Violence erupts at Greece, Macedonia border

German news site Spiegel Online published the interview with Ivanov on a day when hundreds of refugees tried to break through a border fence intoMacedonia from Greece in violent scenes.

Jasmin Rexhepi, head of the aid group Legis which has volunteers working in Macedonia on its borders with Greece and Serbia, said Macedonian authorities were restricting the numbers of migrants they let through because Serbia only allowed 30 people to cross their border on Monday from a train carrying 410 people.

At Idomeni on the frontier, Macedonian police fired tear gas as some 300 migrants forced their way through a Greek police cordon and raced towards a railway track between the two countries.

The border bottleneck began ten days ago, when Austria and four ex-Yugoslav countries on the Balkan migrant route north into Western Europe cut border access for migrants to a trickle.

The Alpine republic of 8.5 million people received 90,000 asylum requests last year, around a quarter of them submitted by Afghans, a trend which is continuing this year.

Athens had previously warned that it could be stuck with up to 70,000 people trapped on its territory.

“Greece can not manage this situation alone”, Edwards said.

Ms Merkel reiterated that the aim is to have a mechanism to distribute refugees arriving in Greece to other European countries.

He said: “We have been walking for three kilometres”.

To prepare for the summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was to meet French President Francois Hollande in Paris on Friday, and she remained vocally opposed to the Austrian border closure. “It is my damn duty to do everything I can so that Europe finds a collective way”, she told state broadcaster ARD. He is in Turkey to discuss border management and the fight against smugglers.

Merkel said after meeting Croatia’s prime minister on Tuesday that preparations have been made in recent months to deal with the hundreds of people arriving daily in Greece.

Up to 10,000 people, mostly Syrian and Iraqi refugees, were waiting at Greece’s Idomeni border crossing in deteriorating conditions, according to Greek police estimates. Hundreds of tents were pitched in soggy fields on Monday and there were reports that fights had broken out among families over tents, which were in short supply.

Gerovassili said there were 25,000 migrants and refugees now in Greece and that Macedonia was only allowing “a few dozen” through every day.

“Noone wants to stay in Greece, Macedonia and Serbia”, he said. “Police stopped our taxi on the national road, which is why we are going through the fields”, Majid said. In a speech to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, he said that “encouraging” cooperation had been established with Greece on the issue but that it may not be enough.

On the ground, thousands continued to mass on the Greek-Macedonian border.

Crowds who gathered at the razor wire fence proceeded to use a heavy metal pole to bring down a gate by digging beneath the barrier and using force to push it up and out.

At least 30 people required first aid, a medical charity said, while a Macedonian policeman was taken to hospital. People were also being sent back for apparent discrepancies between registration documents they received from Greek authorities and their own travel documents, witnesses said.

Hassan Rasheed, 27, from Iraq, told the Associated Press: “I’ve been at Idomeni for 10 days, and it’s the fourth day I’ve been waiting to cross over”.