The highway was blocked for all traffic into Austria. After days of confrontation and chaos, Hungary’s right-wing government deployed dozens of buses to move on refugees from the capital, Budapest, and pick up over 1, 000 – many of them refugees from the Syrian war – walking down the main highway to Vienna. Austria said it had agreed with Germany that they would allow the refugees access, unable to enforce the rules of a European asylum system brought to breaking point by the continent’s worst refugee crisis since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
VIENNA, Sept 5 (Reuters) – Around 2,000 refugees have arrived at Austria’s border from Hungary, and the numbers could more than double through the day, Austrian police said on Saturday.
Two special trains taking refugees from the Austrian border town of Nickelsdorf to Vienna were about to depart, he added.
Wrapped in blankets against the rain, hundreds of visibly exhausted refugees, many carrying small children, climbed off buses on the Hungarian side of the border and walked in a long line into Austria, receiving fruit and water from aid workers.
Hungary cited traffic safety for its decision to move the refugees on. But it appeared to mark an admission that the government had lost control in the face of overwhelming numbers determined to reach the richer nations of northern and western Europe at the end of an often perilous journey from war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
On Friday, hundreds broke out of an overcrowded camp on Hungary’s border with Serbia; others escaped from a stranded train, sprinting away from riot police down railway tracks, while still more took to the highway by foot led by a one-legged Syrian refugee and chanting “Germany, Germany!”
The scenes were emblematic of a crisis that has left Europe groping for answers, and for unity.
By nightfall, the Keleti railway terminus in Budapest, for days a campsite of refugees barred from taking trains west to Austria and Germany, was almost empty, as smiling families boarded a huge queue of buses that then snaked out of the capital.
The refugees left shoes, clothes and mattresses scattered behind them. Helicopters circled overhead.
Austria’s Red Cross said it expected between 800 and 1,500 people to arrive in its refugee reception center of Nickelsdorf at the Hungarian border overnight.
Even as the buses arrived to collect them, some refugees remained suspicious, mindful of how hundreds of their number had boarded a train on Thursday that they believed was heading to the border but was stopped just west of Budapest by riot police who ordered them into a reception camp.
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