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Europe Lacks Strategy to Tackle Crisis, but Migrants March On Europe Lacks Strategy to Tackle Crisis, but Migrants March On
(about 9 hours later)
BERLIN — Europe’s failure to agree on a coherent strategy to deal with the migration crisis continued to have ripple effects across the Continent on Thursday, as undaunted asylum seekers moved on despite conflicting policies, tensions between nations and new obstacles. BUDAPEST — Europe’s failure to fashion even the beginnings of a unified solution to the migrant crisis is intensifying confusion and desperation all along the multicontinent trail and breeding animosity among nations extending back to the Middle East.
Border camps in Serbia began to dissipate and thousands of migrants headed west toward Croatia, a day after Hungary showed its resolve by firing water cannons and tear gas at migrants who tried to breach a heavily guarded border gate. With the volume of people leaving Syria, Afghanistan and other countries showing no signs of ebbing, the lack of governmental leadership has left thousands of individuals and families on their own and reacting day by day to changing circumstances and conflicting messages, most recently on Thursday when crowds that had been trying to enter Hungary through Serbia diverted to Croatia in search of a new route to Germany.
The Hungarian response was criticized by the head of the United Nations human rights agency and the European Union’s migration chief, and the European Council president, Donald Tusk, called for the bloc’s leaders hold an emergency summit meeting on Wednesday to address the crisis. Despite the chaos, there were few signs that European Union leaders, or the governments of other countries along the human river of people flowing from war and poverty, were close to imposing any order or even talking seriously about harmonizing their approaches and messages to the migrants. Instead, countries continue to improvise their responses, as Croatia did Thursday, and Slovenia — the next stop along the rerouted trail — is likely to do in coming days.
Buses in Serbia carried migrants to the border with Croatia, but the transit system began to fray as the day went on. Migrants in the country began to grow restless, the degree to which they would be welcome to travel onward became less clear, and Slovenia said it would not provide a transit corridor to Austria. The migrants did not shift course to Croatia on a whim. When Hungary effectively blocked their access on Tuesday with a border crackdown — which resulted in an ugly skirmish Wednesday between the police and migrants — they had few options.
As migrants continued to look for new ways to reach Europe, the top migration official in Germany stepped down on Thursday after coming under fire for a post on Twitter from his office last month that is widely viewed as having encouraged Syrians to travel to his country. And Macedonian and Serbian officials, along with many aid organizations, were urging them to circumvent a hostile Hungary and even providing maps and nonstop bus service to the Croatian frontier. Initially, Croatia’s foreign minister, Vesna Pusic, seemed to encourage them, too.
With Hungary cutting off access, Croatia had emerged as a newly popular route to Germany, the preferred destination for most migrants, and Croatia’s prime minister promised asylum seekers safe movement, operating under the assumption that they were only passing through the country. “They can move freely in this period,” she said. “We will try to restore a decent face to this part of Europe.”
But on Thursday, the interior minister, Ranko Ostojic, said the country had reached the maximum number of people it could handle. He added that people had been found crossing illegally into the country, and he called upon other countries along the route to Croatia to stem the flow of migrants. So, since Wednesday morning, more than 11,000 migrants have entered Croatia, and officials said 20,000 more were already in Serbia, making their way to the Croatian border and likely to arrive soon — while untold tens of thousands more waited in Turkey and Greece for a clear signal about whether to follow.
Croatia opened two border crossings with neighboring Serbia, hoping to avoid a bottleneck after more than 7,000 migrants entered from Wednesday to midafternoon Thursday. But what the first arriving migrants found on the Croatian border was only more fog.
Amid the uncertainty, thousands of people, fed up with waiting in the sweltering sun, surged past Croatian police officers at the Tovarnik train station, headed in whatever direction they thought would lead to Slovenia. The Croatian interior minister said that the country would abide by European Union rules and register all arriving asylum seekers and that they could not simply pass through the country unfettered. Then late Thursday, swamped by the crush of migrants, Croatia announced that the border would be closed altogether, indefinitely.
Police vehicles kicked up dust along agricultural fields and through the streets while a propeller plane monitored the migrants’ paths overhead, as the authorities desperately tried to corral them back into place. Slovenian officials said that, no matter how many migrants Croatia lets through, they would register all arrivals and turn back any who do not qualify as refugees — a task that Hungary can attest is easier said than done.
Empty buses snaked down local side streets, hoping the migrants would stop at the sight of available transport. Many migrants went directly toward a group of buses just a few hundred yards away from the train station, and a mass of people shoved and shouted as the doors opened. But what effect would registering in Croatia or Slovenia have on their ability to settle later in Germany or elsewhere? Would Slovenia ever let them pass? If they did, would new border controls in Austria and Germany hold them back?
“We don’t need anything from the government of Croatia,” said Manar Alqawy, 23, who spent the last 25 days traveling from Syria. His mother sat behind him under a tent pitched in what had become a de facto bus station. The two spent 13 hours waiting at the train station for transport that never materialized. No one seemed to know.
Some migrants approached aid workers and reporters, asking for smugglers or taxis — or asking if they could transport the migrants themselves. “We have money, we can buy food and water,” said Manar Alqawy, 23, who spent 25 days traveling from Syria and found himself thwarted on the Croatian border. “We can pay taxis, smugglers. Just let us get to Slovenia.”
“We have money. We can buy food and water,” Mr. Alqawy said. “We can pay taxis, smugglers. Just let us get to Slovenia.” Hungary, which had declared a “state of crisis” along its Serbian border on Tuesday expanded it Thursday to include Croatia’s.
On Wednesday, the Hungarian riot police fired tear gas and water cannons at hundreds of migrants after they tried to push through a gate at the border with Serbia. The use of force by the Hungarian authorities, a turning point in the migration crisis, drew criticism from the United Nations, and advocates questioned whether Hungary was breaching international law. So far, Croatians have welcomed the migrants, said Drago Zuparic, a sociologist at the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies in Zagreb, but that could quickly turn if the refugee tide grew and extremists hijacked the debate. The first Syrian refugees reached the Slovenian border crossing at Obrezje Thursday afternoon, but were halted on the Croatian side while officials decided what to do next.
Hungary, for its part, said it was responding to a violent rebellion and that it had detained 29 people, including one person who the authorities described as a “terrorist.” The government said that two children were wounded when they were thrown over the border, and that 20 police officers had been injured during the clashes. A train from Belgrade to Zagreb reached another Slovenian border crossing on Thursday carrying 200 to 250 migrants. The police took them off the train, but no one seemed to know on Thursday evening whether they would be returned to Croatia or allowed to proceed.
The response in Hungary was met with widespread criticism, and the United Nations human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, said on Thursday that Hungary was breaking the law by building a fence on its border to keep out people who may be fleeing war zones, and by turning back refugees after what his office called “very summary proceedings.” “What we expect from the E.U. is to tell us what the form of good European behavior is,” said Nebojsa Stefanovic, Serbia’s interior minister. “Is it what Germany is doing, where refugees are welcomed with medicine and food? Or is it where they are welcomed with fences, police and tear gas?”
“I am appalled at the callous, and in some cases illegal, actions of the Hungarian authorities in recent days, which include denying entry to, arresting, summarily rejecting and returning refugees, using disproportionate force on migrants and refugees, as well as reportedly assaulting journalists and seizing video documentation,” Mr. al-Hussein said in a statement issued in Geneva. The European Union, Mr. Stefanovic added, “needs to say not just what the law is, but what the European norm is, what the values are that Serbia should share.”
Mr. al-Hussein cited three international treaties that are binding on Hungary, including the 1951 Refugee Convention, which ensures the rights of people fleeing war and persecution to seek political asylum. For weeks, government leaders across Europe seemed to think that Germany, the most prosperous nation in the 28-member bloc and a top destination of choice for the migrants, would fashion some sort of solution. Germany has not, and perhaps cannot, and has instead insisted that the arriving migrants be distributed more evenly among the union’s members
“Seeking asylum is not a crime, and neither is entering a country irregularly,” he said, sharply rebuking the Hungarian prime minister for what he called his “xenophobic and anti-Muslim views.” Germany has sent its own mixed signals. Even as it champions the asylum seekers, lawmakers are considering a package of measures that would make it easier to swiftly deport those who do not qualify as refugees under existing laws. A draft of the bill, drawn up by the office of Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière and circulated among German news media on Thursday, also includes efforts to reduce incentives for migrants to reach Germany, such as providing necessities like toiletries instead of cash.
The rebuke notwithstanding, there is little the organization can do immediately to enforce any country’s legal obligations. The United Nations refugee agency has repeatedly said that Australia, for instance, is violating the principles of international law by sending asylum seekers to nearby countries in the Asia-Pacific region. On Thursday, Germany also showed the strain, saying it was indefinitely suspending all train service between Munich and Salzburg, in neighboring Austria, because the task of searching every train for migrants was wreaking havoc with schedules. Refugee agencies were struggling with accepting and processing so many asylum seekers.
And a United Nations expert had previously accused Australia of violating the global torture convention by detaining child migrants on Manus Island. Australia has continued the practice anyway, and its leaders have on occasion sharply shot back against the United Nations. And Manfred Schmidt, the president of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, which many blame for inadvertently inciting the latest surge of refugees and migrants into the Balkans with a Twitter post that seemed to promise asylum in Germany for all Syrians, announced he was resigning — for “personal reasons.”
Mr. al-Hussein’s statement came a day after the Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, bluntly called Hungary’s action “not acceptable” and said he had urged the Hungarian Prime Minister to follow international law. Yet more than a week after its top executive, Jean-Claude Juncker, called for “immediate action” to calm the escalating refugee crisis, the European Union was still groping for a way around the deep divisions that have blocked joint action to address Europe’s biggest humanitarian crisis since World War II.
The police in Austria continued bracing for an influx of migrants on the country’s southern border with Slovenia as migrants tried to find alternatives to traveling to Hungary. In the latest attempt to end the bickering, the bloc said Thursday that it would hold an emergency summit of leaders in Brussels next Wednesday to revive a stalled plan to spread the refugees around the continent.
But on Wednesday, Slovenia refused Croatia’s suggestion that it create a corridor through the country, with Vesna Gyorkos Znidar, the Slovenian interior minister, saying that it was “out of the question,” Austrian public television, ORF, said. Resistance to that idea — which has been vehemently opposed by many countries, including most of the poorer, former Communist states in the east — was evident yet again in parliamentary debate Wednesday in Slovakia.
The Slovenian government introduced border controls with Hungary early Thursday morning, calling it a temporary but necessary measure to ensure public security. All of Slovakia’s top parties, which normally can agree on almost nothing, concurred that the country should not be obligated to accept refugees.
In Germany, Manfred Schmidt, president of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, quit a little more than three weeks after his office posted a message on Twitter on Aug. 25 stating that Syrians refugees would be granted asylum in Germany, regardless of how they had reached the country. “We have rejected these quotas for two reasons,” said Robert Kalinak, the interior minister. “They don’t solve the situation. It won’t work. The ones who draw Germany in the lottery will be happy, the ones who draw Estonia will be unhappy.”
The tweet, based on a technical decision circulated in Mr. Schmidt’s office, was aimed at speeding up the decision time for asylum applications. But it quickly went viral in the Arabic-speaking world, where the decision was interpreted as Germany throwing open its doors. Western leaders, particularly in Germany, bristled at what they saw as opportunistic selfishness among Eastern nations, who are eager to accept money and help from the West but are not always willing to share a burden.
Within days, tens of thousands had gathered at Budapest’s Keleti station, chanting “Germany, Germany,” and seeking to travel west, leading Hungarian officials to criticize what it saw as Berlin’s unilateral rescinding of European Union policy. “The current situation gives the impression that Europe is something people participate in when there is money, and where one disappears into the bushes when it is time to take on responsibility,” said Sigmar Gabriel, head of Germany’s center-left Social Democrats who serves as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s deputy.
That effectively rescinded Germany’s pledge to abide by an agreement that requires migrants to apply for asylum in the first European Union country they reach, and it played a crucial role in sparking the mass migration toward Europe in recent weeks. Next week’s meeting in Brussels follows the failure of a rancorous meeting of interior ministers on Monday, which left unresolved the plan put forward last week by Mr. Juncker, the president of the European Council, to distribute 120,000 asylum-seekers around Europe.
Germany has said it now expects a million migrants to reach the country this year, and the migration office was the subject of criticism that it had failed to speed up the processing of the more than 250,000 applications for asylum, even as thousands more are submitted daily. Even as Hungary and Serbia continued to snipe over Wednesday’s violence, the sun set slowly Thursday evening over the now serene border crossing of Horgos, Serbia, site of the clash between migrants and the Hungarian police. More than 2,000 migrants had camped beside the closed crossing on Wednesday, but only about 200 were left by Thursday evening.
Germany’s Interior Ministry, responsible for the migration office, said that Mr. Schmidt, 56, had cited “personal reasons” for his decision to leave the position he had held for five years. The rest had apparently given up the notion that Hungary would reopen the border and were trying their luck in Croatia, or elsewhere. But Issa Issa, from Asaka, Syria, said he had decided to wait it out in Horgos. He had tried calling friends who left for Croatia and Slovenia, but either they did not answer or told him that the Slovenian border was blocked.
“This is an important border crossing for Serbia and Hungary,” he said. “They won’t leave it closed for long. I’m ready to camp here for a month.”