Migrant Chaos Mounts While Divided Europe Stumbles for Response

[Purveyor]

Source: New York Times

LONDON — The struggle among European leaders to develop a coherent response to the spiraling migrant crisis intensified on Thursday as fresh calls for a blocwide plan were met with recriminations about the Continent being swamped with Muslims.

Even as wrenching photographs of a drowned 3-year-old Syrian boy riveted world attention and galvanized public demands for action, the leaders’ first fumbling efforts seemed only to highlight Europe’s divisions, as they bickered over who should take responsibility for the migrants rather than unifying around a new policy.

The chaos was searingly illustrated by a daylong standoff in Budapest and its outskirts, where hundreds of migrants crammed into trains they thought were bound for Austria and Germany, only to be herded into camps.

The hundreds of thousands of migrants pouring into Europe this summer have posed a third great challenge to the Continent in the last decade. Yet, neither of the first two, the still smoldering euro crisis and the war in Ukraine, posed the same degree of divisiveness — between left and right, rich and poor and east and west. And both, for all the anger and debate they sparked, seemed ultimately manageable.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/world/europe/hungary-train-station-migrant-crisis.html?_r=0