Hungary declares emergency, seals border, detains migrants

[webfact]

Hungary declares emergency, seals border, detains migrants
By DUSAN STOJANOVIC and VANESSA GERA

HORGOS, Serbia (AP) — Hungary sealed off its border with Serbia with massive coils of barbed wire Tuesday and began detaining migrants trying to use the country as a gateway to Western Europe, harsh new measures that left thousands of frustrated asylum-seekers piled up on the Serbian side of the border.

Human rights activists condemned the move, with Amnesty International saying Hungary's "intimidating show of militarized force is shocking." But Prime Minister Viktor Orban defended the measures, saying he was acting to preserve Christian Europe, which he said had become threatened by the large numbers of Muslims streaming into the continent.

"The supply is nearly endless — we can see how many of them are coming," Orban said in a televised address just before the new laws took effect at midnight. "And if we look at the demographics, we can see that these people have more children than our communities who lead a traditional, Christian way of life."

"Mathematics tells you that this will lead to a Europe where our way of life will end up in a minority, or at least face a very serious challenge."

By nightfall Tuesday, thousands of migrants, including many babies and children, prepared to spend a night in the open or in flimsy tents erected in the bushes or on the main highway near the Serbian border with Hungary.

Men collected wood in a nearby forest for fires in preparation for a chilly night.

"I had hope until now, but it's all gone," lamented Mohammad Mahayni, a 32-year-old Syrian from Damascus, who became separated from his wife as they tried to enter Hungary a day earlier.

"I lifted the razor wire for her, she got in before a Hungarian border patrol came by," he said. "Now I don't know where she is."

The new laws make it a crime to breach or damage the 13-foot (4-meter) high razor-wire fence erected along 110 miles of Hungary's border with Serbia and include longer prison terms for convicted human traffickers. Authorities said they detained 174 people who tried to cross the border Tuesday. Hungary has said it will turn most of the migrants back to Serbia, which it considers a safe country where they could also request asylum.

The developments mark a dramatic reversal for Hungary, an East European nation that played a key role in cracking open the Iron Curtain in 1989 when it removed a border fence to Austria, prompting large numbers of East Germans to flee to the West.

At the European Parliament in Brussels, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker paid tribute Tuesday to Gyula Horn, the late Hungarian prime minister who dismantled that fence. He appeared at the unveiling of a bust of Horn, praising him as "a great Hungarian, a great person, a great European" — a clear gesture of reproach of Orban.

Hungary also declared a state of emergency in two southern regions Tuesday, giving authorities greater powers to deal with the crisis and allowing them to shut down roads and speed up asylum court cases.

That also allows the military to be deployed to defend the border, pending approval by parliament next week, though heavily armed military personnel with vehicles and dogs have been seen patrolling the border for days.

"For refugees fleeing from terrifying conflict zones to be met by such an intimidating show of militarized force is shocking, and a woefully irresponsible response to people already traumatized by war and brutality," said Gauri van Gulik, Amnesty International's deputy director for Europe.

The Hungarian government said it plans to extend the steel razor-wire fence — which it calls a "temporary border closure" — several miles (kilometers) along the border with Romania as well, something the Bucharest government said violated the "European spirit" of cooperation.

"I am horrified to think of one thing that is possible: What do we do if Hungarian troops begin to shoot or kill children and women?" Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta said late Tuesday on Antena 3 television.

Though Orban's steps are extreme, the migrant crisis has forced other European governments to reinstate border checks, possibly heralding a threat to the free movement across EU frontiers — one of the most cherished benefits brought by their union.

This week, Germany and the Netherlands were among countries that reintroduced border checks to manage the huge flow of people, while the Czech Republic said Tuesday it is prepared to deploy its armed forces to protect its borders if police alone cannot manage the crisis.

Meanwhile, Austria's Interior Ministry announced it would impose border controls with Hungary starting at midnight Tuesday and said the measures could be extended to the country's borders with Slovenia, Italy and Slovakia if necessary. The move was in response to fears that migrants now streaming into Austria from Hungary could try to cross into the country over those borders in large numbers.

Abolfazl Ebrahimi, a 17-year-old Afghan who was in Athens on Tuesday, said his group now plans to get to Western Europe through Croatia.

"I thought that European people are kind and they will give us rights. But I don't think so (anymore) because the borders between Germany and Austria are closed, and Serbia and Hungary are closed too," he said.

In the last few months, Hungary has become a main entry point and bottleneck into the European Union for migrants, many of them war refugees from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. More than 200,000 migrants have entered Hungary so far in 2015, nearly all by walking across the southern border with Serbia, as they make their way to Germany or other wealthy Western European nations.

Serbia's foreign minister declared it was unacceptable that migrants were being sent back from Hungary while more and more were arriving from Macedonia and Greece.

Serbia "wants to be part of the solution, not collateral damage. There will have to be talks in the coming days with Brussels and other countries," Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said in Prague.

The turmoil at the Hungarian-Serbian border came a day after the 28-nation EU failed to come up with a united immigration policy at a contentious meeting in Brussels. The ministers did agree to share responsibility for 40,000 people seeking refuge in overwhelmed Italy and Greece and spoke hopefully of reaching an eventual deal on which EU nations would take 120,000 more refugees, including some from Hungary.

The effectiveness of Hungary's moves was underlined dramatically by statistics: On Monday, with some gaps still open in the border, 9,380 migrants managed to pass into Hungary, a record high as people rushed to get into the European Union before the gates shut behind them.

When the measures took effect at midnight, almost nobody got in. Hungary said it received 72 requests for asylum by evening Tuesday but had not approved any.
____

Gera reported from Budapest, Hungary. Associated Press writers Pablo Gorondi and Alex Kuli in Budapest; Mike Corder in Roszke, Hungary; Geir Moulson in Berlin; Alison Mutler in Bucharest, Romania, and George Jahn in Vienna contributed to this report.


-- (c) Associated Press 2015-09-16

[baboon]

"I am horrified to think of one thing that is possible: What do we do if Hungarian troops begin to shoot or kill children and women?" Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta said late Tuesday on Antena 3 television.

And how many are Romania prepared to take in, house and feed at the expense of their taxpayers? Thought not.

[Usernames]

Hungary, the savior of European civilization.

[BuaBS]

They should have sealed their borders months ago.

Apparently the Greeks weren't lying about letting the hordes through to invade the EU.

[h90]

They should have sealed their borders months ago.

Apparently the Greeks weren't lying about letting the hordes through to invade the EU.

Also Italy let them in and move freely as long as they move out of Italy....

[Baerboxer]

"I am horrified to think of one thing that is possible: What do we do if Hungarian troops begin to shoot or kill children and women?" Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta said late Tuesday on Antena 3 television.

And how many are Romania prepared to take in, house and feed at the expense of their taxpayers? Thought not.

Romania likes the open borders. They can "encourage" their gypsies to move to more "comfortable" countries while there's no checks.

[Kerryd]

What are these people thinking ? That they just arrive in Germany or England or Sweden and it's all going to be riches and paradise ? That hundreds of thousands of accommodations and high-paying jobs are just sitting there waiting for them to arrive ?

What happens when they arrive and there are no luxury accommodations and they are crammed into block housing (at best) or tent cities, with winter coming ? What happens when they find there are few or no jobs ? What happens when they decide the government of (wherever) isn't giving them enough free stuff for them to earn a living (selling the free stuff), raise a family and take holidays back to the home country ? What happens when the Sunnis and Shias and Wahhabis and Alawites see Zorastrians and Christians and Yazidi refugees getting the exact same things they are (and possibly are living in the exact same accommodations) ?

Note: I was stationed in Germany from '84-88 while the Cold War was "still a thang". The (West) Germans I knew despised the (East) Germans as being mostly welfare cases that the government bent over backwards to support (at the expense of the West Germans footing the bills of course). Then there were the other refugees, like the Turks (yes, at one point there were a lot of Turks flooding into Germany because of the high level of benefits and quality healthcare and the lure of "high paying" jobs).

Tensions got pretty high at one point when an apartment building full of Turkish "refugees" threatened to burn down the building they were living in (with their families) if the German government didn't give them more money !! You see, the Germans were giving them free accommodations and giving them money for food, clothing and sundries, but according to the Turks themselves, it wasn't enough to allow them to return to Turkey for vacations !!!!!!!!

I remember seeing the news reports on TV with my (German) friends. To say that the (West) Germans living in my area were livid would be putting it mildly. They were ready to march on that apartment building, chain the doors and set it on fire themselves. They were happy to help those in need, but when they saw people trying to screw them over and taking advantage of them and being downright arrogant about the whole matter, they got pretty close to taking matters into their own hands.

Throwing open the gates and allowing hundreds of thousands (or millions) of economic migrants and refugees flood into Europe is not going to solve the problems they left behind in their home countries, but it sure might bring those same problems to new places.

The Egyptian billionaire with the plan to buy a "relatively uninhabited" island and sticking a hundred thousand refugees on there is just as short sighted as many of the advocacy groups demanding that even more refugees be allowed in. Somehow the Egyptian figures they'll just whip together a whack of temporary housing, with schools and hospitals, truck/boat/fly in a hundred thousand or so refugees and then hire those refugees to build more permanent buildings. Sovereignty issues ? Security ? Administration ? Food ? Waste ? Meh - someone else's problems. Not to mention that those refugees don't want to be stuck on an island in the Med. They want Euro government supplied housing, jobs and healthcare. They'd stay on that island just long enough to find a way to sneak off of it and into Europe.

I countered the Egyptian's idea with the proposal to simply lease large hunks of land from the Turkish government and set up camps there. It's closer to where most of those "refugees" came from (and supposedly will go back to when the fighting finally ends). It would be cheaper and easier to set up there than on some island in the middle of an ocean. Fewer issues regarding sovereignty and best of all, significantly less risk of those refugees drowning while trying to sneak into Europe on overloaded boats !

Oops I forgot. The goal is to get to Europe, not to somewhere safe, close to home, easy to return home from eventually.

[Scott]

An inflammatory post advocating death has been removed.

[maidee]

greek tragedy : trojan horse has entered europe ...

if so many people needed in germany, why not have looked at eastern europe, at least they are christian

[Sam Jones]

Good work, Hungary - stay firm and keep these Welfare check crusaders out of Europe ...

[farangmick]

Orban is the only head of a European state with cohones. Was going to say balls, but not sure if it would get deleted. Sorry no likes on previous posts. Reached daily limit.