Greece warns Balkan border cap could ‘trap’ up to 70,000 people
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GREECE warned yesterday that the number of refugees and migrants on its soil could more than triple next month, reaching as many as 70,000, as a Balkan cap on border crossings left thousands “trapped” in the country.
“We estimate that in our country the number of those trapped will be from 50,000-70,000 people next month,” Migration Minister Yiannis Mouzalas said.
“Today, there are 22,000 refugees and migrants,” he added in an interview with Mega Channel TV.
Some 6,500 people were stuck at the Idomeni camp on Greece’s northern border with Macedonia yesterday as Macedonian border officials let only 300 refugees and migrants pass the day before.
Dozens staged a protest on the rail tracks near Idomeni on Sunday, an AFP photographer said.
The build-up at the camp, which can hold up to 1,500 people, began in earnest last week after Macedonia began refusing entry to Afghans and imposed stricter document controls on Syrians and Iraqis.
But the bottleneck was expected to worsen after EU members Slovenia and Croatia, as well as Serbia and Macedonia, imposed a limit of 580 migrants crossing their borders each day.
Those measures came on the heels of a clampdown by Austria, which lies farther up the migrant trail that extends from the Balkans to Germany and Scandinavia.
Austria introduced a daily cap of 80 asylum-seekers and said it would only allow 3,200 migrants to transit the country per day.
As a result, the tighter controls have had a big knock-on effect in Greece, where migrants have been arriving en masse from neighboring Turkey.
Thousands, including many children, are now stranded there as the European Union struggles with the continent’s worst migration crisis since the end of World War II.
Pope Francis used his weekly address yesterday to hail the “generous help” offered by Greece to migrants and to urge European countries to work together to “share the burden fairly.”
Mouzalas said he expected the influx to slow when the information about closed borders spread in Turkey, where millions of people fleeing the war in Syria have taken refuge.
“I believe that the influx will diminish when the news that the Idomeni border crossing is closed will be propagated,” the migration minister said.
“We are preparing an information campaign which will be broadcast in Turkey.”
In Italy, authorities are making preparations in case the border closures redirect the migrant flow towards the southeastern province of Puglia, which lies across the Adriatic Sea from Albania.
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