Greece said on Monday the European Union had offered to pay the costs of accommodating 20,000 more migrants in temporary camps on its islands as the bloc struggles to improve its management of the flow of refugees across Europe.
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The surge of migrants across the Balkans on their way to Western Europe is continuing unabated in the hours after an EU-sponsored agreement to slow the flow.
In Brussels late Sunday, European leaders agreed to cooperate to manage migrants crossing the Balkans.
Europe has the obligation to receive them, to grant them protection and assistance and to guarantee their future.
But, as Al Jazeera’s Robin Forestier-Walker reports from the Slovenia-Croatia border, volunteer aid workers said they are being prevented from offering much-needed help to refugees.
“Turkey has a special responsibility in the refugee crisis”, Alexis Tsipras told reporters on the sidelines of an informal EU summit on migration convened by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.
“This is a step in the right direction, and now it is crucial to respect the commitments”, said Slovenian Prime Minister Miro Cerar, whose tiny Alpine nation has been overwhelmed since Hungary put up a fence on the border with Serbia and Croatia, diverting the flow to Slovenia.
Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic warned that addressing the crisis will take time.
More than half of this year’s arrivals were from Syria, 18% from Afghanistan, and 6% from Iraq.
The bodies of the dead have been recovered and two helicopters and two ships, from the Greek coast guard and from the European Union border agency Frontex, continue the search.
Syrian refugee Mohamed Alabdulameed, 28, is one of many trekking across Europe as part of a desperate bid to escape the war ravaging his country.
He said he initially hoped to make it to Britain but was changing plans after hearing how unsafe it had become to try and get across the English Channel. “We can not and should not deal with each other this way”, Horst Seehofer said. But these figures are small compared with the numbers of people now arriving.
Slovenia’s police said Monday nearly 10,000 migrants entered Slovenia from Croatia in the same period, bringing the total number of arrivals in the past 12 days to almost 75,000.
Mitric says “no country could deal normally with such a large wave that Slovenia has faced today”. She adds “we are doing the best we can” but “Slovenia does not have an unlimited capacity of space, human resources, equipment or logistics”. Farther west, in Austria, a few 3,500 people had to sleep outside in the cold, while Germany said it had seen 15,000 arrivals over the weekend.
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Information for this article was contributed by Lorne Cook of The Associated Press.
