Hungary vows to bus migrants
Budapest ready to pass refugee crisis on to EU neighbors.
As refugees begin walking to Austria, Budapest offers to drive them there.
After a day of defiance by increasingly desperate refugees and migrants, the government of Hungary gave in Friday and offered to bus thousands of them to the Austrian border, sending the crisis spinning closer to the heart of the Continent.
An aide to Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in a statement that the buses would transport the thousands still thronging the Keleti railroad station in Budapest and the approx- imately 1,200 people who stormed out of the train station earlier Friday and set off on foot toward the Austrian border.
Austria and Germany on Friday night said they would allow unhindered passage to the throng, which is likely to grow as word of open access to the prosperous European heartland spreads.
It was not clear what the Hungarian government planned for the thousands of migrants already being held in reception centers around the country.
On Thursday, it had made a similar offer of a train ride to the west, but then tried to force the migrants off the train and into a refugee camp outside Budapest.
But on Friday there was little doubt that after days of trying — halfheartedly, perhaps, to comply with European Union regulations and register the refugees — Hungary was ready to follow its neighbors Greece and Macedonia and pass the burden of the refugees on to the next country to the west, in this case Austria.
The refugees themselves were only too happy to comply, having scant interest in remaining in a relatively poor country like Hungary.
Earlier in the day, more than 1,000 had abandoned Keleti station and embarked on a 300-mile walk toward Austria rather than spend another night in a country where they know they are unwelcome.
“This is going to go down in history,” said Rami Hassoun, an Egyptian migrant from Alexandria helping to corral the crowds marching along a six-lane highway.
Hundreds of others fled a camp in the country’s south, near the Serbian border where they had entered.
The chaos in Hungary reflected the inadequacy of a refugee policy across the European Union that has forced migrants to register or apply for asylum in the country where they arrive.
Hungary’s center-right prime minister, Orban, insisted Friday that Europeans risked becoming a minority in their own continent.