After initially offering a warm welcome, Croatia said it could no longer cope with the influx and closed the crossing points on its border with Serbia.
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Croatia has shut all but one of its crossings with Serbia to block the refugee surge.
The United Nations expects no let-up in the flow of refugees coming into Europe – with 8,000 people arriving every day – and that the problems facing governments may only be “the tip of the iceberg”.
Hungary’s hardline Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday that Budapest eventually plans to seal its border with Croatia to stop the influx of tens of thousands of rfuges bound for northern Europe.
But migrants have changed their routes and are now pouring into the country from Croatia, and Hungary has started to erect a fence on that border as well.
Serbia launched countermeasures halting the entry of Croatian commodities early Thursday following Croatia banning cargo traffic from Serbia in the only open border crossing between the two neighbors at Bajakovo.
Slovenia later suspended all train traffic between Slovenia and Croatia until Friday morning, Slovenian news agency STA reported. The fence was built along the country’s border with Serbia to keep migrants out.
“We will not respond to this, because I simply do not know how to respond to that and stay an honest and normal person”. “Our duty is to make it happen on the Hungarian-Croatian border as well,” he said.
Croatian reaction to Serbia’s move was preventing Serbian cars with Serbian plates from entering, so Serbian citizens could on Thursday enter Croatia on foot.
Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić expressed disappointment over the dispute with Croatia and concern over the many people stuck at the closed border. Croatia fought a 1991-95 war against Belgrade-backed Serb rebels to forge its independence from communist Yugoslavia Relations with Serbia have remained relatively cool despite considerable progress in the free flow of people and capital since reformers in Serbia ousted the late strongman Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
Tusk spoke on Poland’s state TVP Info following the European Union summit that chose to toughen border controls and provide more funds to help refugees in the Middle East.
EU President Donald Tusk said a “thread of understanding” was emerging among European leaders as they moved away from mutual recriminations and started to think about how to contribute to solving the crisis, while “protecting Europe from an excessive wave” of migrants and refugees.
Regional authorities in the Croatian town of Dubrovnik said they were preparing for arrivals from Montenegro and were ready to handle about 3,000 to 5,000 refugees daily.
Hungary has announced that it has removed spools of razor wire from a section of the border with Slovenia, a barrier that had been seen as breaching European Union rules about unrestricted travel within much of its territory.
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Ranko Ostojić, Croatia’s interior minister, cited the Strošinci crossing, on the border with Serbia, as being particularly problematic.
