The border incident has caused a diplomatic spat between Croatia and Slovenia, with Slovenia accusing Croatia of breaching an earlier agreement that only 2,500 people can be transported into the country each day.
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“We can only say that there are more than 10,000 refugees in Serbia”, UNHCR spokeswoman Melita Sunjic said.
“Croatian police held them back, with its own refugee camps full to capacity”, said Reuters, while “cold and exhausted refugees chanted ‘open the gate, open the gate!'”.
Upwards of 5,000 people are crossing the Serbian-Croatian border daily, from Greece where they arrive by boat from Turkey, into Macedonia and Serbia, which barely the capacity to cope.
Croatian police ordered refugees off the train, but Slovenian police were deployed to the border and put up iron fences to prevent a mass entry.
“The Republic of Croatia has asked these refugees to stay at our reception centers until their status is resolved, but they all refuse it”, said Matija Posavec, governor of Medjimurje, Croatia’s northernmost county bordering Slovenia. Last week it began rejecting people without proper travel documents and visas and said it registered only 41 new arrivals from Serbia on Sunday.
“There are no restrictions in place”, interior ministry spokesman Karl-Heinz Grundboeck told AFP on Monday.
According to Austrian police, around 3,000 migrants entered the country from Slovenia over the weekend, Grundboeck said.
“The legal option, the legal possibility to come to Hungary and therefore to the European Union through the Schengen borders is open, but the green borders, the natural borders of the country, are sealed”, spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said in announcing the closure.
Hungary will maintain its strict border controls, which involve special police forces and help from the army, since ” the situation is fluid”, Gyorgy Bakondi, chief security adviser to the prime minister, said.
Tension was building among the thousands of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, and seeking to head toward Western Europe.
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This is a small proportion of the 700,000 migrants the worldwide Organization for Migration expects will reach Europe’s borders this year. That figure appeared to have been reduced by the Slovenes to 1,500 a day because they said that’s how many neighboring Austria allow across its border each day.
