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Croatia opens border with Serbia, thousands rush across

They were among the many refugees forced to divert their route through Europe after Hungary sealed off its border with Croatia on Saturday.

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Croatia’s prime minister, Zoran Milanovic, said his country had hoped to minimize the flow of people following Hungary’s decision to seal its border with Croatia, but conditions on the poorly sheltered Serb side of the border had quickly grown unbearable.

Slovenia has announced that it will receive only 2,500 people a day, which makes the movement of refugees much slower.

Hungary closed its frontier with Croatia to refugees early on Saturday in a bid to block the path of streams of refugees fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

Hungarian officials called the closing of the border a success, even as neighboring countries struggled to cope with the tide of refugees.

The key to keeping migrants moving lies with Germany, where the vast majority are heading; Balkan states also demand that Greece do more to control numbers. More were expected later in the day, with a few 1,800 on board one train in Croatia that was due to stop at the Slovenian border.

Over 383,000 migrants have entered Hungary this year, almost all passing through on their way to Germany and other destinations further west in the EU.

“We are going to address the situation on a day-to-day basis”, Helena Biocic, a spokeswoman for the Croatian police, said by phone Sunday.

Hina is reporting that it learned unofficially a few 300 migrants from six buses managed to cross the border at the crossing of Banfi, and that, considering this is a small crossing, the small-sized deployment of the Slovanian police was not ready “to accept” so many people.

“We’ve seen an uneventful past 24 hours on Hungary’s borders”, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs told reporters in Nagykanizsa, western Hungary, on Sunday.

Croatian police say more than 4,000 migrants remain in the refugee camp in Opatovac near the Serbian border.

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.

Slovenian interior ministry Secretary, Bostjan Sefic said that Slovenia will receive new refugees “only when the ones present are already registered”.

Baloch warns “there will be challenges if the process becomes slow or we have a backlog of people”.

Until Sunday night 4,218 refugees had entered Croatia from Serbia.

Simultaneously, trucks arrived in the towns of Madaya and Zabadani, where insurgents are holed up in a mostly government-held area near the Lebanese border.

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“Slovenia will not close its border unless Germany closes its border, in that case Croatia will have to do the same”, said Croatian foreign minister Vesna Pusic.

Migrant crisis: Slovenia sets limit of 2500 people a day