It’s a warm summer night in Budapest as hundreds of people turn the concrete plaza around the main railway station into a refugee camp. The luckier ones have tents. Others stretch out on the steps leading to the subway, using water bottles as pillows. Others sleep on flattened boxes, so exhausted they are oblivious to the noise around them. One family perches on a ledge, their young daughter resting in her mother’s lap as her parents sway with fatigue.
Europe’s failure to forge a response to its greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War is now on full display in downtown Budapest. The human current flowing from Turkey to Greece, then on to Macedonia and Serbia, has struck an obstacle here in Hungary, where authorities are preventing migrants from boarding trains heading west.
Earlier Tuesday, rail traffic was temporarily suspended altogether. Then the hundreds of people hoping to travel were ejected from Budapest’s main Keleti station, even though some had tickets for trains to Germany. A heavy police presence at all entrances to the station prevented them from re-entering. They had nowhere to go and nowhere to stay; they could only sit outside the railway station and wait.
As night fell, there was no information on what would happen to the crowds of people gathered here. In front of the ornate glass façade of the station, a group of about 100 migrants conducted a kind of sit-in, waving makeshift signs and chanting slogans: “We want go! We want go!” and “Germany! Germany! Germany!”
Around the corner, a 30-year old man from Baghdad who would give his name only as Khaled, showed me his ticket for a train from Budapest to Munich for Tuesday and asked if I knew when it would depart. Nearby sat his wife and daughter, a two-year-old with curly hair wearing a pink sweatsuit.
“Where is the help? Is this Europe?” he asked, gesturing bitterly to the scene around him. “Macedonia did not stop us, Greece did not stop us. Why just here you make it hard?”
Khaled hoped to make it to a smaller European country, like Sweden or the Netherlands – somewhere he could quickly find a job, where the schools and hospitals were good, where his daughter could learn to speak another language. “A good life,” he said. “In Iraq we don’t have life.”
The hundreds of people spending the night outside Budapest’s railway station are hostages in a broader European crisis as political leaders dither over how to respond to the flow of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and Africa. For now Hungary is not allowing them to leave, nor is it eager for them to stay.
According to European Union rules, refugees must submit their claims for asylum in the first country where they arrive. In practice, countries like Greece have allowed people arriving from Turkey to move on to places like Germany.
In the meantime, the scenes unfolding at the heart of a European capital are hard to comprehend. Across the street from a Burger King, a McDonald’s and a Western Union, babies sleep on concrete as their parents wait and watch. The subterranean passage leading to the adjoining subway station is now an encampment, with hundreds of people sprawled on the floor – many from Syria, but also Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. I count four portable toilets. Volunteers hand out bottles of water, diapers and apples, but it’s clear the situation is untenable.
SNIP....
Then he has a thought. “Canada is big,” he says. “Why not say, ‘Syria, come’?”
Link to rest
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...event-migrants-from-boarding/article26172535/
Europe’s failure to forge a response to its greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War is now on full display in downtown Budapest. The human current flowing from Turkey to Greece, then on to Macedonia and Serbia, has struck an obstacle here in Hungary, where authorities are preventing migrants from boarding trains heading west.
Earlier Tuesday, rail traffic was temporarily suspended altogether. Then the hundreds of people hoping to travel were ejected from Budapest’s main Keleti station, even though some had tickets for trains to Germany. A heavy police presence at all entrances to the station prevented them from re-entering. They had nowhere to go and nowhere to stay; they could only sit outside the railway station and wait.
As night fell, there was no information on what would happen to the crowds of people gathered here. In front of the ornate glass façade of the station, a group of about 100 migrants conducted a kind of sit-in, waving makeshift signs and chanting slogans: “We want go! We want go!” and “Germany! Germany! Germany!”
Around the corner, a 30-year old man from Baghdad who would give his name only as Khaled, showed me his ticket for a train from Budapest to Munich for Tuesday and asked if I knew when it would depart. Nearby sat his wife and daughter, a two-year-old with curly hair wearing a pink sweatsuit.
“Where is the help? Is this Europe?” he asked, gesturing bitterly to the scene around him. “Macedonia did not stop us, Greece did not stop us. Why just here you make it hard?”
Khaled hoped to make it to a smaller European country, like Sweden or the Netherlands – somewhere he could quickly find a job, where the schools and hospitals were good, where his daughter could learn to speak another language. “A good life,” he said. “In Iraq we don’t have life.”
The hundreds of people spending the night outside Budapest’s railway station are hostages in a broader European crisis as political leaders dither over how to respond to the flow of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and Africa. For now Hungary is not allowing them to leave, nor is it eager for them to stay.
According to European Union rules, refugees must submit their claims for asylum in the first country where they arrive. In practice, countries like Greece have allowed people arriving from Turkey to move on to places like Germany.
In the meantime, the scenes unfolding at the heart of a European capital are hard to comprehend. Across the street from a Burger King, a McDonald’s and a Western Union, babies sleep on concrete as their parents wait and watch. The subterranean passage leading to the adjoining subway station is now an encampment, with hundreds of people sprawled on the floor – many from Syria, but also Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. I count four portable toilets. Volunteers hand out bottles of water, diapers and apples, but it’s clear the situation is untenable.
SNIP....
Then he has a thought. “Canada is big,” he says. “Why not say, ‘Syria, come’?”
Link to rest
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...event-migrants-from-boarding/article26172535/
