Hungary posts ads in Lebanese media warning off migrants

The Hungarians weren’t able to register many of them because they refused to fill out the paperwork, he said.

The bill approved Monday lets soldiers carry out numerous same tasks as police, such as checking ID, detaining suspects and controlling the flow of traffic at the borders. “And we’ll keep doing it,” he said.

People queue up to get a bit of soup, bread and tea from volunteers, children and young men play football, a little girl draws in a notebook and a group of friends bursts into spontaneous song.

Mr Szijjarto explained that without a fence, expelling migrants back into Croatia would create chaos.

Last week, Hungary introduced tough new laws giving courts the power to jail people for up to three years for crossing its borders “illegally”, rising to five years if they damage its frontier fences. Hungarian military officers could be seen on the Croatian border near Beremend this weekend with measuring equipment, sizing up what they needed to build fences there.

The continent’s biggest migratory flow since the end of World War II has dug a deep rift between western and eastern European Union members over how to distribute the migrants fairly.

European Union interior ministers are to meet over the crisis on Tuesday, followed by an emergency summit on Wednesday.

Slovenian Prime Minister Miro Cerar told The Washington Post that that his small country was overwhelmed.

In Greece, fewer boats than normal landed on the island of Lesbos – a major transit point for Syrian refugees heading to Europe from Turkey – on Monday morning, ahead of an expected thunderstorm, Reuters reported.

“The (Schengen) agreements are now part of our daily lives and it is unthinkable that the facilities enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of travellers and cross-border workers in Europe are challenged by nationalist and reactionary thoughts and political actions”, said Jean Asselborn, Minister of Foreign and European Affairs for Luxembourg.

Almost 4,700 migrants were rescued off the coast of Libya on Saturday as they tried to reach Europe but one woman was found dead on board a boat, Italy’s coastguard said.

“To date we’ve registered 13,000 migrants on Croatian territory”, Ranko Ostojic, Croatian inside ninister, stated on Friday.

But even as people were being moved out of Tovarnik, a town on the border with Serbia, more arrived.

The border closures in Croatia and Hungary mean the main land route from Greece to northern Europe has effectively been cut off, reports the BBC.

Meanwhile, Hungary stood behind its tough response Sunday. “That’s the way it’s going to be now, whether the Romanian foreign minister likes it or not”. In other words: compassion is not enough, and while Hungary has been rightfully been condemned for the chilling scenes on its border, those scenes will inevitably be repeated in more humane countries until Europe awakens to the true scale of what is coming, and commits the necessary resources to dealing with it.

Nearly 500,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean to Europe so far this year, increasingly across the water from Turkey to Greece and then up through the impoverished Balkans to the former Yugoslavia, of which Croatia and Slovenia are members of the EU.

They are now racing against the weather, trying to make the journey across the Mediterranean before winter sets in.

In Sunday’s accident off the Turkish coast, the dinghy that was hit was carrying at least 46 migrants to Lesbos, one of several Greek islands inundated in recent months by tens of thousands of people arriving from Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East and South Asia.

Two coast guard vessels headed to the area and have rescued 20 people.