BUDAPEST, Hungary — Leaders of the United Nations refugee agency warned Tuesday that Hungary faces a bigger wave of 42,000 asylum seekers in the next 10 days and will need international help to provide shelter on its border, where newcomers already are complaining bitterly about being left to sleep in frigid fields.
Officials from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said it was sending tents, beds and thermal blankets to Hungary’s border with Serbia, where for the past two days frustrated groups from the Middle East, Asia and Africa have ignored police instructions to stay put and instead have marched on a highway north to Budapest.
Commissioner Antonio Guterres accused the entire European Union of failing to see the crisis coming or take coordinated action, even though the 28-nation bloc of 508 million people should have enough room and resources to absorb hundreds of thousands of newcomers with ease.
There was needless suffering in the migration crisis “because Europe is not organized to deal with it, because the European asylum system has been extremely dysfunctional and in recent weeks completely chaotic,” Guterres said. He told a news conference in Paris that it appeared “clear that if Europe would be properly organized, it would be a manageable crisis.”
The EU has struggled, in part, because front-line nations such as Hungary and Greece have not put enough facilities in place to house a human flow averaging 2,000 to 3,000 a day while the vast majority of people try to push deeper into Europe and seek refugee protection in Germany, the nation accepting the greatest number by far.
Germany already expects to take in 800,000 this year, and Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said Tuesday it could take a further 1 million over the next two years. Many other EU members have yet to follow Germany’s lead, and Hungary’s government instead is focusing on building a border fence to block the route from Serbia. It plans a series of get-tough frontier security measures that it hopes to start enforcing Sept. 15, although international observers are skeptical.
The UNHCR’s refugee coordinator for Europe, Vincent Cochetel, told a Budapest news conference that Hungary could not cope on its own with the coming, even bigger volume of asylum seekers. He said 42,000 people — 30,000 in Greece, 7,000 in Macedonia and 5,000 in Serbia — were likely to enter Hungary in the next 10 days, requiring greater international help.
“We need better coordination to make sure we don’t have chaos at the border,” he said, chiding Hungary for allowing people to be left overnight “in a very dire situation.”
Hungary’s inconsistent reception near the border village of Roszke has left many hundreds waiting for buses that arrive too infrequently, leaving large numbers stranded at night. Officers have found it increasingly difficult to keep them within a designated field. Some have pushed through police lines and walk north deeper into Hungary, while others head south back to Serbia where camps are sometimes better organized.
