SEPTEMBER 7 (Reuters) — Several hundred migrants woke up in a Hungarian field near the border with Serbia on Monday (September 7) morning, after spending a cold night in the open air.
After walking across the border on Sunday (September 6) afternoon, some 500 people, mostly Syrians, were forced to camp out in an open field at temperatures of 8 degrees Celsius, as nearby transit camps were overcrowded with migrants.
The field, designated as a collection point, holds migrants who keep pouring across the border, as the police does not allow them to walk some three kilometers to the nearest border town of Roszke to seek shelter instead.
“The situation is very very sad. Everybody here feel cold and tired and nobody wants to stay here, but there’s no buses enough, one bus at two hours, and there’s about 500 (people here), maybe more. The situation is very very bad,” said Amer, a student from Damascus.
Many migrants, young and old, tried to stay warm by burning donated blankets and plastic bottles as policemen stood by guarding the field.
“Ah, so hard, so cold, and we are tired so much. We just want to take a shower and sleep, but we cannot, we must stay. And they tell us they will send us to another camp, and we don’t know how it is (there). We wait,” said Abdullah, an agronomist from the Syrian city of Homs.
The migrants then gathered and waited for buses to take them to the nearest transit camp, as soon as space becomes available after the transporting of migrants from camps to Budapest.
But by 8 AM only one bus arrived, taking some 50 people, with the rest staying in the field and waiting, creating a bottleneck.
Estimates say that hundreds of people travel the Balkan route from the Greek mainland through Macedonia and Serbia into Hungary every day.
Europe has been split over the idea espoused by Germany and Austria to set fixed quotas for countries to take in migrants in the biggest flow since the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Monday that the European Union should give financial support to Turkey and other non-member countries to help them deal with the stream of migrants and refugees trying to reach Europe.
Addressing Hungarian diplomats in Budapest, the right-wing leader also said discussion of quotas for distributing migrants between members of the 28-nation bloc were premature while it was unable to defend its external frontiers.
