BUDAPEST: Hungarian police blocked hundreds of migrants from boarding trains to western Europe from Budapest’s main rail station on Tuesday, as figures showed more than 350,000 have risked their lives to cross the Mediterranean this year.

As hundreds of police, some in riot gear, moved people out of Keleti station, statistics from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) revealed the scale of Europe’s biggest migrant crisis since World War II.

IOM figures show over 234,770 migrants have landed in Greece alone so far this year — more than the entire Europe-wide figure for all of 2014. Another 114,276 made it to Italy.

But at least 2,600 have died on the journey, it said, drowning or suffocating in dangerous or unseaworthy boats.

The UN’s children’s agency Unicef said eight out of 10 refugees arriving in Macedonia, one of the main transit points onto western Europe, were fleeing war-torn Syria.

An estimated 100,000 have passed through the Balkan country since June, it said.

A third of them were women and children, and one in every eight women was pregnant, it added.

Stories of refugees dying in horrific conditions crammed inside lorries or boats have become a regular occurrence, with European Council President Donald Tusk saying Tuesday the bloc’s priority was “preventing migrants from losing their lives”.

But the crisis has thrown the EU’s border control procedures into chaos as governments struggle to tackle the growing wave of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa.

Meanwhile, around two hundred refugees were locked in a standoff with police outside Budapest’s Keleti station after they were prevented from travelling onwards.

The migrants’ plight was brought sharply into focus last week after 71 people, including four children, were found dead in an abandoned truck on an Austrian motorway near the Hungarian border.

“Germany! Germany! We want to leave!” chanted the crowd, with some holding their babies in the air.

Hungarian railway authorities announced they would allow “only those in possession of the appropriate travel documents and — if necessary — a visa to board trains travelling to western Europe”.

The refugee rights group Hungarian Helsinki Committee warned the situation at the station was “very tense and unpredictable”.

The ban was enforced just 24 hours after police had unexpectedly allowed people stuck for days in makeshift refugee camps to leave the Hungarian capital, with hundreds surging onto trains bound for Germany and Austria, despite many not having EU visas.

This saw the highest number of migrants entering Austria in a single day this year, with police saying 3,650 arriving in Vienna by train on Monday.

Many of the migrants continued on to Germany, which last week eased asylum restrictions for Syrian refugees.

German police said a record 3,500 asylum-seekers had turned up in Bavaria on Tuesday.

An unprecedented number of migrants have also arrived in Belgium, with a camp springing up in Brussels near the the main refugee processing centre, where up to 1,000 were waiting to apply for asylum on Monday.

Sweden also said on Tuesday that the number of weekly asylum requests there was nearing historic levels.

The record influx of refugees and migrants is Europe’s “greatest challenge”, Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy declared on Tuesday during talks in Berlin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

So far, police in Hungary and Bulgaria have arrested seven people in connection with the truck tragedy.

The grim discovery led to a security crackdown in Austria with huge tailbacks forming along the border on Monday and Tuesday, as officers inspected vehicles in search of people-smugglers and migrants.

The escalating situation has divided the EU ahead of emergency talks on September 14.

At the heart of the crisis lies the question over how to distribute the migrants across the bloc and help relieve pressure on so-called “frontline “nations where migrants arrive by sea or land.

Much-flouted EU rules, known as the Dublin regulation, stipulate that refugees should be processed in the first country they reach.

Published in Dawn, September 2nd, 2015

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