Reuters
Vienna
Austria and Germany yesterday threw open their borders to thousands of exhausted migrants, bussed to the frontier by a right-wing Hungarian government that tried to stop them but was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people.
Left to walk the last yards into Austria, rain-soaked migrants, many of them refugees from Syria’s civil war, were whisked by train and shuttle bus to Vienna, where authorities promptly arranged for thousands to travel on to Germany.
The German state of Bavaria said 2,000 of up to 7,000 Syrian refugees expected in the country yesterday had arrived on special trains in Munich. Queues snaked towards tents where the new arrivals were being registered.
Austrian police said more than 6,000 people had entered the country by midday with more expected in what has become Europe’s most acute refugee crisis since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
Meanwhile, Organisation of Islamic Co-operation (OIC) secretary-general Iyad Ameen Madani has called on all members and the international community as a whole to put aside their differences and mobilise their efforts to help the Syrian people and refugees. “This is neither a Syrian, nor Middle Eastern, nor European nor Muslim crisis. This is an international humanitarian crisis, in which precious lives are perishing,” Madani said in a statement.
