Röszke // Hungary’s migrant crisis escalated on Wednesday as police fired teargas at its main processing centre and the government announced it was sending 2,000 police to stem the flow of record numbers of people entering from Serbia.
Police fired teargas to disperse around 200 migrants who had refused to be fingerprinted and were trying to leave the processing centre at Roszke near the border with non-EU Serbia, along which Hungary is erecting a fence.
Police spokesman, Szabolcs Szenti, said “police are trying to calm the situation, but the migrants are continuing to shout.”
Another spokesman said the migrants wanted to leave the centre after news circulated that Germany was easing asylum rules for people fleeing the civil war in Syria.
Police said meanwhile that more than 2,500 people, the highest ever daily total, poured across Hungary’s southern border with Serbia near the town of Roszke on Tuesday even though a barbed-wire barrier was nearly completed.
The majority were from Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and included more than 500 children.
“We left because we were scared, we had fear, bombs, war, killing, death ... That’s why we left Syria,” one Syrian man heading for the Hungarian border said on Tuesday.
“If I go to Europe, I think it’s going to be better ... better than my life in Syria.”
The migrants crossing into Hungary are part of around 7,000 refugees and migrants whose journey to the European Union was blocked last week when Macedonia declared a state of emergency and shut its borders for three days after being overwhelmed by the influx.
As Europe struggles with its worst migrant crisis since the Second World War, Hungary has become – like Italy and Greece – a “front line” state and many of the hundreds of thousands of people trying to enter the bloc travel up through the western Balkans.
The crisis is set to dominate a summit of leaders from the western Balkans on Thursday in Vienna that will also be attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Germany expects to take in a record 800,000 migrants this year.
Hungary, which is part of the passport-free Schengen zone, has registered more than 100,000 asylum-seekers so far in 2015, over double the total for all of last year.
So far this year, 140,630 migrants have been intercepted crossing into Hungary, the vast majority over from Serbia.
The daily number has leaped from 150 per day in the first half of this year to more than 2,000 in August, after Hungary’s conservative government announced it would build a razor-wire fence along its border with Serbia.
Hungary is attractive to the migrants because, unlike other EU members in southeastern Europe like Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania, it is the passport-free Schengen zone, making onwards travel much easier.
Hungary’s right-wing government under Prime Minister Viktor Orban is attempting to stem the flow by erecting a barrier along its border with Serbia.
A roll of barbed wire along the entire length is due to be completed by Monday, followed by a four-metre-high fence.
On Wednesday, Hungary’s police chief Karoly Papp said more than 2,000 police would be operational along to Serbian border from September.
The reinforcements, called “border hunters”, will patrol the length of the border, supporting the more than 1,000 regular police already working around the clock to intercept illegal immigrants, Mr Papp said.
* Agence France-Presse
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