Continue reading the main storyVideo

Migrants Stranded at Station in Budapest

Crowds of people waiting to board trains to Austria and Germany early Tuesday at Keleti train station protested after the station shut down temporarily.

By REUTERS on Publish Date September 1, 2015. Photo by Mauricio Lima for The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »

Stories from Our Advertisers

BUDAPEST — Keleti train station here, which has emerged as ground zero in Europe’s spiraling migration crisis, cut off service to migrants on Tuesday as European countries remained bitterly divided and confused over how to handle the situation.

Emphasizing the sense of confusion, Austria’s interior minister, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, called on Germany, the preferred destination for many of the migrants, to clarify its stance on asylum rules, and Chancellor Werner Faymann lashed out at Hungary for its seeming failure to register migrants before they were sent on to neighboring Austria.

“That they are simply getting on board in Budapest and they make sure they will travel to the neighboring country – what sort of politics is that?” he asked on Austrian television.

Hungary, in turn, expressed its anger by summoning the Austrian ambassador to the Foreign Ministry.

“It is disappointing and incomprehensible that the leader of a neighboring country should talk in this vein about an issue which is causing Hungary, as well as Europe, immense difficulties amounting to a historic challenge,” the minister of foreign affairs and trade, Peter Szijjarto, told the Hungarian news agency MTI.

Photo

Migrants protested on Tuesday as Keleti train station in Budapest was temporarily closed.Credit Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

The cold reception migrants received in Budapest was in marked contrast to the welcome in Munich, where the police said on Tuesday that about 2,500 people had arrived on trains from Budapest, via Vienna, in the span of 24 hours. Hundreds more continued to arrive early Tuesday.

The scenes of confusion and despair at Keleti and the acrimonious exchanges underlined the challenges facing Europe as tens of thousands of migrants, buffeted by civil war and conflict in the Middle East and Syria, are trying to make the perilous journey to Europe, only to be confronted with a patchwork of policies across a 28-member bloc that is ill equipped to deal with the surge.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government, under pressure from a far-right anti-immigrant party with a sizable voice in Parliament, has itself aired some of the most strident anti-immigrant speech on the Continent, and it is in the process of building a fence on the Serbian border.

Adding to the divisions, Janos Lazar, Mr. Orban’s chief of staff, on Tuesday blamed the European Union for stoking the migration crisis, saying that a leftist approach by the European Union over the past 10 years had saddled it with a difficult crisis.

He said that Europe and Hungary must prepare for millions of people heading to Europe, and that the unrest in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria had made it obvious that one-off measures were not enough. He accused the bloc of failing to properly police its territory, saying that the “E.U. has failed to manage the situation, and the problem is the E.U. itself, which is incapable of protecting its own borders.”

At Keleti in Budapest, rows of riot police officers wearing red caps tried to contain the migrants, and the station was shut down under the strain of the influx of migrants trying to travel to Germany from Hungary. The migrants erupted in protest after the station stopped allowing them to board trains, and they were instead funneled into its courtyard, which had been transformed into a makeshift camp.

The migrants, who had been gathered since 5 a.m. in hopes of boarding a train, chanted: “Go free! Go free! Go free!” Later, they shouted, “Merkel, Merkel,” referring to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, whose country is expected to receive 800,000 asylum seekers this year.

Train services at Keleti were restored shortly after 10 a.m., but no migrants were being allowed back into the station.

It was a different story in Munich, where streets around the central train station were blocked off to allow the authorities to organize the migrants and bring them to the city’s refugee processing centers, where they were to be registered and begin the process of applying for asylum.

Continue reading the main story

Traveling in Europe’s River of Migrants

Thousands of migrants and refugees are desperately pushing their way through the Balkans, trying to reach Hungary before it seals its border.

Aug 31What Asylum Seekers Talk About on the Road to Hungary

Aug 31Migrants in Serbia Create Makeshift Charging Stations for Smartphones

Aug 30After Grim News in Austria, Syrian Family Struggles Over Decision to Hire Smugglers

Matching the flood of people was a flow of donations of drinks, food and baby necessities from Munich residents. “There is no end to the willingness of people to help — Great!” the police said on Twitter.

The contrasting scenes in Budapest and Munich reflected a continent polarized by how to respond to a wave of migrants trying to reach Europe.

In a post on Twitter from its federal office for migrant affairs last week, Germany indicated that it was easing its rules, which call for migrants to seek asylum in the European Union country where they first arrive or are registered, for those coming from Syria.

Although the language made clear that Germany was not changing its overall policy but was issuing guidance for certain situations, it was reported as a general easing of the rules, stirring hope among the migrants and confusing European partners.

The German action appeared to cast doubt on whether the Dublin Regulation, which establishes the criteria for handling asylum seekers, was still in force.

“There were even rumors that Germany is sending trains to Budapest to pick up refugees,” Reuters quoted Ms. Mikl-Leitner as saying before a regular cabinet meeting in Vienna. “It is all the more important that Germany informs refugees in Hungary that Dublin has not been suspended.”

Ms. Mikl-Leitner was speaking after a day of ambiguity about whether migrants who had reached Hungary, a European Union member and part of the Schengen zone, could head west to Austria and on to Germany. Many migrants have been apparently avoiding registering in Hungary or Austria in hopes of finding refuge in Germany, even as migrant advocates say that European Union countries appear to be selectively applying the Dublin rules, in some cases failing to register or fingerprint migrants to avoid having to take responsibility.

Ms. Merkel has insisted that her country continued to apply the Dublin Regulation, and a spokesman for the Interior Ministry reiterated that point on Tuesday, Reuters reported.

In Hungary, the authorities said in a statement that the Budapest police chief had heightened controls in the capital for the next seven days, with a focus on districts with large migrant populations. The police said they would intensify checks of documents, as well as search clothing and vehicles.

Interactive Graphic Which Countries Are Under the Most Strain in the European Migration Crisis? European Union officials struggle to cope with the growing crisis. OPEN Interactive Graphic

Karoly Papp, the national police chief, said that the flow of migrants at the border continued, and that 500 people had been detained for illegal crossings from Serbia between the start of Tuesday and 6 a.m. Zsuzsanna Vegh, head of the immigration office, said 2,000 asylum requests had been registered overnight, bringing the total to over 44,000. Most of those came from people claiming to be Syrians, she said.

Tamas Lederer, a volunteer who is helping to coordinate the response at Keleti, said he had been told that as of Tuesday, only refugees with visas from countries in the European Union’s open-border Schengen zone would be allowed to board the trains.

He said that migrants and asylum seekers with identity cards and passports from places like Syria had been able to travel on Monday, but that the authorities had toughened their stance.

In the last five days, the number of migrants trying to leave from the Budapest station has grown to 2,000 a day from about 800, he said.

Migrants at Keleti on Monday had a mixed reception, with police officers setting up a cordon that prevented them from accessing the international ticket office, before it was eventually opened.

At the ticket offices, migrants waited in long lines to buy tickets for westbound trains, guided by a handful of police officers.

Ayham Kaka, 30, from Aleppo, Syria, was sitting at the corner of a food stall with his wife and small child. They had been lucky enough to secure tickets on the last direct service to Berlin for the day.

“We don’t come to stay in Hungary,” he said, recounting a difficult journey through the Balkans, the last leg of which involved crawling under barbed-wire barriers and being held up for four days in Budapest. “It is a very dangerous situation; the police are very dangerous,” he added.

Jannik Fröchlich and Carina Lehmann, both 21, from Hanover, Germany, were waiting to board the Berlin-bound train, too. They were shocked to experience what they had until then seen only on television.

“It’s difficult, you can’t allow everybody to come,” Mr. Fröchlich said. “It would be giving a bad signal.”

Read more http://rss.nytimes.com/c/34625/f/640350/s/49789955/sc/3/l/0L0Snytimes0N0C20A150C0A90C0A20Cworld0Ceurope0Ckeleti0Etrain0Estation0Ebudapest0Emigrant0Ecrisis0Bhtml0Dpartner0Frss0Gemc0Frss/story01.htm