(MENAFN- Arab Times) Britain will take in thousands more Syrian refugees, Prime Minister David Cameron said Friday amid growing pressure at home and abroad to address the crisis. "Given the scale of the crisis and the suffering of the people, today I can announce that we will do more, providing resettlement for thousands more Syrian refugees," he told reporters on a visit to Lisbon. "We will continue with our approach of taking them from the refugee camps," he added, in a reference to UN camps on the Syrian border. "This provides them with a more direct and safe route to the UK, rather than risking the hazardous journey which has tragically cost so many lives," the prime minister said.
Cameron did not specify how many more refugees Britain would accept, saying only that more details would be announced next week and that the resettlement scheme would be kept "under review". "Britain will act with our head and our heart, providing refuge for those in need while working on a long term solution to the Syria crisis," Cameron said. Britain has faced mounting pressure to accept a greater share of Syrian refugees, especially after the publication this week of harrowing images of a three-year-old Syrian toddler found dead on a Turkish beach.
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A petition to parliament urging Britain to accept more refugees has garnered nearly 360,000 signatures, while campaign group Avaaz said that 2,000 Britons had volunteered to host refugee families. Several editorials in Britain harked back to the times when Britain accepted huge numbers of refugees before and after World War II, and around the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Britain has accepted 216 Syrian refugees under a special government scheme over the past year and around 5,000 Syrians have been granted asylum since the conflict there broke out in 2011 - far fewer than countries like France, Germany and Sweden. More than four million Syrians have fled the war, many of them taking refuge in neighbouring Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. Britain has also opted out of a quota system for relocating asylum seekers within the European Union despite growing calls in the EU for fairer distribution.
On the streets of London, views on the issue varied. "I can't believe that we haven't done anything before now," said 45-year-old Victoria Buurman as she walked with her shopping in central London. "I think it's disgusting that we have to get to a point where children are dying before we even recognise that we're not acting morally. It's horrific," she said, breaking into tears. But Souvik Ghosh, a 26-year-old research student from India, said Britain should not take any more migrants. "There should be some limitations, OK? Because otherwise this country's economic system will be overflowed," he said. Contenders for the leadership of the main opposition Labour Party have all urged Cameron to do more. Meanwhile, hundreds of refugees who have been stuck for days at Budapest's Keleti train station gathered their belongings and began marching out of the city, vowing to make it to Austria on foot after Hungarian authorities blocked them from boarding Western-bound trains. They carried their belongings in bags and backpacks as they snaked through Budapest in a line stretching nearly a half-mile long, hampering traffic at times, as they began the 171- kilometer journey (106-mile) to the Austrian border. By mid-afternoon they had reached the M1 motorway on the outskirts of the city.
The people, many Syrians fleeing war, want to eventually reach Germany or elsewhere in the West and are trying to avoid registering in Hungary, which is economically depressed and more likely to return them to their home countries than many Western European nations. Under European law, asylum seekers will be approved or disapproved in the countries where they are first registered. One man 23-year-old Osama Morzar from Aleppo, Syria, was so determined not to be registered in Hungary that he removed his fingerprints with acid, holding up totally smooth finger pads to an Associated Press reporter as proof. "The government of Hungary is very bad," said Morzar, who studied pharmacology at Aleppo's university. "The United Nations should help." A couple from Baghdad, Mohammed and Zahara, who marched with a toddler, said they had been in a Hungarian asylum camp and got roughed up by guards because they refused to be fingerprinted. She said she has family in Belgium and is determined to seek asylum there. They would not give their last names. Meanwhile, a standoff continued for a second day at the station in Bicske, a town northwest of Budapest that holds one of the country's five camps for asylum seekers. Hundreds of people sat on a train there, some with tickets they had purchased to Berlin or Vienna. Although some eventually relented and registered at the asylum center, most were determined not to. At some point, about 100 people left the train to wage a protest in front of a large number of TV cameras and journalists. Using white paint, they wrote "no camp / no Hungary / Freedom Train" on the side of the train.
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