BUDAPEST, Hungary – Hungary’s leader railed Thursday at Germany and EU leaders for lacking urgency in dealing with Europe’s migrant crisis as chaos reigned back home, where migrants by the thousands surged into Budapest’s main train station after police ended their two-day blockade of its entrance.
In a swirl of confusion, excited migrants piled into a newly arrived train at Keleti station in Hungary’s capital despite announcements in Hungarian and English that all services from the station to Western Europe had been canceled.
A statement on the main departures board said no more trains to Austria or Germany would depart “due to safety reasons until further notice!”
The question of how to defuse the human gridlock in Hungary was being hotly debated Thursday in Brussels at a meeting between European Union leaders and Hungary’s anti-immigrant prime minister, Viktor Orban.
Hungary, which for months had done little to prevent asylum applicants from heading west, this week has declared it won’t let more migrants deeper into Europe.
“We Hungarians are full of fear. People in Europe are full of fear, because we see that European leaders, among them the prime ministers, are not capable of controlling the situation,” Orban said.
Orban principally blamed Germany as he confirmed his government’s plan to send at least 3,000 troops to Hungary’s southern border with Serbia, where police patrols, razor-wire coils and a 13-foot-high fence already seek to deter new arrivals.
Orban’s top aide, Janos Lazar, said 160,000 migrants had reached Hungary this year, nearly 90,000 of them since July 6.
Orban said Hungary’s problem with migrants was really “a German problem. Nobody would like to stay in Hungary. All of them would like to go to Germany.”
He vowed that Hungary would defend its borders by fingerprinting, photographing and screening all migrants that cross into its territory. Once the proposed measures are passed in parliament, he said, migrants and smugglers alike would be warned of the tougher new deterrent measures in place, which would include increasing prison terms for smugglers and making it a crime to damage or break through the border fence.
Hungary’s parliament is expected to vote on Orban’s security and immigration reform measures Friday.
But Serbia’s prime minister, Aleksandar Vucic, warned that if Hungary stopped accepting migrants who currently can walk through police-supervised gaps in the razor-wire defenses, this could create a dangerous public backlash or humanitarian crisis in Serbia, where many hundreds assemble daily before crossing to Hungary. Virtually none of the migrants claim asylum in non-EU member Serbia.
Vucic said the EU needed a region-wide plan to ensure migrants received care and support if Hungary sealed its border, “otherwise ... in 12 days we can face huge problems here.”
Lazar urged Germany to help ease the situation at the Keleti train station, where an estimated 3,000 people have camped for days. Conditions have grown increasingly squalid despite the efforts of volunteers distributing water, food, medicine and disinfectants.
On Thursday, an AP reporter saw one infant boy beside his sleeping parents crawling onto the pavement to eat breadcrumbs from the floor. Nearby, an unattended toddler walked to a pile of garbage, picking at discarded wrappers in search of candy.
“We would like Germany, where the migrants want to go, to pull its own weight,” Lazar said, suggesting the migrants go to the German Embassy in Budapest and apply for a German entry visa.
German Chancellor Angela Markel declined to respond directly to Hungary’s criticisms, but emphasized that all EU members should show the same care toward war refugees and observe the same obligations on handling asylum cases. She called for each EU nation to accept “a binding quota” of refugee applicants.
When asked by a reporter whether Hungary’s migrant problems were really Germany’s as Orban asserted, Merkel said: “Hungary is right when it says that we must protect our external border and we must register refugees and asylum seekers. That is undisputed ... but of course that’s not the end of it.
“There is also an obligation to give protection to those who deserve protection. The Geneva convention on refugees applies not just in Germany but in every European member state,” Merkel said during a visit to Bern, Switzerland. “The Geneva convention obliges us to take in refugees from civil wars when they are fleeing from fear, war and horror and give them protection. Germany is doing no more and no less than this ... and all countries must do this.”
Associated Press reporters Petr Josek and Balint Szlanko in Bicske, Hungary; Jovana Gec in Belgrade, Serbia; Geir Moulson in Berlin, Lorne Cook in Brussels and Amir Bibawy in New York contributed to this report.
