Migrants wait at the Croatian-Slovenian border Saturday for a bus to take them to Austria.
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Hungary, which has received more than 383,000 migrants this year, has spent months building a razor-wire fence along its southern borders in a bid to keep them out. For many of them, countries such as Hungary and Slovenia are not the final destination, but rather the way through to Germany.
More than 5,000 people are stuck in a refugee camp in Croatia waiting to move on to tiny Slovenia, which is taking in limited numbers of people per day, slowing down the flow of people toward Western Europe. “Around 80 percent of the people whom I met, an average day in Croatia’s migrant flow, are economic migrants, not coming from Syria or Iraq but coming from elsewhere”, she noted.
The country said it had reinstated border controls on its frontier with Slovenia, effectively suspending Europe’s Schengen system of passport-free travel though it said it was acting within the Schengen rules.
“We are continuously monitoring the situation at the Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian borders, and are ready to react to any situation which might develop”, said Kovacs.
The United Nations refugee agency said on October 19 that more than 10,000 migrants are now stranded in Serbia. Only hours before, its rows of tents had been packed with people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
Szijjarto said in a statement Saturday that the government was defending Hungary and its citizens from the “mass wave of unidentified, uncontrolled migrants”.
In Germany, a government official who declined to be named said the Hungarian border measures did little to solve the problem.
Slovenia’s Interior Ministry said a few 5,000 people had reached its borders Monday, and most were allowed to enter, with at least 900 reaching Austria by the evening.
Croatia during the weekend, near the maximum it can process, Bostjan Sefic, a state secretary at the country’s interior ministry, told reporters in Ljubljana Sunday. Later a train carrying around 1,200 refugees entered Slovenia at the border crossing in Sredisce ob Dravi, while another 600 were transported by bus to border crossings in Mursko Sredisce and Macelj.
Migrants are now using a Slovenian route to reach Germany and Austria.
About 5,000 migrants spent a chilly night in Opatovac, eastern Croatia in a transit camp.
“They are risking their lives and nobody is able to stop this flow… without shooting”.
Serbia’s minister in charge of migration suggested Serbia too might try to stem the flow from Macedonia; over 6,000 entered on Monday, many of them Syrians with small children.
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The Italian navy tweeted it had rescued 113 migrants and found eight bodies in a rubber boat, attempting to cross the Mediterranean on Sunday.
