Refugees march to demand Hungary opens its borders

Hundreds of refugees and migrants walked 200 kilometres from the Serbian capital Belgrade towards the border with Hungary yesterday to protest against its closure.

The group chanted and held banners with “Open Hungary’s borders” and “we don’t need food, water or nothing, we want you to open the borders”.

Hungary has built a razor-wire fence along its border with Serbia and Croatia and reinforced it with border controls, effectively blocking the Balkan migration trail, a route used by some one million migrants last year on their way to reach the rest of the European Union.

More than 6,000 migrants are now stuck in Serbia.

On Sunday, Hungarians voted against an EU redistribution scheme which would mean accepting a quota of refugees from frontline states such as Greece and Italy but the referendum was later classed as invalid due to low voter turnout.

Ahead of the referendum, the Hungarian government distributed thousands of leaflets urging people to vote no in the referendum on the grounds that parts of the EU had become “no-go zones” due to the high number of refugees living there and that terrorists may use crowds of immigrants to slip into the country.

Serbia has also said its army will seal off borders with Macedonia and Bulgaria to prevent the entry of migrants from those countries. “We will block the migrants the same way as the countries which did not erect the border fence,” Serbian President Tomislav Nikolić said yesterday.