Having fled their war-torn land refugees are in limbo at Tovarnik, where dreams of onward travel seem shunted on to a siding
Wilting in the heat, surrounded by piles of rubbish and smothered in the thick stink of a portable toilet, there was one thing that gave hope to the thousand-odd refugees stranded on Friday at the first rail station inside Croatia. The prospect, however fleeting, of a train.
Every hour or so, somebody somewhere would whisper “qitar”, the Arabic word for train. Within a few seconds, a cascade of humans would tumble from the shade of the nearby trees, into the 40-degree heat, and towards the station’s single platform. Always they were taunted by the pair of empty tracks gleaming in the blinding sunlight.
Latest developments in Europe's refugee crisis – a visual guide
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“Rumours,” sighed Salem Baddour, a 26-year-old Syrian economics graduate, on more than one occasion. “Always rumours.”
Since Hungary blocked its borders on Tuesday, it is this tiny rail station at Tovarnik, a town located a kilometre inside Croatia, that has become the latest crucible of the European refugee crisis
nitially, Croatia welcomed refugees here, promising to carry them from the station’s single platform all the way to Slovenia, the gateway to northern Europe. But as the exodus then swerved westwards it turned out Croatia could not cope with such a sudden influx of refugees. Many people were left stranded in Tovarnik.
At about 12:30am on Friday, a train did arrive but the thousand people who climbed on board had to wait more than eight hours for it to leave. Those waiting at the station half a day later had the opposite problem. Instead of the train that never left, theirs was the train that never came.
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/18/syria-to-croatia-then-taunted-by-the-trains-that-never-come
