with “a very high number” of refugees in the long-term. Some are pretending to be Syrian in the hope of getting asylum, he said.
Twenty eight refugees drowned off the Greek island of Farmakonisi yesterday when their wooden boat sank, the coastguard said, thought to be the largest recorded death toll from any single accident in Greek waters since the refugee crisis began.