Refugee Crises At Dangerous Tipping Point As Hungary Makes Arrests, Germany Loses Patience
“I’m not happy. I had to leave Syria — I love Syria, but so much killing there.”
That’s from 17-year old Mohammed Al-Hamdan who made it across the Hungarian border with Serbia at a railroad crossing near the village of Roszke before it was closed on Tuesday. As NBC reports, “just before Hungarian police closed the railroad crossing, a Syrian family ran down the tracks trying to make it through, the patriarch screaming to his wife and small children, ‘Yallah, yallah!’ — Arabic for ‘Let’s go!’” Before closing the “popular” passage, Hungary had reportedly begun hauling migrants on to trains and shipping them straight to the Austrian border. “The situation is that after crossing the border these people have arrived at the collection point in Roszke, where there is no official procedure, people are just being collected. Earlier these people were being taken to the registration points … this is not happening now, but rather, buses are taking people from the collection point to the Roszke train station according to our information,” a UNHCR spokesman told Reuters.
Of course even for the migrants who were “lucky” enough to be rounded up and shipped to Austria as opposed to being stranded behind Hungary’s new migrant-be-gone fence, their fate is far from certain. As The New York Timesnoted on Monday, Austrian officials have now sent “2,200 soldiers to help reinforce the eastern border.”
The rush to get into the Hungary came as the country largely completed a four meter, razor wire fence meant to cut off the flow of refugees and channel them to official registration centers where they can apply for asylum. “If their applications are refused,” BBC says, “they will now be returned to Serbia rather than being given passage through Hungary.”
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