Migrant Crisis: Dozens Find New Route To Croatia

Buses carrying migrants arrived from Serbia’s southern border with Macedonia to the western town of Sid near the Croatian border on September 16.

MORE: Is Germany about to start getting tough on migrants?

Germany and Austria called Tuesday for an European Union summit on the crisis next week.

They had travelled by bus from the Macedonian border at Presevo, 500 kilometres to the south.

They’re aiming to reach the Schengen zone, Europe’s border-free area, where they hope to find safety and stability after enduring months of violence at home and uncertainty on the road to Europe.

“The European Union has found itself under the onslaught of hundreds of thousands of migrants and has ceased to be a safe place”, the leftist leader told parliament, insisting that “90 per cent of these people are economic migrants“.

“We are staying at the border in Hungary until they open”, said Ahmed Rashid Yousef, who fled Syria.

Croatia has space in reception centres for around 3,000 migrants, fewer than the number crossing borders daily up and down the Balkans, having landed in Greece by boat and dinghy from Turkey.

“We think that many thousand people were still on the go in Hungary before the border closed and they will surely make their way to Nickelsdorf here in Austria and try to continue their journey to Germany“, a police spokesman said on Tuesday morning.

Hungarian officials said they were preparing to erect a fence along the country’s eastern border with Romania that would be similar to the one on the Serbian border.

The changes mean that crossing the border illegally can result in a prison term of up to three years, rising to five years if people damage the razorwire or a more substantial four-metre-high barrier which is still under construction.

Serbia’s minister for refugees, Aleksandar Vulin, urged Hungary to reopen its border, “at least for women and children“, speaking to AFP at the Horgos crossing, where around 100 people were waiting for the frontier to reopen.

But Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has defended the measures, saying he is acting to preserve Christian Europe, which he said is threatened by the large numbers of Muslims streaming into the continent.

The border has until now been the main route for asylum seekers, who mainly arrive first by dinghy in Greece and then trek across the Balkan peninsula to reach the EU’s frontier-free Schengen zone, most bound for Germany. The ministry says the measure could be extended to the country’s borders with Slovenia, Italy and Slovakia, if needed.

The German Chancellor said she would not apologise for the actions of her countrymen who have turned out at railway stations with clothes, food and welcome signs.

The Hungarian move came as a domino effect of reintroduced border controls took hold across central Europe, which is grappling with its biggest migratory wave since the end of World War II.