Refugees in Hungary Fed 'Like Animals In Pen'
(VIDEO)
Video
September 11, 2015 "Information
Clearing House"
- "RT"
- Dramatic footage has emerged showing people at Hungary's main
refugee camp on the border with Serbia being fed like wild
animals. Crowds of refugees, children and women among them,
shout to get the officers' attention, struggling to catch the
bread thrown to them through the air.
Some 150 people can be seen at Roszke camp in a fenced-in
enclosure inside a big hall as Hungarian police, equipped with
helmets and hygiene masks, throw bags of sandwiches at them.
The video was shot secretly by an Austrian volunteer who visited
the flashpoint camp earlier this week. The footage, which was
uploaded on YouTube late Thursday, had over 25,000 views by
Friday afternoon.
"It was like animals being fed in a pen, like Guantanamo
in Europe," Alexander Spritzendorfer, whose wife, Michaela
filmed the scenes, told AFP. The couple came to Roszke to bring
food, clothes and medication to the refugees.
"It was inhumane and it really speaks
for these people that they didn't fight over the food despite being
clearly very hungry," Michaela Spritzendorfer-Ehrenhauser said.
"It was around 8 o'clock and they were giving dinner to
people," she said. "There were maybe 100 people trying to
catch these plastic bags with sausages... They were not able to
organize a camp and treat them like human beings," Reuters
quoted Spritzendorfer-Ehrenhauser as saying.
Hungarian police said Friday they had launched an urgent
investigation into the video.
Meanwhile, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs claimed that people
were spending only a few hours in an "optimal case" at this
detention center. But they can remain there for up to two days under
a procedure permitted by the EU.
"I can see policemen who have been performing their duties
for months, trying to take care of 23,000 migrants arriving
continuously day by day, while there is no cooperation whatsoever on
their part," Kovacs told Reuters. "I can see they are
trying to maintain order among those who are unable to line up for
food."
With Europe experiencing an escalating refugee crisis, Hungary is
bearing the brunt of the latest influx as thousands of refugees flee
violence in the Middle East and North Africa. Tens of thousands of
asylum seekers are entering the European Union, using Hungary as a
transit country as they seek to reach better-off countries such as
Germany, Austria and Sweden.
On Wednesday, a journalist for Hungary’s N1TV channel, associated
with the far-right Jobbik party, was fired after her colleagues
filmed her kicking and tripping up migrants, including children,
fleeing from the police. Camerawoman Petra László was filming at a
migrants’ center near the village of Roszke on the Hungarian-Serbian
border when hundreds of migrants broke through a police cordon in a
field.
At one point, she found herself in the middle of a throng of
people running from the police. After a couple of migrants
accidentally bumped into László, she moved to one and aimed a kick
at a young refugee girl passing by. Later on, filming a police
officer trying to detain a man carrying a young boy, the journalist
apparently deliberately stuck her leg out and tripped the man up,
causing him to fall on the ground along with the child.
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