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Hungary’s razor wire fence stops refugees at the border
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HUNGARY shut the main land route for migrants into the European Union yesterday, taking matters into its own hands to halt an unprecedented influx of refugees while the bloc failed to agree a plan to distribute them.
Crowds of migrants built up at Serbia’s northern border with Hungary, their passage blocked by a razor wire fence.
Under new rules that took effect from midnight, Hungary says that anyone seeking asylum at the Serbian border would automatically be turned back and anyone trying to sneak through risked a prison sentence.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban, one of the continent’s loudest opponents of mass immigration, says he is acting to save Europe’s “Christian values” by blocking the main overland route used by mainly Muslim refugees, through the Balkans and across his country via its border with Serbia.
Families with small children sat in fields beneath a fence which runs almost the length of the border.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been arriving at the EU’s southern and eastern edges and making their way to the richer countries further north and west, in the greatest migration to western Europe since World War II.
With emergency talks having failed to break a deadlock over an EU plan to force member countries to accept quotas of refugees, Germany’s Interior Minister said the bloc should consider imposing financial penalties on countries that refuse.
Record arrivals forced Germany and several neighbors to reimpose emergency frontier controls this week, unravelling two decades of borderless travel within the 26-member Schengen zone, one of the EU’s flagship achievements.
Moral obligation
Germany and other relatively open countries say Europe has a moral obligation to accept refugees and other EU states must do their part. Eastern European countries, in particular, argue that a more welcoming stance only encourages more people to make dangerous voyages, and risks attracting an uncontrolled influx of millions.
Under its new rules, Hungary has declared its border with Serbia “safe,” meaning those crossing from it cannot claim asylum. Asylum claims would be processed within eight days, and those at the Serbian border should be rejected within hours.
“If someone is a refugee, we will ask them whether they have submitted an asylum request in Serbia. If they had not done so, given that Serbia is a safe country, they will be rejected,” Orban said.
“We will start a new era,” government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said shortly after midnight on the border. “We will stop the inflow of illegal migrants over our green borders.”
Long queues formed in no-man’s land at metal containers built into the fence, where migrants were expected to register, though only a handful were seen entering. They had spent the night in the open, given tents, food and water by aid workers.
Nine Syrians and seven Afghans were detained by police and face possible imprisonment on suspicion of breaching the fence, the first arrests under the new rules.
“I don’t know what I will do,” said 40-year-old Riad from Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial hub reduced in many parts to rubble since war broke out in 2011 and put to flight millions of Syrians. “I will wait to see. We have lost everything to reach this point.”
Hungary blames Germany for accelerating the flow of migrants and tearing up European rules by announcing in August that it would take in Syrian refugees regardless of where they entered the EU. Germany has prepared for as many as 800,000 asylum seekers this year, and some senior officials now say even that figure may be an underestimate.
More than 100,000 asylum seekers arrived in Germany in August, and nearly as many arrived by train in the first two weeks of this month.
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