Share

Thousands Stranded By Hungary Border Closure

The migrant route switched to Slovenia on Saturday after Hungary closed its border for the influx.

Advertisement

Slovenia has expressed readiness to cope with between 2,000 and 2,500 refugees per day as long as Austria and Germany keep their borders open.

Thousands of people, many of them refugees fleeing war-torn Syria, have been making the perilous journey north to the EU’s richer countries in the hope of settling there.

Autumn weather With cold, rainy autumn weather taking hold across the Balkans, aid agencies are warning of potentially major humanitarian problems if the flow of migrants is disrupted, and bottlenecks occur on a route that is bringing about 6,000 people to Croatia’s eastern border each day.

Over the border in Serbia, thousands had been kept in about 50 buses since early on Sunday waiting to cross to Croatia.

Rail service between Hungary and Croatia was suspended, Hungarian railways said in a statement on its website.

A few 300 kilometres (185 miles) to the southeast of Ljubljana, about 2,000 migrants were queueing at the Serbian border with Croatia.

The migrants – many from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq – have already spent weeks walking from Turkey, via Greece, Macedonia and Serbia.

With several other ex-Communist members of the European Union, Hungary opposes a plan by the bloc to share out 120,000 refugees among its members.

Behind the wire, a group of migrants disappears into the gloomy darkness toward Zakany station where a train waits to bring them to Austria.

On Friday, the Hungarian government closed the country’s border with Croatia “to protect the citizens of Hungary and Europe”.

“Croatia asked us to accept 5,000 migrants per day, but Austria told us they can accept at maximum 1,500”, he said. “Be patient, we will tell you when to go”, reads the message written in Arabic, carried by Rawan, 23, her 12-year-old sibling Dina and a Czech volunteer, as lines of people stretch back for hundreds of metres.

On Sunday morning, security was tight as a train arrived from Croatia, packed with people eager to pass through this, another transit country, as quickly as possible to get to Western Europe.

Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic, who has repeatedly denounced Budapest’s policy towards migrants, said Saturday that the government was “successfully keeping (the migrants situation) under control”.

On Saturday, 12 refugees – four of them children – drowned while trying to reach the Greek island of Lesbos, the Turkish coastguard said.

Advertisement

Information for this article was contributed by Amer Cohadzic, Pablo Gorondi, Ali Zerdin, Dusan Stojanovic, Jovana Gec and Suzan Fraser of The Associated Press; and by Marton Eder, Boris Cerni, Jasmina Kuzmanovic, Krystof Chamonikolas, Edith Balazs and Raine Tiessalo of Bloomberg News.

Migrants pushed towards Slovenia after Hungary closes Croatia border