Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras says a summit of European Union and Balkan leaders on the migrant crisis is of little use if Turkey is not involved.
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European leaders have agreed on a 17-point plan of action to tackle the escalating refugee crisis in the region.
Joint operations in the waters around Greece will continue, members of the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at EU’s External Borders (Frontex) will receive reinforcements on the border between Bulgaria and Turkey, Greece and Macedonia will have to establish better cooperation on the border, with the increased engagement of UNHCR.
The extraordinary meeting, called by EU’s chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker, was attended by Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia, as well as concerned refugee organisations, Xinhua reported. He added: “It can not be that in the Europe of 2015, people are left to fend for themselves, sleeping in fields and wading chest-deep through rivers in freezing temperatures”.
Cerar said Croatia, which has already seen a few 230,000 migrants pass through since mid-September, was still waiving migrants through into Slovenia without alerting Slovenia authorities.
While the German leader has called for European Union states to share the burden of redistributing migrants across the 28-member bloc, many eastern countries complain that they weren’t consulted and that the migrants want to go to Germany rather than stay on their territory.
“Europe must show it is a continent of values, a continent of solidarity”, she said.
Antonija Zaniuk of Slovenian Red Cross said the hardest thing to manage at the Brezice refugee camp was when people became restless and wanted to move on the the next leg of their journey across Europe.
Germany’s Interior Ministry says Berlin will send five police officers to Slovenia this week to help prepare a European support deployment for the country’s border guards.
“Neighbours should work together along the route, as well as upstream with countries such as Turkey, as host to the largest number of refugees”.
Around the border town of Brezice – the arrival point for at least a half of the 84,000 refugees who have entered Slovenia from Croatia over the past 11 days – doctors and nurses have been working around the clock.
“Refugees need to be treated in a humane manner along the length of the Western Balkans route to avoid a humanitarian tragedy in Europe”, Juncker said in a statement on Sunday.
Leaders agreed to increase border surveillance, properly register refugees, and stop bus and train transfers to the next border without the consent of the neighbouring country.
Syrian refugee Mohamed Alabdulameed was one of many forging into Slovenia after almost three weeks on the road.
He said financial support for Greece and the UNHCR is expected.
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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, so often the target for building border fences that diverted the flow of refugees to other nations, simply said, “Hungary is not on the route anymore, so we are just observers here”. And while they were all pointing their fingers at Greece, the latter blamed Turkey, as well as the Commission for not inviting Ankara at the meeting.
