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Migrants Can Enter Austria and Germany, Official Says
Migrants Can Enter Austria and Germany, Official Says
(about 2 hours later)
BUDAPEST — After a day of defiance by increasingly desperate refugees, the government of Hungary metaphorically threw up its hands on Friday and said it was offering to bus thousands of migrants to the Austrian border, sending the crisis spinning closer to the heart of the Continent.
BUDAPEST — 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.
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 approximately 1,200 people who stormed out of the train station earlier on Friday and set off on foot toward the Austrian border.
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 below-ground plaza outside the city’s main train station onto more than 40 buses headed for the Austrian border, as they had been demanding.
The Austrian chancellor, Werner Faymann, said on his Facebook page on Saturday morning that he had spoken to Mr. Orban and — in agreement with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany — the refugees would be allowed in. “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,” the Facebook statement said.
“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.
”We expect further that Hungary should meet its European obligations, including the obligations which result from the Dublin agreement,” the statement said. “At the same time, we expect Hungary to be ready to solve the current burdens on the basis of the fair distribution which the European Commission is currently working on.”
Austrian officials promised to do what they could to receive the migrants safely and seamlessly.
The refugee dilemma strikes a deep chord in Austria, which accepted waves of people in past decades whenever unrest hit the Soviet bloc: in 1956, after the anti-Soviet revolt in Hungary; in 1968, after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring reforms in Czechoslovakia; in 1981, after martial law was declared in Poland; and in the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
After a confusing night, in which the police warned that soccer hooligans were planning to attack the encampment, the promised buses finally began arriving around 1 a.m. Saturday, to cheering and clapping from the weary migrants.
While buses could be seen arriving to pick up the marchers, there was no immediate sign of buses around Keleti station Friday night. Shortly after 11 p.m., the police sealed off the stairways that led from the station’s main entrance down to the underground plaza where the migrants were encamped, and riot police moved to close off the area around the station — ostensibly to keep away potentially rowdy soccer fans.
The people in the encampment had hoped to travel by train to Austria and then on to Germany, and the Hungarian authorities had let six trainloads of them through on Monday before shutting down all international rail traffic to the West.
A police officer blocking the entrance to the station said the trains would begin running in one or two hours, but only those with valid tickets would be allowed to board, and that the stairs down to the migrant encampment would continue to be blocked.
Officials said that more than a thousand other migrants who had begun walking Friday down the M1 motorway, the country’s main road to the West, severely disrupting traffic, would also be picked up and driven to the border. But migrants allowed only one bus to leave, saying they would wait to see if it actually went to the border before allowing others to depart.
“We’ve got orders not to let people up this way,” the officer said.
Police helicopters swirled overhead, and the migrants, uncertain what to do, huddled together in the fetid encampment to wait for what the night would bring.
It was not clear what the government planned for the thousands already being held in reception centers around the country. On Thursday the Hungarian government offered a train ride to the west, but then tried to force the migrants off the train and bus them to a refugee camp outside Budapest.
Just before 1 a.m. on Saturday, a man with a bullhorn began telling the crowd that they would be taken to the border, but that they should bring with them as much food and water as they could. Families began frantically packing their possessions. Be prepared to move, they were told.
But there was little doubt that after days of trying, halfheartedly, perhaps, to comply with European Union regulations and registering the refugees, Hungary was ready to follow Greece and Macedonia and pass the burden of the refugees on to the next country to the west, in this case Austria.
The long line of regional buses began loading the migrants. Some were marked “chartered service” or “transit service.” They were mostly rickety, Soviet-era buses in distinctive blue and yellow liveries.
The refugees themselves are only too happy to comply, having set their sights on Germany and having scant interest in remaining in a relatively poor country like Hungary. That much was evident earlier in the day, when more than a thousand abandoned Keleti station and embarked on a 300-mile walk, rather than spend another night in a country where they are not welcome.
People waited in long lines to board, and by 1:10 a.m., the first buses were on the move. Migrants waved happily to onlookers as they pulled away.
“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.
By 2 a.m., the police said, 40 buses had departed. More were en route to carry migrants waiting at other locations around the city, who were being told they needed to make their way to the main Keleti station to catch them.
Elsewhere, a standoff with the police at the Bicske station outside Budapest ended on Friday with hundreds of refugees fleeing the train and others agreeing to enter a nearby reception center.
Government officials said Friday evening that the buses would take the migrants to Hegyeshalom, the main border crossing on the road to Vienna.
Hundreds of others fled a camp in the country’s south, near the Serbian border where they had entered.
The decision to let the migrants go came at an emergency session of top Hungarian officials on Friday, and was made both for humanitarian reasons and to ease the pressure on the nation’s transit system, said Janos Lazar, the prime minister’s chief of staff.
The chaos in Hungary reflected the inadequacy of a refugee policy across the 28-member European Union 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 the authorities.
Mr. Faymann said on his Facebook page that he had spoken with Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and that the migrants would be allowed into both countries.
Once they register and apply, they must remain there — even if that country is as hostile to migrants as Hungary, which is building a 110-mile fence on its border with Serbia to keep them away.
Karl-Heinz Grundböck, a spokesman for the Austrian Interior Ministry, said the police and volunteer organizations like the Red Cross would try to smooth the arrival of the migrants.
On Friday, lawmakers introduced changes to Hungary’s 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.
The six trains that left Budapest on Monday arrived in Munich the next morning after a chaotic and crowded journey across Austria, and the more than 3,000 passengers were quickly processed by the German immigration authorities.
The United Nations said Hungary’s leaders had declined to accept assistance from the agency that supports refugees, including for migrants at Keleti.The meager humanitarian aid at the station is provided by a group of volunteers that formed on Facebook.
More than 300,000 people have crossed into Europe by sea — most of them from Libya to Italy or from Turkey to Greece — and 2,600 have died in the attempt. Thirty to 40 drowned Friday after a boat carrying more than 120 Somalis, Sudanese and Nigerians deflated off the coast of Libya.
Mr. Orban, has said he intends to enforce the European Union rule about asylum, which he has been doing since he was criticized earlier in the week for 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 migrants who manage to get to Greece must then begin a difficult trek across Macedonia and Serbia before sneaking into Hungary in hopes of getting, eventually, to preferred destinations such as Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.
“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 Mr. Orban as saying on public radio.
Nearly 170,000 migrants have crossed Hungary’s southern border this year, officials said. Some, using human smugglers or managing to gain access to trains or taxis, have made their way to the West, while others are waiting in crowded Hungarian reception centers for their cases to be resolved, or clustering at Keleti and other Hungarian train depots.
Clashes over how to deal with the influx of migrants from Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere dominated a meeting of European Union foreign ministers on Friday in Luxembourg, with no concrete proposals. 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.
In response to reports that Germany was prepared to be more accepting of migrants from war-torn Syria, the number of people pouring into Hungary rose rapidly in recent weeks. Two months ago, around 2,000 a day were crossing the border. Within the last week, it grew to 3,000 or more, and they continued to arrive despite the closing of the Budapest train station and a crackdown by Hungarian officials.
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 Mr. Orban, with the 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 refugee crisis has struck a deep chord in Austria, which accepted waves of people in past decades whenever unrest hit the Soviet bloc — Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981 — and during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
Subhi, a 17-year-old migrant from Damascus, Syria, was among those walking to Germany, even though he walks with a limp. “I’m fed up,” he said. “I’m going to walk all the way to Germany to get treatment.”
For much of the night, the migrants awaited the arrival of the promised buses, unsure whether to trust the Hungarian authorities to actually take them to the Austrian border.
Imad Sbeih, a 50-year-old man in a wheelchair who is also from Damascus, was equally determined. “Nothing but death will stop us,” he said.
Adding to the confusion and tension, riot police officers had closed and locked all access to Keleti station and the nearby subway station, and had blocked the main stairwells leading up from the migrants’ encampment. The police said they had done so because of rumors that soccer hooligans, leaving a hard-fought match between the Hungarian and Romanian national teams, intended to come to the station and attack the migrants.
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 the police chasing them.
A huge operation Friday night, involving thousands of police officers, was intended to “protect the migrants,” said one officer, who would not give his name. Arabic-speaking refugees on bullhorns exhorted any migrants still above ground in the station area to retreat to the underground encampment, where the police could protect them from the soccer hooligans.
In Bicske, scores of migrants relented and allowed the authorities to take them to a nearby camp on Friday, the Hungarian state news agency reported, though many others continued to barricade themselves in a train to avoid just that.
“These people are coming, and they will be dangerous,” one screamed.
Migrants said the situation on the train was becoming unbearable, with the stench of clogged toilets and little to eat or drink. Others talked of pursuing a policy of passive resistance, hoping that Hungary would cave into their demands, even as the authorities were digging in
Families straggled down to the encampment, women cradling babies, men hauling plastic bags full of their few remaining possessions. Fear of an attack and the heavy police presence made them wary of sleeping outside at ground level, as many had in recent nights.
Laszlo Balazs, a police official in charge of border control, was quoted by the Hungarian state news agency as saying that 120 migrants on a separate train, which had also been stopped by the authorities, had agreed to be escorted to a camp in Vamosszabadi, near the border with Slovakia, where they would be registered by immigration officials.
“Why people want to attack us?” asked Mohammad, 25, a student of Arabic literature who is Palestinian and grew up in the Yarmouk camp in Syria. He would not give his last name for fear that the Syrian government would harm his family.
The police said they had detained over 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, Mr. Balazs said they were investigating the episode.
But the soccer hooligans never appeared.
Indifference to migrants has not been limited to Hungary. Domestic politics — the spread and growth of right-wing, anti-immigrant parties — have been framing many of the leaders’ responses to the crisis.
Before the arrival of the buses, the underground concourse was full of hundreds, perhaps thousands. Even in the tense atmosphere, with the helicopters circling and sirens wailing, the migrants continued to wash in the public water pipes. Many had bedded down for the night. Others said they could not sleep.
In Britain, Mr. Cameron responded Friday to what his critics call his apathy to the crisis by vowing to accept thousands more Syrians — but only from existing camps near the conflict zone. Leaders are trying to find the difficult balance between offering assistance and not encouraging more people to head to Europe.
Rumors about the promised buses to Austria had circulated through the crowd, but some said they would not trust the authorities. When two trains were allowed to leave Keleti station on Thursday, people boarding them were told they were bound for the border, only to be taken to stations near detention camps.
Mr. Cameron, who is trying to manage anti-immigration sentiment in the country as well as in his own Conservative Party, had been criticized for dismissing on Wednesday the idea of Britain adhering to a quota system for taking in asylum seekers who reached Europe.
Meanwhile, Abdullah Kurdi buried his sons — Aylan, 3, and Ghalib, 5 — and their mother, Rehan, in Kobani, Syria, his ancestral home: a city he had fled to, and later fled from, to escape war. Mr. Kurdi was the only family member to survive when a smugglers’ raft bound from Turkey to Greece foundered on Wednesday. A picture of the body of Aylan face down in the surf, almost as if sleeping, focused new public attention on the plight of Syrian refugees.
”We think the most important thing is to try to bring peace and stability to that part of the world,” he said, referring to Syria. He added, “I don’t think there is an answer that can be achieved simply by taking more and more refugees.”
“The father gave a speech that was really painful,” said Salih Muslim, an activist in Kobani who attended the funeral and was reached by phone. There was, Mr. Muslim said, “weeping and crying all over the place.”
Mr. Cameron gave no details or firm numbers on how many Britain would take in. But Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said that the country would take in 4,000 more Syrians.
Mr. Cameron also emphasized that Britain is spending 900 million pounds, about $1.37 billion, this year to aid Syrians with food, shelter and medical supplies. Later on Friday, he said that Britain would spend £100 million more on aid for Syrians, bringing the total to £1 billion. In the past four years, roughly 5,000 Syrians have been granted asylum in Britain.
The head of the United Nations refugee agency chief, António Guterres, said on Friday that the European Union should take in 200,000 people under an emergency relocation program.
The appeal highlighted the escalation in the movement of migrants, with more than 310,000 reaching southern Europe this year. Germany expects 800,000 by year’s end.
In Syria, a funeral was held Friday for Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old boy whose drowning set off a global outcry after photographs of his body were published. His brother, Ghalib, and mother, Rehan, were also buried on Friday. The family had been trying to reach Greece by boat.
