Thousands of migrants who have been ‘bottled up’ in Hungary, demanding passage to the West, will be allowed into Austria and Germany, the Austrian chancellor said late Friday. Early Saturday, the first buses carrying them arrived at the Hungary-Austria border.
Image: Credit Attila Kisbenedek/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In a chaotic scene at the main border crossing on the road to Vienna, local volunteers handed out water and bananas to the first busloads of exhausted but happy migrants. As they began passing from Hungarian territory through the border checkpoint, a few shouted, “Thank you, Austria!”
Earlier, after several days of continued chaos and civil disobedience by the migrants, Hungarian officials threw in the towel and allowed the people living in a squalid encampment in a below-ground plaza outside the city’s main train station onto more than 40 buses headed for the Austrian border, as they had been demanding.
“On the basis of the current situation of need, Austria and Germany agree to allow in this case the onward journey of these refugees into their countries,” Chancellor Werner Faymann of Austria wrote on his Facebook page.
Migrants in Budapest early Saturday before leaving by bus to cross into Austria. More than 40 buses were sent to the border. Austrian officials have pledged to do what they could to receive the migrants safely and seamlessly.
Credit: Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Late into a confusing night, during which the police warned that soccer hooligans were planning to attack the encampment, the promised buses finally began arriving around 1 a.m. Saturday, to cheering and clapping from the weary migrants.
The people in the encampment had hoped to travel by train to Austria and Germany, and the Hungarian authorities had let six trainloads of them through on Monday before closing off the station to them and eventually shutting down all international rail traffic to the West.
Officials said that more than a thousand other migrants who had begun walkingFriday down the M1 motorway, the country’s main road to the West, severely disrupting traffic, would also be picked up and driven to the border. But migrants allowed only one bus to leave, saying they would wait to see if it actually went to the border before allowing others to depart.
Police helicopters swirled overhead, and the migrants, uncertain what to do, huddled together in the fetid encampment.
Credit: Frank Augstein/Associated Press
Just before 1 a.m. on Saturday, a man with a bullhorn began telling the crowd that they would be taken to the border, and that they should bring with them as much food and water as they could. Families began frantically packing their possessions. ‘Be prepared to move,’ they were told.
The long line of regional buses began loading the migrants. Some were marked “chartered service” or “transit service.” They were mostly rickety, Soviet-era buses in distinctive blue and yellow liveries. People waited in long lines to board, and by1:10 a.m., the first buses were on the move. Migrants waved happily to onlookers as they pulled away.
Tags: Europe Crisis Europe migrants crisis migrants issue
