This was published 9 years ago
Hungary shuts Budapest train station as hundreds of migrants protest
By Krisztina Than
Budapest: Hundreds of angry migrants have demonstrated outside Budapest's Keleti train station, demanding they be allowed to travel on to Germany, as the biggest ever influx of migrants into the European Union left its asylum policies in tatters.
Rows of riot police officers tried to contain the crowd and the station was shut down under the strain of the influx of migrants trying to travel to Germany from Hungary. Train services were later restored, but no migrants were allowed back into the station.
Around 1000 people waved tickets, clapping, booing and shouting "Germany! Germany!", "Go free! Go free! Go free!" and "Merkel, Merkel" outside the station.
One man held up a sign that said, in German: "Please let us go!"
Hungarian police guard the main entrance as migrants protest outside Keleti station in Budapest.Credit: Getty Images
It was a different story in Munich, where streets around the central train station were blocked off to allow authorities to organise the migrants and bring them to the city's refugee processing centres, where they were to be registered and begin the process of applying for asylum.
Matching the flood of people was a flow of donations of drinks, food and baby necessities from Munich residents. "There is no end to the willingness of people to help - Great!" the police said on Twitter.
A refugee crisis rivalling the Balkan wars of the 1990s as Europe's worst since World War Two has polarised and confounded the European Union, which has no mechanism to cope with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of poor and desperate people.
Germany is likely to accept by far the largest share. In the case of those fleeing the Syrian civil war it has effectively suspended an EU rule that asylum seekers must apply in the first EU country they reach. But it insisted on Tuesday that the rule was nevertheless still in force and urged other EU countries to abide by it.
The migrants want to take a train from Budapest to Germany. Credit: Getty Images
The vast majority of refugees fleeing violence and other migrants escaping poverty arrive on Europe's southern and eastern edges but are determined to press on and seek asylum in richer and more generous countries further north and west. That means illegally crossing a bloc that has no internal border controls to stop them.
Austrian interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner called on Germany, the preferred destination for many of the migrants, to clarify its stance on asylum rules, and Chancellor Werner Faymann lashed out at Hungary for its seeming failure to register migrants before they were sent on to neighbouring Austria.
Migrants show their tickets at Budapest station, demanding to be let on a train to Germany. Credit: AP
"That they are simply getting on board in Budapest and they make sure they will travel to the neighbouring country - what sort of politics is that?" he asked on Austrian television.
Hungary, in turn, expressed its anger by summoning the Austrian ambassador to the foreign ministry.
Children sleep on the floor outside the station. Credit: AP
"It is disappointing and incomprehensible that the leader of a neighbouring country should talk in this vein about an issue which is causing Hungary, as well as Europe, immense difficulties amounting to a historic challenge," foreign affairs minister Peter Szijjarto, told the Hungarian news agency MTI.
In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government, under pressure from a far-right anti-immigrant party with a sizable voice in parliament, has aired some of the most strident anti-immigrant speech in Europe, and it is in the process of building a razor-wire fence on the Serbian border.
Migrants wait to board a train to Germany.Credit: AP
Antal Rogan, the parliament caucus leader of Orban's ruling centre-right Fidesz party, said "the very existence of Christian Europe" was under threat.
"Would we like our grandchildren to grow up in a United European Caliphate? My answer to that is no," Rogan told the pro-government daily Magyar Idok.
Migrants who arrived on a train from Budapest wait to be registered by the German police in Rosenheim.Credit: Getty Images
Orban's chief of staff, Janos Lazar, told a parliament committee that immigration must be tightly controlled tightly.
"I do not think Hungary would need a single immigrant from Africa or the Middle East," Lazar said.
Volunteers distribute food to migrants coming from Budapest at the train station in Munich, Germany.Credit: AP
"In the past decade... a leftist view has dominated the European Commission and the European Parliament, that the way to develop Europe was through allowing everyone in and accepting everyone without checks, rules and controls."
When asked why the Budapest train station was closed, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said Hungary was trying to enforce EU law.
Marah, a 20 year-old woman from Aleppo, Syria, said her family had bought six tickets for a RailJet train scheduled to leave for Vienna at 9am on Tuesday.
"They should find a solution," she told Reuters. "We are thousands here, where should we go?"
Reuters, New York Times