Merkel hammered out the agreement at talks in Berlin with the premiers of Germany’s 16 states, vowing to increase federal support for helping regional governments meet rising costs of hosting asylum seekers.
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Merkel said Thursday that Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro will be declared safe countries as part of efforts to reduce the stream of people from those countries who have arrived.
Tobias Plate, a spokesman for Germany’s interior ministry, said Friday that it’s estimated that “30 percent of asylum seekers claiming to be Syrian in the end aren’t Syrian”.
The refugee crisis coming on top of the Greek crisis, and the prolonged euro ordeal in general has now done in the last European leader with any claim to continent-wide leadership: Germany’s not-so-iron chancellor, Angela Merkel.
The office of the centre-left chancellor emphasised that Europe has common standards for accommodating, taking care of and processing asylum seekers that need to be respected. His direct criticism of the German leader, as significant as it is unusual, is a reflection of the pressure building in Berlin over the refugee crisis.
Germany is facing an unprecedented influx of asylum seekers, especially since the country had decided not to return the Syrian refugees to the country in which they entered the European Union, as provided by European legislation.
Hungarian police announced 10,046 migrants, a new daily record, had arrived on Wednesday from Croatia, while Austrian authorities said on Thursday that 8,100 had entered from Hungary in the previous 36 hours. Serbia has banned Croatian cargo traffic and Croatia in return has now banned Serbian-registered vehicles.
An European Union official is touring a migrant camp near Serbia’s border with Croatia amid boiling tensions between the two Balkan rivals struggling with the influx of tens of thousands of people moving toward Western Europe.
After all, we’ve been through a bloody and destructive civil war, two world wars, two British invasions and various other military conflicts, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, stock market crashes, flu epidemics, major catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina – you name it.
Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic says the financial losses will be big on both sides, and adds he thinks the sanctions won’t last long.
Croatia shut all but one of its crossings with Serbia to block the migrant surge, which reached almost 45,000 in a week.
The United Nations estimates 4 million people have fled Syria in the past four years.
As for the Syrians, the young men who are fleeing, those guys need to take off their skirts, put on some combat gear and take back their country, whether it be overturning a corrupt government or fighting ISIS.
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Croatia’s police said Serbian nationals were not let into Croatia early Thursday because of “a problem” with the border information site.
