European Union warns of looming refugee ‘disaster’ in Balkans as winter approaches

Well over half a million migrants have arrived in Greece from Turkey and the vast majority don’t want to stay so head north through the Balkans to other, more prosperous European Union countries.

A human being sleeps inside the luggage room of a bus as he waits to cross from the northern Greek village of Idomeni to southern Macedonia, Mon., November 9, 2015.

Children watch a movie at a refugee camp near the northern Greek…

People wait in a queue to be allowed to pass from the northern Greek village of Idomeni to southern Macedonia, Monday, November 9, 2015.

European Union interior ministers met on Monday to discuss the ongoing refugee crisis as pressure has mounted on the 28-member bloc to deliver more convincingly on the promises it made to tackle the issue.

More than 3,000 people have drowned among the almost 800,000 who have reached Europe this year.

But the resources have been painfully slow in coming.

Jean Asselborn, the European affairs and foreign affairs minister of Luxembourg, which holds the rotating presidency of the Council, stressed after the talks that one of the reasons for setting up processing centers is because Greece, which has often been accused of letting refugees leave the country before being identified, can not cope with all the migrants arriving in the country.

“We can not let people die from the cold in the Balkans”, he added.

To help manage the influx, European Union border agency Frontex has called for 775 extra officers, but member states have so far only offered about half that amount. Nearly three weeks later, less than half has been pledged. Of the 160,000 refugees who were supposed to have been moved out of Italy and Greece by last week, fewer than 150 had been relocated elsewhere in the EU.

Despite the tension, the debate was said to have been smoother than at previous meetings: “Today we discussed in a much better atmosphere compared to the previous ones”, said the migration commissioner, Dimitris Avramopoulos.

A man carries a child to a dinghy as migrants prepare to travel by…

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said that the European Union “cannot systematically take time to make urgent decisions and, once they are made, take time to apply them”.

The ministers also sought to pave the way for the relocations by intensifying efforts to set up centres in Greece and Italy that separate asylum seekers from economic migrants, who will be told to return to their countries of origin.

“Solidarity can’t work if we are not determined enough to implement the measures that we have already agreed”, he said.