The question now isn’t whether fences can “stop” migrants fleeing to Western Europe, but rather if the backup in the Balkans, the proliferation of razor wire fences, and the coming winter will be enough to make a large percentage of asylum seekers reconsider which route they want to take. “I would like to stress that in this way Slovenia is not closing its borders”.
Advertisement
Slovenia and Austria are the latest countries in Europe to introduce tighter border controls to try to limit the influx of refugees from war-torn nations like Syria and Iraq.
As a result, the Slovenian prime minister, Miro Cerar, said that it was likely that numerous 30,000 migrants who are traveling northward from Greece could be stranded in his country.
An AFP reporter in Gibina in north-eastern Slovenia said on Wednesday morning soldiers were erecting rolls of the razor wire to about waist-height across fields. Compounding concerns, there have been more than a dozen suspected arson attacks on buildings earmarked for refugees in the last few months.
Norwegian news agency NTB says 162 asylum-seekers have been evacuated after a refugee shelter in southern Norway caught on fire.
In total, Ljubljana plans to fence off 80 kilometres (50 miles) of its 670-kilometre frontier with Croatia, Austria’s chancellery said Wednesday after a meeting with Slovenian Foreign Minister Karl Erjavec in Vienna.
The plan is a watered down version of an already significantly reduced border fence proposed for the area around the busy crossing at Spielfeld. For Greece, meanwhile, whose continued existence in the European Union has been in doubt for much of the year primarily for financial reasons, would see another rope that ties it to the union severed, creating even more distance between Greeks and their European counterparts and thus facilitating an eventual Grexit. Tensions mounted when Croatian authorities stated elements of the fence have been in disputed territory.
Hungary says it has approved two of the almost 4,900 asylum requests it has received from refugees since it closed its border with Serbia with a razor-wire fence on September 15.
Sweden, struggling to administer the inflow too, became the newest European Union nation to announce the introduction of temporary border controls, as of Thurs.In accordance to the global Organization for Migration, virtually 800,000 people have entered Europe by ocean this yr. The European Union predicts in that three million more might arrive by 2017.
“Two Afghan men stated that (Bulgarian) police officers had shot at them… wounding two”, the report by the Serbia-based rights group said.
More than 170,000 migrants and refugees from the Middle East, Asia and Africa have crossed into Slovenia from Croatia since mid-October, effectively funnelled through Slovenia by Hungary’s decision to close its border with Croatia.
Advertisement
Cerar has said that Slovenia, which has a population of only 2 million, is unable to accommodate large amounts of migrants, many of whom may remain in the country for a long period of time.
