Under pressure at home to reduce the influx, Ms Merkel acknowledged the western Balkan states’ action “will obviously bring us fewer refugees, but they put Greece in a very hard situation ” “.
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In Greece alone, the number of marooned migrants is estimated to be around 36,000.
At least five migrants, including a baby, drowned as they tried to sail from Turkey to Greece, the Dogan news agency reported on Thursday.
But in a sign that Turkey is playing hardball yet again, Volkan Bozkir, its Europe minister, said they would accept “tens of thousands” , “not hundreds of thousands or millions ” “.
“I ask myself if the European Union is throwing its values overboard”, said Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner, whose government has led a push to seal off Greece from the north as an alternative to relying on Turkey to stop migrants leaving.
The strong words came after Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia barred entry to transiting asylum seekers, and Serbia indicated it would follow suit.
Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel said the closures were “neither sustainable nor lasting” in tackling Europe’s biggest migrant crisis since World War II and would leave Greece bearing the burden of the influx.
Not a single migrant has entered Macedonia for the past two days, police said Wednesday, but denied that the country had closed its border with Greece entirely. It is aimed at stopping illegal migrants from passing through the four nations to seek asylum elsewhere in Europe.
As European Union interior ministers met in Brussels on the crisis, Austria urged migrants to give up hope of moving on.
He said he believed that the deal with Turkey had discouraged migrants to head to Europe and attributed the crisis to traffickers whose business model consists of entrapping migrants into the rash promise of finding hope by risking their lives and money while taking risky journeys across the Aegean Sea. FYROM has refused entry to refugees since Monday.
Under a deal agreed in principle at an EU-Turkey summit in Brussels on Monday Turkey has been promised financial assistance of up to Euro 6 B in return for helping curb the migrant inflow into Europe from the country’s territory.
Most of the migrants are from Syria, where the civil war has created more than 4 million refugees.
Several buses left Idomeni transporting migrants back to Athens Wednesday, workers at the camp said, but most remained, uncertain of what their options were now.
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Jean Asselborn, Luxembourg’s migration minister, said the deal must be vetted “legally, diplomatically, politically, but as well humanly”. Clandestine routes are opening again in Hungary, where authorities report more people are breaching the razor-wire fence on its southern border. She added that “the closure of the Balkan route is going to plan and this clock will not be turned back”.
