13,000 refugees crammed at strained Greek border

IDOMENI: Some 13,000 refugees are crammed in unhygienic conditions on Greece’s border with Macedonia, officials said last night, with all eyes on a key EU-Turkey summit tomorrow that is seen as the only viable solution to the crisis.

“There are 13,000 people here and nearly 20,000 in this prefecture, over sixty percent of the country’s entire refugee and migrant flow,” Apostolos Tzitzikostas, regional governor of Greece’s Macedonia prefecture, told Skai television yesterday.

“We can no longer shoulder this strain by ourselves,” said Mr Tzitzikostas, who wants the government to declare an emergency in the area.

Greece has been plunged at the heart of Europe’s migration crisis after a series of border restrictions along the migrant trail has caused a bottleneck on its soil.

More than 30,000 refugees and migrants have been trapped in the country, around a third of them at Idomeni where aid groups have long reported food and tent shortages.

The Doctors Without Borders charity yesterday began erecting additional tents to shelter over 1,000 people who have been sleeping in muddy fields and ditches.

In past days, the mainly Syrian and Iraqi refugees have regularly held protests in front of the barbed-wire fence guarded by Macedonian riot police, demanding to be allowed through.

Last Monday, hundreds of them tried to break through a breach in the fence, and were pushed back with volleys of tear gas.

Hussam, a 25-year-old Syrian, says the refugees are hoping that tomorrow’s EU-Turkey summit will provide a breakthrough.

“We are calm now because we are hoping for a positive outcome [tomorrow], that they will help us pass,” Hussam said. “If there isn’t one, I don’t know what will happen.”

According to Greek officials, Macedonia has allowed some 2,000 people through its borders in the last two weeks. The same number of people fleeing war and poverty arrive in Greece from neighbouring Turkey in two days.

Athens is building additional facilities to house the refugees and migrants, but many prefer to go to the border in the hope of eventually getting through, and are stuck there for days and weeks.

Greece has asked the EU for €480 million in emergency funds to help shelter 100,000 refugees. A senior UN migration official has warned that the numbers stuck in Greece will probably reach 70,000 in the coming weeks.