Belgrade - European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker called for emergency talks and Slovenia gave its army a green light to help control a surge in migrants as Europe’s refugee crisis deepened before the onset of winter.
German chancellor Angela Merkel will join government leaders from Austria, Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Republic of Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia at the meeting in Brussels scheduled for Sunday, Juncker said on Wednesday.
It followed a decision by Slovene lawmakers in Ljubljana to give the army additional powers to help police man border posts overwhelmed with migrants, STA newswire said. The Adriatic nation of 2 million people will also ask the European Union for financial and other assistance, President Borut Pahor said Tuesday in Brussels.
“In view of the unfolding emergency in the countries along the Western Balkans migratory route, there is a need for much greater cooperation, more extensive consultation and immediate operational action,” the Commission said in a statement Wednesday.
Merkel’s government has clashed with countries in the European Union’s east over how to tackle the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. Merkel and Juncker asked for the emergency meeting, according to Germany’s Bild newspaper.
While she has pledged to grant asylum to genuine refugees, Hungary closed its borders with Serbia and, on Saturday, fellow EU member Croatia. That has created bottlenecks on borders and inflamed tensions between former Yugoslav partners.
The situation has been escalating since late summer, when the flow of migrants shifted from northern Africa through southern Europe to a path leading from Turkey to Greece and through the Balkans.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who has also been invited to the talks in Brussels, said on Tuesday that more than half a million refugees had arrived in Greece this year.
Tightening bottlenecks
In Serbia, which unlike former Yugoslav partners Croatia and Slovenia isn’t an EU member, Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic has said his country won’t build barriers “under any circumstances.”
Serbia registered more than 103 000 migrants crossing its territory in October, with 11 000 entering from Macedonia since the weekend, according to the UNHCR. That’s creating a choke-point at the border with Croatia, where authorities are trying to limit the number of people entering.
“About 3 500 spent the night in the mud at the Serb-Croat border,” of whom 450 were taken by buses at 4 o’clock in the morning to a reception center inside Croatia, UNHCR press officer Mirjana Milenkovski said by phone. “Others couldn’t wait any longer so they just moved on foot across the fields,” she said.
Slovenia’s police said that, since Friday, more than 21 000 migrants had crossed. Officials there have said the country can cope with about 2 500 migrants a day, while Croatia wants to send about 5 000, or half of its own daily intake.
Interior Ministry State Secretary Bostjan Sefic said on Tuesday that the country had experienced one of its most difficult days in the crisis.
“First and foremost is the safety of our citizens, and we have to ensure that with controlled migration,” Slovenian police Director General Marjan Fank said, according to a statement on the police website.
It would be an illusion to expect that Slovenia “as the smallest country on this route, can tackle migrant flows on its own without the cooperation of neighboring countries. There is obviously no common approach to this crisis.”