After Clashes With Migrants Along Border, Macedonia Begins Letting Some

As of Friday, only legal migrants can enter Macedonia.

Around 44,000 migrants are reported to have travelled through Macedonia since June.

“No more Macedonia“, one officer said in English to a Syrian man requesting passage.

Until now Bulgaria’s main focus has been on stopping migrants crossing over its border with Turkey, where it has dispatched over 1,000 extra police and where it is expanding a 30-kilometre barrier.

A spokesman for Macedonia’s Interior Ministry said authorities declared the state of emergency in reaction to complaints by the citizens of Gevgelija about the high number of migrants in their city, and that they were attempting to limit the flow of refugees to avoid the large crowds that had been sleeping on the ground at the train station.

Now however, with the clamour for trains increasingly chaotic and violent at Gevgelija station, Macedonia is again tightening control over the border.

Several thousand people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, many of them Syrian refugees, spent a cold night in no-man’s land after Macedonia on Thursday declared a state of emergency and effectively blocked its southern frontier to migrants and refugees, reports Aljazeera.

“UNHCR is particularly anxious about the thousands of vulnerable refugees and migrants, especially women and children, now massed on the Greek side of the border amid deteriorating conditions”, UNHCR said in a statement.

When news that several hundred would be let through every few hours reached those on the border, a crush formed after the first group streamed through. The NGO said that four of the migrants were hospitalized due to their injuries. “This is a situation caused by lack of political will and the EU is simply not providing necessary resources”.

While Hungary has also made moves to prevent the illegal crossing of asylum seekers with the construction of a fence to protect the country’s borders from those entering from Serbia, which is a non-EU country.

A team from aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres tweeted that 10 people were injured and it was treating those hit by “shrapnel” from the blasts.

“The more tightly controlled a border is, the more risky and expensive it becomes to cross”. The situation is escalating, with more people arriving at the border each day, she said.

Migrants arrive at at the southeastern island of Kos, Greece, August 15, 2015.

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“We are allowing entry to a number that matches our capacity to transport them or to give them appropriate medical care and treatment”.

The decision clears the way for the country’s army to help deal with the crisis. The other one goes through Italy. That does not include the hundreds more who have reached the islands on their own.

Instead, he said, it stemmed from concern over whether the migrants would stay in Slovakia for the long term. As part of their “processing”, they get a temporary residents’ permit which can range from 30 days to six months, allowing them to apply for some form of civil protection status.