But 71 decomposed bodies discovered in the back of a lorry in the same country where leaders are meeting to try and get a handle on the situation may serve as a reminder that persistent meetings won't help the situation. Instead empathizing with the human tale to the tragedy might force EU leaders to view the migrants as people — not quotas.
#Austria #Europe beauty that 71 #Syria #war refugees anticipated be4 their bodies were discovered in a truck.Horrific pic.twitter.com/wqiWzv9nC2
— Maria Finoshina (@MFinoshina_RT) 28 августа 2015
The grim discovery of the decomposed bodies of 59 men, 8 women and four children cramped in a chicken truck in Austria has been revealed to European leaders attending a summit in the country's capital, Vienna.
Top of their agenda is how to respond to the refugee crisis gripping Europe. Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants are traveling by sea to Italy and Greece and across the West Balkans to reach Europe every day.
Dozens of migrants found dead inside Hungarian truck in Austria. Eerie timing, as Merkel, Balkan leaders, EU officials meet in Vienna.
— Dan McLaughlin (@DanMcL99) 27 августа 2015
The truck with 71 refugees on board, believed to be Syrian, traveled through Serbia and Hungary. The vehicle was found abandoned in Austria near the country's border with Slovakia and Hungary — the driver no longer behind the wheel.
Police in Burgenland stopped to check the lorry, thinking it had broken down. It was then that they noticed the smell of decomposing bodies and saw signs of blood dripping from the back door. The migrants had been dead for days. Officers at the scene had to be treated by psychiatrists following their discovery.
"These people seem to have died a while ago", Peter Doskozil, director of Austrian state police said. "It is not clear what the cause of death was, the investigation is ongoing."
The truck has been taken to a center in Vienna with a special refrigeration system to help identify the men, women and children on board and found out what happened.
But it appears only when the sheer numbers of migrants dying to reach Europe increase will the politicians stand up and take notice of the dire situation and agree on a humanitarian solution rather than reinforcing borders and fences, forcing the migrants to embark on deadly journey on their door stop.
Following the meeting in Vienna, Mrs Merkel announced that Germany would join France, Italy and Greece to push through compulsory quotas for EU countries to share in the responsibility for processing and resettling refugees and asylum seekers.
"We are going to demand fair quotas," Merkel said. "Then we will see who rejects those".
More than 267,000 refugees, asylum seekers and migrants have arrived in Europe by boat this year — with more than 2,300 dying in the process. According to Amnesty International more than half of all the refugees who took the Western Balkan route were from Syria, where it's believed the 71 people found dead on board the chicken truck in Austria had come from.
