EU chief urges united effort to handle migrant crisis

BRUSSELS — European leaders moved Wednesday toward a showdown over the continent’s migrant crisis with increasingly bitter divisions over how to cope with the crush of people seeking asylum.

European Union President Donald Tusk urged divided EU nations to set aside their differences and work together to hammer out a concrete plan “in place of the arguments and the chaos we have witnessed in the last weeks.”

French President Francois Hollande was more blunt.

“Those who don’t share our values, those who don’t even want to respect those principles, need to start asking themselves questions about their place in the European Union,” he said on his way into the meeting.

At the meeting, EU leaders managed to agree early today to send about $1.1 billion to international agencies helping refugees at camps near their home countries.

The leaders also agreed to set up “hot spots” by the end of November where EU experts can quickly register and identify people eligible for refugee protection, said Tusk, who led the emergency summit in Brussels.

The move is intended also to quickly filter out economic migrants who are unlikely to qualify for asylum in Europe.

“The measures we have agreed [to] today will not end the crisis. But they are all necessary steps in the right direction,” Tusk said at the conclusion of seven hours of meeting with the bloc’s leaders.

He added that European leaders, who have disagreed acrimoniously with one another over how best to tackle the flow of migrants into the continent, finally appeared to reach a common understanding and consensus at the meeting.

Exact details of the decisions taken by the leaders were not immediately available.

EU leaders at the summit also were focusing their talks on strategies to ease the flow of the hundreds of thousands of people who have sought haven in Europe this year. Some are from war-ravaged Syria and Iraq. Others are from economically strained countries, and are seeking jobs and better futures.

The EU envoys were trying to reach an agreement on bolstering Europe’s external borders to better sort people fleeing war from those seeking economic relief, whom they can deport.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said his country would donate $152 million — including about $61 million to the World Food Program — to help feed refugees in camps close to the conflicts they are fleeing.

“We must make sure that people in refugee camps are properly fed and looked after, not just to help them but also to stop people wanting to make, or thinking of making, this very, very difficult and very dangerous journey to Europe,” he said.

The conclave came a day after EU interior ministers pushed through a plan — over the objections of four central European nations — to spread 120,000 asylum seekers across Europe.

“The decision to relocate 160,000 people from the most affected member states is a historic first and a genuine, laudable expression of European solidarity,” European Commission President JeanClaude Juncker said Wednesday. “It cannot be the end of the story, however. It is time for further, bold, determined and concerted action by the European Union, by its institutions and by all its member states.”

One opponent, Slovakia, warned that it would reject the EU resettlement decision and threatened to oppose it in court.

“We will go in two directions: First one, we will file a charge at the court in Luxembourg … secondly, we will not implement the [decision] of the interior ministers,” Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico told reporters before leaving for the summit in Brussels. “We won’t implement this decision because we think it can’t work.”

Leaders of the four countries that voted against the migrants measure — Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia — have all condemned the effort as a grave violation of their independence in a bloc that usually prides itself on consensus. European officials said the vote was binding on all countries, including those that voted against it.

The decision to override the dissenters means the EU will be sending thousands of people into nations that do not want them, raising questions about the future of the bloc and the well-being of the asylum seekers consigned to those countries.