Austria wants a full stop to migrant influx along Balkans

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, left, speaks with a Syrian family at the port of Mytilene during his visit on the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016. A total of 413 people lost their lives on the journey, including 321 on the way to Greece, the International Organization for Migration said.

Refugees and migrants are helped by volunteers as they arrive on a…

Greece filed a rare diplomatic protest with Austria for excluding officials from Athens from Wednesday’s meeting of foreign and interior ministers in Vienna, held a day before a European Union-wide interior ministers’ meeting in Brussels.

Austria has angered Greece by holding a meeting of Balkan states to which Greece was not invited.

“With every passing week, it appears some European countries are focusing on keeping refugees and migrants out more than on responsibly managing the flow and working on common solutions”, it said.

In addition, on 18 February, the heads of police services of Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia announced an agreement to jointly profile and register refugees and asylum-seekers at the border between the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Greece, as well as take a number of additional actions to manage the situation.

Along with Austria, countries on the migrant route to western Europe already have introduced stricter transit rules in the past weeks. “For that reason, it is necessary for us to take national measures”, Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz told reporters in Vienna. The talks come after figures showing Europe’s migrant headache continuing to rage, with over 110,000 people arriving in Greece and Italy so far this year alone, following more than one million in 2015.

A joint statement from the Vienna talks said that after hundreds of thousands of people trekked through the Balkans a year ago, many ending up in Germany, Sweden and also Austria, the inflow must be “massively reduced”.

“We did not take a unilateral decision”, Macedonian foreign minister Nikola Poposki told Germany’s Bild daily in an interview published on Wednesday. “The interest on the Greek side is only in transporting refugees as quickly as possible towards Central Europe”. As a result, countries throughout the western Balkans have begun unilaterally to impose restrictions, sparked by Austria’s much-criticized introduction last week of daily migrant limits.

Minister Ioannis Mouzalas said the Greek government was looking at additional sites to set up temporary transit camps by the end of the week.

“It’s not something we can do in one or two days, but we are trying to keep people in humane conditions”, he said.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban stressed that the quotas “could redraw Europe’s cultural and religious identity”.