Hungary opens trains to migrants
BUDAPEST, Hungary – Thousands of people desperate to reach Western Europe rushed into a Budapest train station Thursday after police ended a two-day blockade, setting off a wave of anger and confusion as hundreds shoved their way onto a waiting train. But when it tried to drop them off at a camp for asylum seekers, a showdown began.
One man threw his wife and infant son onto the tracks, screaming in Arabic, “We won’t move from here!” Police surrounded the prone family, pulled the husband away and handcuffed him. His wife and boy were freed and allowed to rejoin other migrants.
The scene of desperation was just one of many that unfolded Thursday as tempers flared in Hungary’s war of wills with migrants trying to evade asylum checks and reach Western Europe, a showdown with consequences for the entire continent.
As Hungary’s anti-immigrant prime minister warned European partners that he intends to make his country’s borders an impassible fortress for new arrivals, his government struggled to coax thousands of unwanted visitors away from the Budapest transportation hub that has been turned into a squalid refugee camp.
People fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Asia and Africa rushed into the Keleti train terminal when police unexpectedly withdrew Thursday morning, ending a blockade designed to stop migrants from boarding trains to their desired destinations in Germany and Austria.
In desperate scenes, people pushed each other to reach the train’s six carriages. Children caught in the melee cried in terror as parents or older siblings pulled them through open windows, thinking that getting on board meant they would be first to escape Hungary.
But instead of heading to the Austrian border, the overloaded train stopped at Bicske, a town northwest of Budapest that holds one of the country’s five camps for asylum seekers – facilities the migrants want to avoid because they don’t want to pursue asylum claims in economically depressed Hungary. As the train platform filled with police came into view, those inside chanted their disapproval and their determination to reach Germany, their almost unanimous goal.
The crowd, angrily waving train tickets to Vienna and Munich, refused police orders to board buses to the asylum center, pushing their way past police and back onto the train. A daylong standoff ensued in which police and charity workers took turns handing food and water to the passengers, only to have them tossed out train windows in protest.
“We don’t need food and water! Just let us go to Germany!” one man shouted.
About 100 police kept watch on the train, barring media from the platform, but didn’t remove the migrants by force.
The question of how to manage the crisis was hotly debated Thursday in Brussels at meetings between European Union leaders and Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban. His chief of staff, Janos Lazar, said 160,000 migrants had reached Hungary this year, 90,000 of them in the past two months alone, representing about half of all asylum-seekers in Europe.
“We Hungarians are full of fear,” Orban told a Brussels news conference, warning that the acceptance of so many Muslims from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere would erode Europe’s Christian bedrock.