Hungary's prime minister yesterday angrily accused illegal migrants of "rebelling" against the rule of law in his country as security forces across Europe struggled to control record flows of hungry, scared refugees.
The United Nations called for the swift creation of large-scale reception centres in frontline states such as Hungary and Greece, and one UN agency warned that millions more refugees could arrive in Europe if Syria's civil war continues to rage.
Many of the tens of thousands of refugees now trekking from Greece via the Balkans and Hungary towards western Europe are fleeing the Syrian war in search of sanctuary, above all in more welcoming and generous countries such as Germany and Sweden.
German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said his country, which expects to take in 800,000 asylum seekers this year alone, had finite resources and urged other European countries to do much more to share the burden.
He said Germany expected to receive another 40,000 migrants this weekend. And as politicians from the left and right accused Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government of losing control of the refugee situation, the defence ministry put 4,000 troops on standby to help with the influx.
Security concerns
Citing security concerns,
Austria
partially shut a highway linking
Vienna
and Hungary yesterday. Some 8,000 people had crossed the border on Thursday and a further 4,500 arrived overnight, Austrian police said. The rail link to Hungary also remains shut due to “massive overburdening” by the migrants.
Hungary is racing to construct a fence along its border with Serbia by early October to help stem the tide. It also plans to implement much tougher immigration rules from next week.
Prime minister Viktor Orban, a fiery populist who has framed the crisis as a battle to preserve Europe's prosperity and "Christian identity", angrily criticised the behaviour of the mostly Muslim migrants who have been filling up central Budapest and disrupting traffic along roads running westward to Austria.
Legal order
“They seized railway stations, rejected giving fingerprints, failed to cooperate and are unwilling to go to places where they would get food, water, accommodation and medical care . . . They rebelled against Hungarian legal order,” Orban told reporters.
“From the 15th, Hungarian authorities will not forgive illegal border crossings,” he said.
More than 170,000 migrants have crossed into Hungary from non-EU Serbia so far this year. Many try to avoid being registered in Hungary for fear of being stranded there or returned to the country later in their journey across Europe.
In Geneva, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said it was sending prefabricated housing units to provide temporary overnight shelter for 300 families in Hungary but also expressed concern over Budapest’s tough approach, including the possible deployment of troops to tackle the crisis.
“Obviously we expect authorities to respect rights of refugees whether they are the police or army,” said UNHCR spokesman William Spindler.
Syria's four-year civil war has so far displaced almost eight million people, said Peter Salama of Unicef, the UN childrens' agency, adding: "There could be millions and millions more refugees leaving Syria and ultimately [going] to the European Union and beyond." – Reuters