Riot police fire tear gas at refugees
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/6643146/Riot-police-fire-tear-gas-at-refugees.html
DESPERATE refugees were sprayed with tear gas at the Hungarian border today as a tense standoff at the EU frontier exploded.
Hungarian cops also used water cannon and pepper spray to control hordes of asylum seekers after a four metre fence separating Hungary from Serbia was breached by migrants.
Furious refugees locked on the Serbian side of the border threw bottles, bricks and stones at police. Sources claimed two children were thrown over the fence and a pregnant lady went into labour.
The largely young, male crowd erupted with fury and screamed: “Shame on you Hungarians!”
Amir Hassan from Iraq said: “We fled wars and violence and did not expect such brutality and inhumane treatment in Europe.”
Scores of refugees from the Syrian conflict were reduced to pouring water over their eyes and attempting to cover their faces as sirens wailed in the background.
The chaos deepened the migration crisis threatening to tear the European Union apart. Germany has demanded an urgent meeting to discuss the crisis next week.
But Austria said German officials had requested a temporary suspension of rail services from the Austrian city of Salzburg to try and cope with the sheer numbers of refugees heading to the EU’s powerhouse economy
UN envoys said the United Nations may be forced to hold a special session of its security council next week to discuss the crisis.
In London, Home Secretary Theresa May said the first group of 20,000 Syrian refugees to be housed under the Government’s resettlement plan will arrive “in the coming days”.
But she repeated Britain would not take part in any EU plan to redistribute migrants across the Continent.
Hungary’s actions were condemned yesterday by human rights groups and other European leaders yesterday.
Labour MEP Claude Moraes said the use of tear gas was “unacceptable”.
Meanwhile Serbia expressed its “harshest possible protest”.
Croatia offered free passage to the EU for refugees blocked at the Hungarian-Serbian border gate.
But terrified officials warned that refugees choosing the new transit route could be blown up by land mines peppering ground on the Croat-Serbian border.
As many as 50,000 landmines dating from the Balkans War are still unaccounted for – including anti-vehicle mines, anti-personnel mines and even ones designed to disable a tank.
The controversial measures are part of Orban’s strategy to stem the flow of migrants trudging up through the western Balkans, most headed to Germany and Sweden.
The result was plain to see in statistics released by Hungarian police on Wednesday, with the number of people intercepted falling to just 367 from a record 9,380 the day before.
The apparent success in deflecting the flow sparked fears in Serbia that it would be swamped by an unmanageable number of migrants.
Serbia’s minister for refugees, Aleksandar Vulin, called on Hungary to reopen the border “at least for women and children” as around 100 people waited in vain to cross.
From the Alps to Istanbul, thousands of other migrants were caught in similar bottlenecks, with hundreds setting out to walk to Germany from the Austrian
border city of Salzburg after trains north were suspended as Berlin reintroduced border controls.
Germany, Austria and Slovakia have introduced identity checks on parts of their borders, and Poland and the Netherlands are considering whether to follow suit.
The measures have caused tailbacks at road crossing points and stoked concern among German road hauliers, who point to rising costs.
And hundreds more were stranded in the Turkish border city of Edirne after police stopped around 1,000 refugees from crossing into Greece and Bulgaria.
And huge crowds were camped out at Istanbul’s main bus station for a second night running, after being refused tickets to Edirne.
“They cannot stay here. Maybe we will allow them to stay two or three days but then they have to leave,” Edirne governor Dursun Ali Sahin told Turkey’s NTV channel.
Hungary’s hardline anti-migrant stance has been sharply criticised, with the UN refugee agency saying it could violate the 1951 Refugee Convention.
Romania, which is a member of the EU but not of the passport-free Schengen zone, criticised Hungary’s planned border fence as “out of step with the spirit of Europe”.
Politically, though, the big concern is for the future of the 20-year-old Schengen agreement, considered as important as the euro by many EU supporters.
By doing away with border checks and reducing bureaucracy, it provides a powerful economic stimulus and enhances a common European identity, they say.
Berlin’s decision Wednesday to extend greater passport controls to its border with France — the Schengen zone’s other principal architect — seemed to deal it another blow.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Austrian counterpart Werner Faymann on Tuesday called for a special EU summit next week to debate the crisis.
“Time is running out,” Merkel warned, urging an end to the squabbling that has flared since eastern members flatly refused to accept EU-set quotas for taking in tens of thousands of refugees.
Some 500 people are thought to have been killed in the minefields since the war ended a decade ago. The EU border agency Frontex on Tuesday revealed the scale of the human tide heading to Europe from the Middle East.
It said 500,000 migrants were detected at EU external borders in the first eight months of the year – with 156,000 in August alone.
Lebanese officials warned earlier this week that IS terrorists were cashing in on the misery by infiltrating refugee camps to smuggle agents in Europe.
Lebanese Education Minister Elias Bou Saab said he fears the fanatics make up at least 2 per cent of the 1.1 million Syrians living in camps across the country.
The Sun today revealed Britain was looking at setting up a no-fly zone over Syria in a bid to halt the refugee exodus to Europe.
But Syria’s hated President Bashar al-Assad today blamed the West for the refugee crisis.
In his first public comments on the mass migration, he said Western support for “terrorists” meant more Syrians had been forced to flee the country’s civil war.