Migrants surge into Western Europe through Austria
Thousands of migrants flooded into Austria on Saturday, seeking refuge after shuttling for days in bordering countries that were unable or unwilling to offer them shelter.
Austrian police said some 6,700 people travelled to the central European country from Hungary after being trapped on Friday in a vicious tug-of-war as bickering European governments shut border crossings, blocked bridges and erected new barbed-wire fences in a bid to shut down the flow.
More are expected as people continue to make their way north via Turkey and Greece after fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East and Africa. On Saturday, the Greek coast guard said they failed to save a five-year-old girl found in the sea off the island of Lesbos after the boat she travelled on sank, also leaving 14 others missing.
Asylum-seekers who headed westward into Croatia after being beaten back by tear gas and water cannons on the Hungarian-Serbian border just days earlier found themselves being returned to Serbia or to Hungary, after Croatia declared it could not handle the influx.
Hungary then put them on buses, and sent them on to Austria.
Meanwhile, Hungary’s military said that it is calling up 500 army reservists as the country reinforces its borders with razorwire fences, the deployment of thousands of soldiers to the border and other tough measures.
The EU’s failure to find a unified response to the crisis left Croatia, one of the poorest countries in the European Union, squeezed between the blockades thrown up by Hungary and Slovenia and the unending flood of people flowing north from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Though sympathetic to their plight, Croatian President Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic demanded that the EU step forward and take responsibility for the people in transit through this country of 4.2 million. More than 20,000 have arrived since Wednesday.
“We’re flooded, local communities are flooded, the numbers of refugees in some areas is far greater (than) the number of local residents. So we need to control, we need to stop the flow and need reassurances from EU what happens to these people,” Kitarovic said.
Kitarovic stressed further measures would be taken to secure Croatia’s borders. Underscoring that Croatia itself has only recently begun to recover from the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, Kitarovic said that migrants were also in danger of stepping on mines leftover from the conflict.