Record numbers of migrants have arrived in Hungary as it races to seal its border with Serbia by tomorrow, amid continuing division across Europe about how to handle hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers.
Hungarian police said they detained more than 4,300 migrants on the Serbian border on Saturday, setting a one-day record as thousands of soldiers and work gangs of prisoners tried to complete a 175km security fence. An even greater number are believed to have entered the country yesterday.
Populist prime minister Viktor Orban says Hungary's border security will change fundamentally tomorrow, when "the rules are changing and . . . if you cross the border illegally, you will be immediately arrested by the authorities".
Preparations are being made for Hungary’s military to be allowed to support more than 2,000 police officers already patrolling the border area, through which more than 170,000 migrants have passed on their way to western Europe this year.
Influx
The move comes as Germany reintroduced border controls with Austria, after halting train services from the neighbouring state to slow the influx of asylum seekers from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
The Bavaria region, which borders Austria, is under particular strain: 13,000 asylum seekers reached its capital, Munich, on Saturday alone, and 63,000 migrants have arrived at the city’s main train station since August 31st.
German newspaper Bild cited security sources as saying Bavaria's state government had asked for help from the federal police, and 2,100 officers would be sent to Bavaria to assist in securing its borders.
Germany’s transport minister, Alexander Dobrindt, called for measures to provide “help for countries from where refugees are fleeing and . . . effective control of our own borders which also no longer works given the EU’s complete failure to protect its external borders”.
Serbia fears a humanitarian crisis if thousands of migrants are trapped on its territory.
Mr Orban insists the migrants should stay in the first safe countries they reach after fleeing conflict zones such as Syria and Afghanistan and says those seeking a new home in western Europe are pursuing prosperity rather than security.
Hungary has come under heavy criticism for rounding up the migrants in overcrowded and underprovisioned camps near the Serbian border, and for taking people to such camps on trains they thought were going to Austria.
"Sticking refugees in trains and sending them somewhere completely different to where they think they're going reminds us of the darkest chapter of our continent's history," said Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann.
Strain
“It is unacceptable that refugees arrive from Hungary afraid, panicked, hungry and sometimes traumatised,” said Mr Faymann, whose country is under heavy strain as thousands of migrants cross it each day, most heading for Germany.
Budapest dismissed Mr Faymann’s comments as “utterly unworthy of a 21st-century European leader” and summoned Austria’s ambassador.
Hungarian foreign minister Peter Szijjarto said Mr Faymann's "campaign of lies" against Hungary made it harder to find a European solution to the crisis.
The interior ministers of the EU’s 28 countries will meet today to discuss a crisis that has opened a rift between a German-led group of states that wants each member to take a quota of refugees, and mostly central European countries that oppose such a plan.
Czech premier Bohuslav Sobotka said yesterday there was “no way to back off” from Prague’s “solid” position that quotas would fail, because migrants could not be forced to remain in poorer EU states to which many would be sent.
“The quotas won’t work. People asking for asylum in Europe are not asking in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania or the Czech Republic but in Germany or Sweden, because they want to live there,” he said.
“If they are redistributed based on the quotas, we won’t be able to keep them in detention centres.”
Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Romania and the Baltic states have, with different degrees of vehemence, rejected quotas, and urged the EU instead to focus on tightening its external borders and finding ways to keep migrants out of Europe, or at the very least to stop them on its southern fringes.
“If Greece is incapable of protecting its own borders then the EU must be given the right to protect the country’s borders with concrete security forces and border surveillance,” Mr Orban said.
Division on the issue between Europe’s leaders was mirrored in many of its major cities over the weekend, when thousands took to the streets in rival protests calling for more liberal and for tougher attitudes towards migrants.
