HORGOS,
Serbia — Hungarian riot police officers fired water cannons and tear
gas on Wednesday after hundreds of migrants tried to break through a
gate at the newly reinforced border between Serbia and Hungary.
“Open!
Open! Open!” the migrants chanted, as many covered their faces to
protect themselves. About 50 riot police officers formed a barrier to
prevent them from passing. A vehicle armed with water cannons stood
nearby. Military helicopters hovered overhead.
Hungary’s
decision to seal its borders and press criminal charges against
migrants continued to reverberate across Europe, sending thousands of
people on alternative routes through Croatia
and other countries to reach Germany and other points in Western
Europe. Croatia’s prime minister promised them safe passage, as long as
they were only passing through the country.
Hungary
moved, meanwhile, to close off another alternative, by tightening its
border with Romania. The ripple effects reached as far as Edirne, on the
European side of Turkey, where police officers at a bus station near
the city were blocking migrants who wished to walk to the nearby border
with Greece and Bulgaria.
Hungary announced that police officers had detained
519 people for illegal entry or damaging a border fence since new rules
came into force a day earlier. The authorities have opened 46 criminal
cases so far, and the first suspects were to appear in court Wednesday
afternoon, according to Gyorgy Bakondi, an aide to Prime Minister Viktor
Orban.
Prosecutors
in Szeged, Hungary, said that four Iraqi citizens would appear in court
for illegal crossing, in expedited proceedings. They were held after
crossing the border through an opening in the fence that had been cut by
others, the Hungarian authorities said. One Iraqi was convicted and
sentenced to expulsion.
On
the Serbian side of the border, hundreds of migrants remained stuck,
while still others kept arriving. At the border town of Horgos,
migrants, who had slept in tents overnight, lined up for food. There
were just 11 toilets and two taps with running water for them. The
temperature reached a sweltering 86 degrees Fahrenheit.
Mohamed
Afar, 23, who said he had left Damascus, Syria, after his shop there
was bombed, said he and 13 relatives had raced to get into Hungary, but
had failed to make it before the border was closed. Now, he said, they
were sheltering in an abandoned building once used by Serbian customs
officials.
“I’m
hoping the border will open,” he said, adding that he was looking to
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to resolve the crisis. “I will wait.
Maybe Ms. Merkel comes to open it? The Hungarian government seems to
have no mind or heart. Can’t they see all these families? There is
nothing for us here. It smells and it’s dirty.”
Mr.
Afar said that he was desperate to take his two young children to
Germany or to the Netherlands, but that he was quickly running out of
money.
Hungary’s actions had spillover effects throughout the region. Buses that had been carrying migrants to Serbia’s border with Hungary from its border with Macedonia were instead diverted to Croatia, Serbian news media reported.
Croatia’s
prime minister, Zoran Milanovic, said on Wednesday that migrants would
be allowed to pass through the country, which is a member of the European Union but borders several countries that are not.
“No one will block them,” he said. “No fences.”
But
Mr. Milanovic, who faces a tight race in elections scheduled for
mid-November, also made it clear that his country was a temporary stop,
not a final destination, for the migrants.
The
closing of Hungary’s borders has raised concerns among humanitarian
groups that migrants seeking to get to Croatia could inadvertently cross
through areas near the Hungarian-Croatian border that are littered with
thousands of land mines left from the Balkan wars of the 1990s. On
Wednesday, Croatian demining experts were sent to the area where many
migrants were arriving, Reuters reported.
The
countries of the former Yugoslavia, which were torn apart by the wars,
have thus far taken a tolerant and welcoming stance toward the migrants,
who have viewed the region as a transit zone rather than a final
destination. But with Hungary’s decision to criminalize the breaching of
its borders, countries like Serbia and Croatia, which are relatively
homogeneous and poor compared with some of their richer European
neighbors, could soon confront a stream of migrants for which they are
ill prepared.
In
northern Serbia, a short distance from the border with Hungary,
hundreds of people spent the night outside or in temporary tents and
expressed determination to enter Hungary, notwithstanding the new ban.
Hundreds chanted “Open the door!” and several began hunger strikes.
On
a visit to the border region on Tuesday, Aleksandar Vulin, the Serbian
minister of labor, employment and social affairs, chided Hungary for
refusing to abide by its agreements with Serbia and warned that the
situation could spiral out of control.
In
Croatia, the Right Party leader, Anto Dapic, told the local news media
that he supported offering “temporary aid to women and children, but not
young men who look like they just left the gym.”
Mr.
Dapic has aligned himself with countries in Eastern and Central Europe,
like Hungary, which have argued that immigration is a matter of
national sovereignty, and that the European Union has no right to tell
countries how many refugees they should take in.
The
Croatian interior minister, Ranko Ostojic, said his country “respected
the fundamental values of the E.U.,” which it joined in 2013, and had
embraced a plan that would distribute migrants across the union’s member
states according to their population and wealth.
Asked
whether the Schengen Agreement — which has permitted unrestricted
travel across much of the Continent — was under attack, Mr. Ostojic said
in a televised interview: “If each country has an individual approach
to this work, and if this continues, of course, then the founding values
for which the E.U. exists, which is freedom of movement of people, is
at risk. That is why responsible leaders at this time are really looking
for a solution to this situation.”
Over
100 migrants, unable to travel to Hungary, instead went to Sid, Serbia,
and crossed the border Wednesday morning to Tovarnik, Croatia, where
the authorities were trying to register them, Croatia’s state radio
service reported.
Croatian
border patrol officers caught a number of migrants trying to bypass
registration by going through neighboring cornfields, and, as of 11
a.m., had detained 181 of them.
In
Austria, army border controls officially took effect at the start of
Wednesday, drastically slowing the flood of migrants from Hungary. The
controls were focused on three border crossings: Nickelsdorf,
Deutschkreutz and Schachendorf.
Elsewhere
in Austria, which followed Germany’s decision over the weekend to
impose stringent border checks, there was a bottleneck of migrants
seeking to enter Germany. At the Westbahnhof in Vienna on Wednesday
morning, an estimated 5,000 migrants spent the night; a few were
sleeping on mats outdoors.
In
Salzburg, where 1,200 migrants had spent the night in emergency
shelters, Michael Rausch, a police spokesman, said the situation was
tense.
As
of Wednesday morning, there were 2,000 migrants at Salzburg’s main
station, according to the Austrian broadcaster ORF. The police said that
some 5,000 migrants had slept in Vienna overnight, many of them
stranded because of bottlenecks along the German-Austrian border.
In
a rare bit of good news as the crisis continued, Osama Abdul Mohsen,
the Syrian migrant who was tripped by a Hungarian camerawoman while
carrying his child, will live in Madrid, after a Spanish soccer academy
offered to help him settle there, The Associated Press reported.
Video footage of the trip became a potent symbol last week of the abuse
of refugees. The academy said that it wanted to find Mr. Mohsen, who
was a coach in Syria, a job in soccer but that he first needed to learn
Spanish.
No comments:
Post a Comment