[EU News] Refugees Try to Breach Greece’s Border With Macedonia

[lioneatszebra]

Refugees Try to Breach Greece's Border With Macedonia
from The New York Times



Riots erupted on the Greek border with Macedonia on Monday, as angry refugees broke down a razor-wire fence separating the two countries with a battering ram after the Macedonian authorities sealed the frontier to prevent them from passing.

The conflict surged as the Greek government warned that tens of thousands of people could be trapped in the country within a month, adding to fears that it would be turned into a giant holding center for migrants, and as aid groups cautioned that a humanitarian crisis was growing.

Greece has requested emergency aid from the European Union to help it deal with the crisis, which shows little sign of abating, and on Sunday, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said that Greece could not be allowed to succumb to that threat.

"Do you seriously believe that all the euro states that last year fought all the way to keep Greece in the eurozone, and we were the strictest, can one year later allow Greece to, in a way, plunge into chaos?" she told the public broadcaster ARD.

Macedonia recently closed its border with Greece, a major stop on the migrant trail, to thousands of Afghans after reclassifying them as economic migrants rather than refugees, a move that denied them the right to apply for asylum.

That policy, which was effectively a response to an Austrian decision to put a daily cap on the number of people allowed into the country, left thousands of Afghans with nowhere to go. It also promoted fear among Syrians and Iraqis, who worried that they might also be unable to travel further north if similar restrictions were imposed.

The Balkans have served as the main passageway for migrants, most of whom hope to reach Germany, which has accepted far more asylum seekers than any other country. Germany's warmer welcome has led to tensions with other European countries, and last week Austria and nine Balkan states agreed to put in place several measures to choke off the flow of refugees, effectively imposing their own response to the migrant crisis.

As a result, many migrants in Greece have effectively been trapped — they cannot move on, and they cannot return home — and officials in the country said they expected the problem to worsen.

"We estimate that we will have a number of people trapped in our country which will be between 50,000 and 70,000," the minister for migration, Ioannis Mouzalas, told the Greek TV channel Mega, Reuters reported.

Mr. Mouzalas said that he believed those numbers would be reached in the coming month, and that 22,000 migrants were already in the country.

Greece is the most popular entry point into Europe for hundreds of thousands of refugees from Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. More than 111,000 migrants have already arrived in the country this year, far ahead of the pace of last year, according to the International Organization for Migration.

The European Union has been grappling with how to deal with the spiraling challenges as thousands from the Middle East and Africa, seeking to flee civil war and other conflicts, continue to come to Europe in search of better lives. Many make perilous journeys, crammed into in boats with other migrants that have capsized along the way.

More than 400 migrants have died this year while trying to cross the Mediterranean, the organization reported, including 321 on the heavily traveled route between Turkey and Greece.

But countries across the European Union have struggled to agree on who should shoulder the burden, and the influx has been particularly tough on Greece, which is still trying to deal with the aftermath of a punishing debt crisis.

The sporadic imposition of border controls by countries including Austria, Denmark and Sweden over the past few months has dealt a serious blow to the Schengen agreement, a cornerstone of European integration that allows the free movement of people across much of the bloc's internal borders.