Migrants buffeted amid European political tug-of-war
Thousands of migrants poured into Austria on Saturday amid an increasingly bitter tug-of-war among overwhelmed European countries who have tried to divert the flood by either throwing up barbed-wire barriers or quickly transporting refugees to the next border to the north.
Austrian police said some 10,000 people crossed overnight from Hungary, which has deployed thousands of troops to cope with the flood and is calling up 500 army reservists.
Christian Stella, deputy police chief of Burgenland, told the Austrian Press Agentur that Hungary had not given enough advance warning that the refugees were coming. "We need a lead time of half a day," said Stella. Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner also criticized the Croatian and Slovenian authorities for violating EU by not accepting asylum applications from the refugees, APA reported.
Slovenia used pepper spray on a group of migrants trying to cross the border from Croatia, the BBC reported. Slovenian police said more than 1,000 migrants have entered the country and hundreds more are camped at border crossings.
Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanović, who was initially welcoming to refugees, said Friday that his country could no longer cope with the flood and was simply shipping them on to Hungary to deal with. "We forced them (Hungary), by sending people up there. And we'll keep doing it," he said.
Asylum-seekers headed into Croatia after being beaten back by tear gas on the Hungarian-Serbian border just days earlier found themselves being returned to Serbia or Hungary, after Croatia declared it could not handle the influx.
Hungary — which accused Croatia of violating international law by sending unregistered migrants to its lands — then put them on buses, and sent them on to Austria.
At the Heiligenkreuz border cross into Austrian, Adeeb Jaafri, a theater student from Damascus, was weary from the journey, but thrilled on Saturday to have made it into Austria, the AP reported., “Right now, I feel like I’ve been born anew.”
Jaafri was not bothered by the long lines in front of him to get a seat on a bus away from the border.
He says “it makes no difference to me whether I am delayed whether I stay here two days. The important thing is that I’ve finally arrived. And that I am now finally safe.”
Croatia’s president appealed to the European Union for help with the crisis. Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic told the Associated Press early Saturday that her country of 4.2 million people needs to be realistic about what it can do for migrants and refugees who want to transit Croatia in hopes of seeking asylum in more wealthy Western European nations.
“We need to stop the flow, we need to get reassurances from European Union what happens to these people who are already in Croatia, and those who still want to transit through Croatia further,” she said.
In a sharp response, Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, said Croatia had “lied in the face” of Hungary and failed to show adequate solidarity with its neighboring nation by sending refugees across their border that Hungary had tried to keep out, The Guardian reported.
The U.N. warned that such spats between the countries endangered the concept of European unity.
“If there is no agreement to share refugees between the countries of the European Union, it risks undermining the very essence of the European project.” said Peter Sutherland, the U.N.’s special representative on international migration, according to the British newspaper.
Meanwhile, the flood into Europe continues unabated from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of the migrants and refugees, who are fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa, want to go to Germany or Scandinavian nations.
They typically thread their way north via Turkey and Greece, then over land toward the heart of Europe. On Saturday, the Greek coast guard said they failed to save a 5-year-old girl found in the sea off the island of Lesbos after the boat she traveled on sank, also leaving 14 others missing.
The surge of migrants has also sparked protests in Germany, which has agreed to take in hundreds of thousands of refugees. Right-wing rioters demonstrated for a second night in front of a new asylum shelter in the eastern German town of Bischofswerda, throwing a bottle at a bus arriving with refugees and shouting racist slurs at them.
The German news agency dpa reported Saturday that around 100 protesters tried to block the road to the asylum shelter. Police had to protect the refugees from the crowd as they entered the shelter late Friday.