An AFP photographer said at least 1,000 people entered Hungary from Serbia via a cross-border railway track, close to the southern Hungarian village of Roszke.
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Bulgaria, however, was on Tuesday taking matters into its own hands, announcing that it was sending in the army to buttress the south-western border with Macedonia – hit in recent days by an unprecedented influx of migrants.
Serbian authorities acknowledged that the Russian contribution in organizing the migrant camps was the most quick and effective compared to other organizations, the RSHC said in a press release.
After they formally ask for asylum, they have three days to reach the border with Hungary, which is rushing to build a barbed wire fence on its border with Serbia to block the refugees.
Record numbers of refugees are streaming into EU member Hungary from Serbia, posing a new headache for regional leaders at a summit this week set to be dominated by Europe’s worst migrant crisis since World War II. The figures do not include the hundreds that manage to make it to the islands, mostly in inflatable dinghies.
Long lines of migrants, many of them refugees from Syria, snaked through southern Serbia by foot on Monday before jumping on trains and buses north to Hungary and the last leg of an increasingly desperate journey to western Europe.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said the situation was “noticeably calmer and more orderly” on Sunday and Monday, as nearly 2,000 individuals crossed from Greece into former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, fleeing the war in Syria. “We had no income, no jobs, nothing”, he said, after crossing into Serbia early on Monday. Survivors told authorities they had been in a boat carrying about 15 people when it overturned. A search was underway in the area for survivors, a spokesman said.
Some 102,000 migrants arrived in the EU via Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Montenegro or Kosovo between January and July this year, versus just 8,000 for the same period in 2014, according to EU border agency Frontex.
Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz, who had travelled to the Macedonia-Greece border, called for an urgent new strategy to deal with the “humanitarian disaster”.
“This is a real disaster for the whole European Union and I think there is the real need to have more focus on this problem, not only on the route through Italy but also on the route on the Western Balkans”, Kurz said.
France and Germany are both urging Brussels to compile a list of countries whose nationals would not be considered asylum-seekers except in exceptional personal circumstances.
They are now making their way across Serbia to Hungary before moving on to richer countries such as Germany, Sweden and Britain.
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With asylum-seekers coming not just from war zones such as Syria but also from countries without military conflict in southeastern Europe, Hollande and Merkel reiterated their calls for Brussels to draw up a list of safe countries of origin.
