Open the gate, migrants cry
BERKASOVO — Thousands of migrants clamored to enter Croatia from Serbia on Monday after a night spent in the cold and mud of no-man’s land, their passage west slowed by a Slovenian effort to impose limits on the flow to Western Europe.
Croatian police held them back, with its own refugee camps full to capacity, a Reuters reporter said. In western Croatia, up to 2,000 more spent the night on a train stranded near the border with fellow European Union (EU) member Slovenia, which was refusing entry.
When Hungary closed its border with Croatia to migrants on Friday, the unrelenting flow was diverted to Slovenia en route to Austria and Germany, the favored destination for most migrants.
But Slovenia recently imposed a daily limit of around 2,500, saying it would only take in as many people as those that exit into Austria.
Upward of 5,000 are flowing across the Balkan border daily from Greece, where they arrive by boat and dinghy from Turkey.
A Reuters reporter on the Serbian side of the border with Croatia said there was no apparent police presence to help maintain order. Cold and tired, migrants chanted “open the gate, open the gate!”
The arrival of a projected 700,000 migrants this year to Europe’s shores, fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia by boat and dinghy across the Mediterranean and Aegean, has exposed deep and often ugly divisions in the European Union.
Hungary’s right-wing government said the mainly Muslim migrants posed a threat to Europe’s prosperity, security and “Christian values.” It sealed its borders with Serbia and Croatia and enacted stringent laws that rights groups said served to deny refugees their right to seek protection.
Also, Germany’s Pegida movement held an antimigrant rally on Monday, highlighting a European backlash toward a massive influx that had heaped pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Monday’s rally marked a contrast to efforts by Merkel who over the weekend made a crucial one-day trip to Turkey, where she hailed progress in helping Ankara deal with the migrant crisis and vowed to push forward its long-stalled EU membership bid.
In Cologne, simmering tensions ended in violence on Saturday when a man with a knife attacked independent mayoral candidate Henriette Reker, who advocated helping refugees. Reker suffered serious neck wounds. Four others were injured in the attack.
Reker won Sunday’s election with an absolute majority.
The attacker, a 44-year-old unemployed man arrested at the scene, had “a racist motivation” according to police.
In Turkey, Merkel said that the fact Ankara had accomplished the immense task of looking after more than two million Syrian refugees on relatively little funding had led to “migration pressure,” which resulted in the current unprecedented influx of migrants into Europe.
“We will engage ourselves more strongly financially as the European Union. Germany will play its part,” she promised.