Germany urges other EU countries to take in more refugees

By The Guardian

Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, has pressed other EU countries to do more to share the burden of refugees arriving in Europe, and said “it wasn’t right” that some nations were refusing to accept them.

Merkel said the current situation, which has seen chaotic scenes in the western Balkans as tens of thousands of refugees and migrants head north towardsAustria and Germany, was “not satisfactory”. She said that Europe as a whole had to deal with the problem.

Speaking at her summer press conference in Berlin on Monday, Merkel renewed her call for a new quota system to be introduced. It would see applications from asylum seekers shared out among the 28-nation bloc. The Franco-German proposal would be discussed on 14 September at a meeting of EU interior ministers, she said.

David Cameron and some east European countries have fiercely resisted the plan. On Monday, Austria’s interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said that EU countries that refused to take their fair share of refugees should see the money they receive from the EU budget slashed.

Speaking after 71 people were found dead in the back of a lorry in Austria last week after apparently suffocating to death, Mikl-Leitner said: “In a European community you can’t just pick out the raisins. You also have to take responsibility.”

Germany expects to accept 800,000 asylum seekers this year, four times more than in 2014 and more than any other EU country. Merkel stressed: “If Europe fails on the question of refugees, its close connection with universal civil rights will be destroyed.” In June Downing Street said the UK would accept fewer than 1,000 Syrians.

Asked on Monday if Britain should be penalised for refusing to show solidarity, Merkel said: “I don’t want to get out my torture instruments.” She noted that the UK, Ireland and Denmark have treaty opt-outs from the EU’s asylum protocols. “Let’s talk to each other, rather than at each other,” she said.

The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, meanwhile confirmed that France would build a new “humanitarian” camp for 1,500 migrants in Calais which would be ready in the new year, with fresh funding from European authorities.

Currently, at least 3,000 people are sleeping rough in fetid conditions in a makeshift camp of tents known as “the new jungle”, as they hope to be able to cross the Channel to Britain. Doctors and NGOs have warned of the unsanitary conditions of the makeshift Calais camp and of health problems which could worsen as winter sets in.

European commission vice-president Frans Timmermans said that European authorities would give France an extra €5m to help migrants in Calais. Visiting Calais, Timmermans said Europe “will never turn away those who need protection”.

Echoing Merkel, Valls said that too few EU countries were helping to deal with huge migration flows. “Too many countries are refusing to play their part. It goes against the European spirit and we can’t accept it,” he said. 

Valls implicitly criticised Hungary, which has built a 109-mile (175km) fence along its southern border with Serbia. “Barbed wire” would not solve the problem, he said.

Berlin and Paris have come up with various proposals to deal with Europe’s worst refugee crisis since 1945. They include a list which would see migrants from “safe countries” automatically deported, and new registration centres in Italy and Greece, where asylum applications could be processed.

Merkel admitted that if Europe was unable to agree an equitable distribution of refugees, the passport-free Schengen zone would be called into question. It is already under strain. On Monday there were 16-mile tailbacks on the motorway between Budapest and Vienna after Austria on Sunday introduced new border inspections.

Austria’s interior ministry said that about 200 asylum seekers had been stopped as part of the operation and five people traffickers arrested. It denied its checks were in breach of the Schengen agreement. 

Austrian security forces also stopped trains with several hundred migrants on board near the border with Hungary, a police spokesman said, hours after authorities in Budapest let them leave despite many not having EU visas. The trains were halted near the Hungarian border town of Hegeshalom, where Austrian police proceeded to check their papers. At least one of the trains was later allowed to leave.

It emerged on Monday that the refugees found suffocated to death inside a truck in Austria last week almost certainly included a Syrian family of six and two Pakistani men, according to volunteers working at a camp in Hungary.

Some of the victims had stayed at the camp at Budapest’s Keleti station run byMigration Aid, a volunteer group. They were among 71 people who travelled last Wednesday in the back of a refrigerated van from the central Hungarian city of Kecskemét.

Their badly decomposing bodies were discovered on Thursday on Austria’s A4 motorway near the town of Parndorf. Four men – three Bulgarian nationals and an Afghan – appeared in court over the weekend.

“We are 99% sure that a Syrian family – a mother and father with four children, who had stayed on this site – were in the lorry,” a volunteer who helps out as an interpreter from Arabic to his native Hungarian, “Baba”, told the Guardian.

He said: “Another Syrian family had been waiting for them in Germany, and when they didn’t arrive, they called us up, and then we heard the news from Austria.”

Tamás Lederer, 42, a university professor and the de facto head of Migration Aid, said: “The other Syrian family had been here some weeks before: that’s how they had my telephone number. One of them called to say the family should be here. We worked out what had happened from pictures that appeared online.”

“There were also two Pakistani gentlemen in their 20s,” he said, adding that “people here are devastated”.

According to Baba, the 71 victims would be hard to identify. “Most people in the truck hadn’t been fingerprinted. We know this because most didn’t have a police paper, just an armband. Nowadays the police and immigration are so overrun that they can’t even ask their names,” he said.

Hungarian police said a fifth man was detained on Saturday evening on suspicion of human trafficking. Earlier on Saturday a court in Kecskemét – a smuggling centre halfway between Budapest and the migrants’ most common entry point of Röszke – remanded the four truck suspects in custody for a month. They were a 28-year-old Afghan and three Bulgarians aged 29, 30 and 50. As the bodies were found in Austria, the Hungarian courts will only deal with smuggling charges.

Over the weekend, the dead were mourned at a candle-lit shrine on the steps of Budapest’s train station. Syrians and other nationalities chanted “Germany! Germany! Germany! Let us go! Let us go!” in two impromptu demonstrations on Saturday and Sunday.

Migration Aid began helping 100-200 refugees in the underpass to Keleti metro station five months ago. It has experienced soaring numbers of up to 1,500 people in recent days.

Speaking at the transit zone, where families use empty pizza boxes as makeshift mattresses, Lederer said the overcrowding was due to two developments: Hungary’s new policy of refusing to let migrants to even enter the station without passports and the 7,000-person bottleneck caused by Macedonia holding migrants at its border with Greece for three days, before relenting just over a week ago.

Hungary’s new policing policy of denying migrants entry to Budapest station has confused many, in the light of Merkel’s recent promise that Syrian citizens could apply for asylum, irrespective of which EU country they arrived at.

“No passport, no train,” a police officer told Syrians Qais, 20, and Amraz, 15, at the station gates.

“We posted our passports to Germany, and the Hungarian government told us we can travel with this,” Qais said, holding up travel authorisation documents given to them at a police station in Szeged, near Hungary’s border with Serbia. “We left Mayadin because Syrian army jets destroyed our house,” he said. The war has scattered his family across the globe: one of his brothers moved to Egypt, another to Russia. “We were planning to travel to my uncle, who has been living in Dortmund for a year,” Qais added.

“I haven’t slept for three days. Can you help us?” Amraz said.

Hungary’s dominant party Fidesz, which was plummeting in the polls in a quagmire of corruption scandals earlier in the year, has adopted a hardline policy against migrants in recent months. These moves have included a billboard campaign that warned migrants “if you come to Hungary, do not take the jobs of Hungarians”, a “national consultation” questionnaire that international organisations have condemned as a xenophobic push poll, and the construction of the fence.

However the fence has not stopped the flow of people, many of whom have walked thousands of miles by the time they reach it.

Amer, a 28-year-old former business development manager from Aleppo, told the Guardian that “a four-year-old blind child cut two veins while crossing the fence last week”.

This week Hungary’s Fidesz party will pass a regulation under which the police will be allowed to enter any private home without a warrant if the presence of illegal migrants is suspected. Illegal crossing of the border will meanwhile become a criminal offence punishable by immediate expulsion and, in repeat cases, incarceration of up to five years.

Migrants will be held in “closed transit zones” within 60 metres of the border, while their applications are ruled on within eight days. Fidesz has also said it will move the migrant zone at Keleti to a less central location in two weeks.