(Telegraph.co.uk) June 30 2015 - Dressed only in a thin white polo shirt and jeans, Ashraf, a 17-year-old from Damascus, shivers in the rain next to the dense Serbo-Hungarian forest where he has lived without food and water for three days. His exhausted father holds up a handful of grass: “For three days now we’ve had nothing else to eat but this.”
Ashraf, who set out from Syria with his father in November, has just been caught after crossing into Hungary from Serbia, with the aim of reaching Germany. He and around 60 compatriots, including families with babies and a dozen children under 10, were captured by Hungarian police and rounded up between a forest and an industrial estate.
“We are good people, my father is an electrician. I want to be a dentist. Germany needs us, we are good people,” Ashraf says.
He and his father, like thousands of others, passed through Turkey, Greece and Macedonia. They walked for seven hours a day, for seven months.
According to government statistics, they were among at least 61,000 migrants who have entered Hungary this year, up sharply from 43,000 in all of 2014. This is more refugees per capita than any other EU country apart from Sweden. Around 95 per cent of them cross from Serbia, which is not a member of the EU but has started accession talks.
As a gateway to both the EU and the Schengen passport-free zone, Hungary has become the hidden front line of Europe’s migration crisis. Its government wants to ensure that Ashraf is among the last to enter the country via this route. Hungary – the first nation to dismantle its borders before the collapse of Communism in 1989 – is planning to erect a 110-mile long, 13ft-high barbed wire fence along its border with Serbia. The plan has outraged the United Nations and the EU. Natasha Bertaud, a European Commission spokesman, said last week: “We have only just torn down walls in Europe: we should not be putting them up.” Full Story
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