waltky
Wise ol' monkey
Migrants are a pest in Budapest...
Chaos in Budapest train station amid Europe's migrant crisis
Sep 1,`15 -- Chanting "Freedom! Freedom!," angry migrants demanded to be let aboard trains bound for Austria and Germany after Hungary temporarily suspended all rail traffic Tuesday from its main Budapest terminal and brawny police forced hundreds of migrants out of the train station.
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Hungary halts rail traffic in bid to stop migrants
September 1,`15 — Overwhelmed by thousands of asylum-seekers, Hungarian authorities Tuesday briefly halted rail traffic from their nation’s main train station, the latest blow to borderless movement in Europe.[/b]
Chaos in Budapest train station amid Europe's migrant crisis
Sep 1,`15 -- Chanting "Freedom! Freedom!," angry migrants demanded to be let aboard trains bound for Austria and Germany after Hungary temporarily suspended all rail traffic Tuesday from its main Budapest terminal and brawny police forced hundreds of migrants out of the train station.
Chaos enveloped the city's Keleti station. Forced into the midday sun, scores of migrants protested for hours, waving newly purchased train tickets angrily in the air. The official U-turn surprised observers, given that Hungary over the weekend had started to allow migrants to travel by train to the west without going through asylum procedures. Janos Lazar, chief of staff to Prime Minister Viktor Orban, told lawmakers that Hungary disagreed with Germany's openness to taking refugees from war-torn Syria. He blamed Germany and what he called other "left-wing governments" in Europe for encouraging the rush of migrants that has staggered Hungary both on its borders at in its capital city. "The defense of our borders is important, not opening the borders," he said.
But human rights watchdogs called Hungary's actions incoherent and indefensible. They said Hungary's open residential centers for asylum seekers already were too overcrowded to cope, and blocking migrants from using cross-border public transport forces them to cross the border dangerously hidden in smugglers' vehicles. Hungary rail shutdown came less than a week after Austrian police found 71 migrants dead in a smuggler's abandoned truck, the apparent victims of suffocation. "If you deny them - although they have a paid ticket - and you don't let them get on board, you push them right into the hands of smugglers," William Lacy Swing, director general of the International Organization for Migration, told The Associated Press. "So they get into vans and into trucks and they die."
Migrants demonstrate at the Keleti Railway Station in Budapest, Hungary, Tuesday, Sept.1, 2015, after the police stopped them from getting on a train to Germany and evacuated the station.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected Hungary's criticism of German asylum policy, saying her country was offering the same welcome to people fleeing war in Syria that all members of the 28-nation EU, including Hungary, should provide. Speaking in Berlin, Merkel said Germany shouldn't be expected to take the lion's share of Syrian refugees and appealed to EU partners to volunteer to take more. Germany expects to take in 800,000 asylum seekers this year, compared to under 3,000 for fellow EU member Spain. Merkel said Germany typically did give refugee protection to Syrian citizens fleeing the country's 4-year-old war. "That should come as no surprise. Actually, it should be the same in every European country," she said.
European nations say more than 332,000 migrants have arrived already this year. The front-line border nations of Greece, Italy and Hungary as well as non-EU members Serbia and Macedonia have been overwhelmed by the thousands surging across their border. More than 2,600 migrants have also drowned this year as they cross the Mediterranean in smugglers' often-unseaworthy boats. Scuffles broke out Tuesday morning at Budapest's Keleti station as hundreds of migrants pushed toward the metal gates where a train was scheduled to leave for Vienna and Munich, only to be blocked by police. Authorities announced over loudspeakers that all trains would be stopped indefinitely from leaving. Migrants' papers were checked, and those with train tickets but no EU visas were ushered out of the station. Outside, hundreds who had spent heavily on the tickets chanted "Germany!" and "U.N.!" But Hungary's national rail company, Mav, said it no longer would sell train tickets to customers who could not present proper ID and, where required, visas. It said customers would be allowed to buy only tickets for themselves, not multiple purchases.
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Hungary halts rail traffic in bid to stop migrants
September 1,`15 — Overwhelmed by thousands of asylum-seekers, Hungarian authorities Tuesday briefly halted rail traffic from their nation’s main train station, the latest blow to borderless movement in Europe.[/b]
The abolition of border controls between European Union nations has been a central pillar of European leaders’ dreams of stitching together a continent of common values and interconnected economies. But in just weeks, the mounting migration crisis has begun to erode a system that took decades to build. Hungarian authorities shuttered Budapest’s grand fin-de-siecle train station for hours on Tuesday morning, stopping rail traffic for all passengers while they worked to clear crowds of hundreds of migrants who had gathered at the station in recent days.
The asylum-seekers, many of whom are fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, hope to make it onward to Germany, which has promised shelter and sustenance for Syrians. By midday in Budapest, the train station had been reopened, but migrants were being kept away, Hungary’s state-owned news agency reported. Austria has also significantly increased inspections of vehicles crossing the border from Hungary since Sunday, causing backups of trucks that stretched for miles, another sign of the fast-mounting barriers between nations that years ago closed their border checkpoints. Authorities on Monday had allowed thousands of migrants to board trains to Austria, prompting complaints from Austrian leaders. “Just allowing them to board in Budapest . . . and watching as they are taken to your neighbor, that’s not politics,” said Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann in an interview late Monday with the ORF broadcaster.
There are no signs the crisis is abating. Greece’s coast guard said Tuesday that it had rescued 1,192 migrants and refugees from Monday to Tuesday near eastern Greek islands that are close to the Turkish coast. That was a significantly higher figure than in recent weeks. From Greece, migrants try to move northward through the Balkans, to Hungary and onward to Western Europe. Appeals to take in desperate asylum-seekers have run into skepticism that swift changes would actually take place. In a news conference Tuesday alongside Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the two leaders had agreed that a common European solution to the refugee crisis was needed.
She reiterated her call that even as genuine refugees should be granted asylum, economic migrants should be weeded out. She said the European Commission should define “safe countries of origin,” adding that registration centers should be established in Italy and Spain so that those migrants who do not have an honest legal claim to asylum could be returned to their countries more quickly. Those who do have genuine claims, she said, should then be more distributed more fairly within Europe. Germany is taking the lion’s share of refugees — an estimated 800,000 this year alone. Rajoy called the refugee question “the biggest challenge for Europe in the coming years.”
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