BERLIN, Germany – German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel announced that his country is ready to accommodate 500,000 asylum-seekers a year, as a UN official criticized the United States and wealthy Arab countries for not doing more to ease the growing humanitarian crisis.
Meanwhile, the plight and desperation of refugees fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Eritrea to arrive in the European Union by the thousands every day was highlighted again Tuesday, as hundreds of migrants on the Hungary-Serbia border fled from a holding area and broke though a police line on the frontier, some carrying children.
In Germany, the vice chancellor told public television ZDF that the country can deal “with something in the order of half a million for few years.”
But he called on other European countries to take their allotted share of refugees and do more to ease the crisis, soon after Berlin said it will allocate nearly $7 billion to help accommodate and help refugees.
On Tuesday, thousands of refugees waited in Greece and Hungary – which have seen the largest influx over the past several days – for a chance to start new lives in prosperous European countries.
Both Germany and Sweden have called for a distribution of refugee among the 28 European Union countries, while Austria says that member states not taking in refugees should suffer financial penalties. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have resisted taking in more refugees.
The influx is the largest since World War One. Germany is expecting 800,000 refugees by the end of this year.
In Geneva, the United Nations harshly criticized the United States and wealthy Arab Gulf states for not taking in refugees.
Peter Sutherland, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon´s special representative on migration, said on Tuesday that it is not enough for Washington and wealthy Gulf Arab states to give money to help Syrian refugees.
“Taking refugees is separate from giving money,” Sutherland was quoted as saying.
Most of the four million Syrian refugees from the war are in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and northern Iraq.
The plight of the refugees was brought home for many across the world last week, as the picture of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old boy who drowned as his family was trying to reach a Greek island, went viral on the Internet.
