PHOTO: Asylum seekers wave their train tickets and lift up children outside the main Eastern Railway station in Budapest.
Hundreds of asylum seekers have staged an angry demonstration outside Budapest's shuttered main international train station, demanding they be allowed to travel on to Germany, as a migration crisis puts the European Union's rules under unprecedented strain.
- Station evacuated after 500 asylum seekers tried to board trains to Vienna
- Hundreds still waiting outside the station
- Europe receiving the biggest movement of people since WWII
Hungarian authorities closed the train station altogether, then reopened it but barred entry to the asylum seekers.
About 100 police wearing helmets and wielding batons guarded the station. Dozens of asylum seekers who were inside were forced out.Around 1,000 people waved tickets, clapping, booing and hissing, and shouting "Germany! Germany!" outside the station. Later they sat down, staring down at a police blockade at the entrance of the station.
The crowd later calmed down and several hundred people — men, women and children — remained outside in the baking sun, many sitting on the ground and in the streets around as police blocked entrances to the station.
"I am really pissed off. Why can't the Hungarians just let us go?" one Afghan asylum seeker, Haider, 31, said after ripping up his ticket.
"I worked as a translator for the US army for four years."
A public tannoy announcement was earlier made at the train station, which has been packed with asylum seekers for several weeks, that no trains would be leaving or arriving "until further notice" and asking everyone to leave.
Some of the people then began shouting as hundreds of police, some of them riot officers, began moving them out although they offered no resistance and there were no clashes.
PHOTO: Riot police stand on the train track as they monitor asylum seekers.
The announcement came as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) revealed over 234,770 asylum seekers have landed in Greece alone this year, more than the whole Europe-wide figure of 219,000 for all of 2014.
At least 2,600 died on the hazardous journey, drowned or suffocated in dangerous or unseaworthy boats, it added.
Another 114,276 made it to Italy, with most of the other arrivals split between Spain and the island of Malta.
The arrival of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers has confounded the EU, which no border controls for travel between 26 countries of its Schengen area but requires those seeking asylum to remain in the country where they first arrive until applications are processed.
Frustrated asylum seekers, pouring into Hungary at a rate of more than 2,000 per day during August, were left to set up ever-growing makeshift camps outside the two main stations in Budapest.
A total of 3,650 people — lots of young men but also large numbers of families with small, exhausted children and a few old people — reached Vienna by train on Monday, this year's biggest daily number, Austrian police said.
Spain's prime minister described the record influx as Europe's "greatest challenge" for the coming years.
"What we're seeing now is the greatest challenge for Europe in the coming years, I have no doubt about that," Mariano Rajoy said during a visit to Berlin.
The crisis has prompted the government in Budapest to reinforce its border with a razor wire fence and deploy thousands of extra police to try to funnel the flow of asylum seekers to legal channels rather than allowing them through unchecked.
PHOTO: Asylum seekers stand in the Eastern (Keleti) railway station of Budapest behind of a line of the local police on August 31, 2015. 
No comments:
Post a Comment