PHOTO - A migrant holds a crying boy out of a local train coming from Budapest and heading to the Austrian border, that has been stopped in Bicske, west of the Hungarian capital yesterday. — AFP

Hungary blasts EU amid refugee chaos at train station – Migrants scuffle as police try to break human gridlock

BUDAPEST: Hungary’s leader railed yesterday at Germany and EU leaders for lacking urgency in dealing with Europe’s migrant crisis as chaos reigned back home, where migrants by the thousands surged into Budapest’s main train station after police ended their two-day blockade of its entrance.

In a swirl of confusion, excited migrants piled into a newly arrived train at Keleti in the Hungarian capital despite announcements in Hungarian and English that all services from the station to Western Europe had been canceled. A statement on the main departures board said no more trains to Austria or Germany would depart “due to safety reasons until further notice!”

Many migrants, who couldn’t understand either language and were receiving no advice from Hungarian officials, piled aboard in a standing-room-only crush and hoped for the best. Instead, the train soon stopped northwest of Budapest in the town of Bicske, where dozens of riot police stood waiting to escort the human cargo to one of the country’s major camps for asylum seekers – an overcrowded, open-door facility that many of the migrants already had left days before.

Disappointed migrants started chanting “No camp!” in Arabic, some tried to flee on foot down the tracks, and one family sat down beside the tracks and appealed to journalists for help. When police told the media to move off the tracks and the family to move inside, the husband in apparent desperation lost emotional control. He threw his own wife and infant child onto the tracks, sat down beside them and started hitting himself in the head as he bemoaned Hungary’s unwillingness to let them travel west.

Police in helmets and body armor surrounded the prone family and lifted the man off of his wife and child. Officers handcuffed him as he whimpered, his chest down on the pavement, and carried him away. The woman and infant were escorted off the tracks but not detained. Other migrants scuffled with police and forced their way back on to the train’s carriages, where an hours-long standoff in the sweltering sun began. Police delivered water to the migrants, but many tossed the bottles back, expressing fears that police might have drugged the water and wanted to sedate them.

Human gridlock

The question of how to defuse the human gridlock in Hungary was being hotly debated yesterday in Brussels at a meeting between European Union leaders and Hungary’s anti-immigrant prime minister, Viktor Orban. Hungary, which for months had done little to prevent asylum applicants from heading west, now says it won’t let more migrants deeper into Europe.

“We Hungarians are full of fear. People in Europe are full of fear, because we see that European leaders, among them the prime ministers, are not capable of controlling the situation,” Orban said. Orban principally blamed Germany as he confirmed his government’s plan to send at least 3,000 troops to Hungary’s southern border with Serbia, where police patrols, razor-wire coils and a 13-foot (4-meter) fence already seek to deter new arrivals. Orban’s top aide, Janos Lazar, said 160,000 migrants had reached Hungary this year, nearly 90,000 of them since July 6.

Orban said Hungary’s problem with migrants was really “a German problem. Nobody would like to stay in Hungary. All of them would like to go to Germany.”

He vowed that Hungary would defend its borders by fingerprinting, photographing and screening all migrants that cross into its territory. Once the proposed measures are passed in parliament, he said, migrants and smugglers alike would be warned of what was to come.

Hungary’s parliament is expected to vote on Orban’s security and immigration reform measures today. Lazar urged Germany to help ease the situation at the Keleti train station, where an estimated 3,000 people have camped for days. Conditions have grown increasingly squalid despite the efforts of volunteers distributing water, food, medicine and disinfectants.

Yesterday, an AP reporter saw one infant boy beside his sleeping parents crawling onto the pavement to eat breadcrumbs from the floor. Nearby, an unattended toddler walked to a pile of garbage, picking at discarded wrappers in search of candy. “We would like Germany, where the migrants want to go, to pull its own weight,” Lazar said, suggesting the migrants go to the German Embassy in Budapest and apply for a German entry visa. “We believe this is primarily an immigration crisis, not a refugee crisis, and in this situation Europe can’t renounce defending its borders,” Lazar told reporters in Parliament.

On Wednesday, migrants had threatened to walk the 105 miles (170 kilometers) to the Austrian border if police wouldn’t let them board trains to their desired destinations in Austria and Germany.

PHOTO= The front pages of some of Britain’s daily newspapers showing an image of the body of Syrian three-year-old boy Aylan are pictured in London, yesterday. — AFP

Image of dead boy piles pressure on Cameron

LONDON: British Prime Minister David Cameron came under pressure yesterday to take in more refugees after the image of a dead Syrian toddler washed up on a Turkish beach raised the emotional temperature of the debate.

Cameron said on Wednesday that he did not think the answer was to take more and more refugees but to bring peace and stability to the Middle East, a response widely perceived as inadequate in the face of the unfolding tragedy. “Mr Cameron, summer is over … Now deal with the biggest crisis facing Europe since WW2,” read a headline on the front page of the Sun, Britain’s highest-selling newspaper, above the image of the lifeless boy being carried away. The change of tone from a newspaper criticized by the United Nations rights chief in April after one of its columnists compared migrants to “cockroaches”, was a mark of the emotional impact of the images of human suffering across Europe.

Nicola Blackwood was among several members of parliament from Cameron’s Conservative Party who spoke out in favor of a more compassionate stance from the government. “We cannot be the generation that fails this test of humanity. We must do all we can,” she tweeted. Her colleague Nadhim Zahawi also took to Twitter to express his feelings about the dead Syrian boy: “Pic should make us all ashamed. We have failed in Syria. I am sorry little angel, RIP.” Britain has granted asylum to about 5,000 Syrians who were able to reach the country by their own means since the start of the Syrian war. In addition, it has taken 216 people under a UN-backed relocation scheme for vulnerable Syrians. Several European countries have taken in Syrians in greater numbers.

“CAN AND MUST DO MORE” As the outpouring of emotion over the dead toddler put the government on the defensive, Chancellor George Osborne appeared on television to express sympathy and defend what he called Britain’s “leading role” in responding to the crisis. “I was very distressed when I saw it myself this morning, that poor boy lying dead on the beach,” Osborne said. “What we need to do to help those desperate families is break up the criminal gangs who traffick in people and led to that boy’s death, beat ISIS which is the thing they’re fleeing, we’ve got to make sure the aid is going there to help those families.”