Bulgaria, new end of road on migrant trail
SOFIA:
Until recently, most migrants entering Bulgaria from Turkey wouldn’t hang around, seeking to continue their journeys towards western Europe. But now they are finding themselves stranded in the EU’s poorest country. The reason is that tighter border controls introduced since July have made it much harder for people to follow the usual route of crossing from Bulgaria into Serbia, and from there further west. And if they do make it to Serbia, then getting into Hungary - which last year erected a fence topped with razor wire - has become tougher still with authorities expelling any migrant caught near the border.
Iraqi Kurd Azhuan Arhwanssara, for instance, says that after laying low “20 to a room” in a Roma ghetto in Sofia, he took his chances this summer and tried to cross into Serbia - but was turned back by Serbian border guards. “We didn’t come this far to give up,” the 22-year-old musician told AFP at a migrant shelter at Vrajdebna in the outskirts of the Bulgarian capital. He’s not abandoning his dream of making it to “England or Canada”.
Ivan Penkov, director of the now overflowing shelter, said that Arhwanssara’s story has become more common in recent weeks, and that in August his facility’s 320 places “were filled up in less than 10 days”. “Since July, several groups of migrants disappeared from our refugee centre,” Penkov told AFP in a visit this week. “But then they came back, having failed to cross into Serbia.” Alan, a 13year-old Syrian, is another case in point. He broke his leg in a forest while trying to cross into Serbia and was turned back, together with his companions, by Bulgarian border police.
Drowned
And going north from Bulgaria into Romania can be dangerous, since it means crossing the raging Danube river that marks the border between the two countries and where crossing points are rare. Earlier this week a boat capsized on the river. Three migrants drowned and three went missing, some of them children. Police are finding ever more migrants hidden in vehicles on the bridge linking the two countries at Ruse, said local police chief Dimitar Chorbadzhiev.
Fewer than 20 percent of the 5,310 places available in Bulgarian reception centres were filled at the end of May. Now they are almost full. “Before, more than 90 percent of those who arrived in Bulgaria left again (for somewhere else). Now they have nowhere to go,” said Georgy Voynov, a lawyer with rights group the Helsinki Committee. Estimated at around 10,000, the number of migrants stranded in Bulgaria remain modest compared to the roughly 60,000 stuck in Greece or the almost 130,000 who have crossed the Mediterranean to Italy so far this year. — AFP