Migrants Protest Restrictions At Macedonian Border

But those deemed economic migrants – mainly people from Iran, Pakistan and Bangladesh – are blocked.

In late October, more than 300 migrants are lying in Victoria Square in central Athens, the Greek capital.

Of course, many are fleeing years of conflict Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

More than 4,500 people entered Macedonia on Saturday, traveling through the Balkan peninsula from Turkey.

A stranded Iranian migrant has his lips sewn as he sits on rail tracks at the border between Greece and Macedonia near the Greek village of Idomeni November 23, 2015.

Some have been protesting by not eating or talking and around a dozen have sewn up their mouths.

Following the terrorist attacks in Paris that have left at least 130 people dead, pressure has grown in Europe to install a better screening process for the millions of migrants and refugees who have flooded into the continent from war-torn regions. Others lose their cool, such as an Iranian man who tried to slit his wrists with a razor to protest the blockade Sunday afternoon before Macedonian police intervened.

Declaring “the situation is untenable”, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven announced tighter border controls and asylum rules in a bid to reduce the number of arrivals and force other European Union states to take in more refugees.

“Macedonia knows that the only solution is European-wide expanded cooperation, real-time exchange of information and additional support so that we may ensure appropriate security and humanitarian outcomes for all involved”, Gruevski said Monday, the Guardian reported.

Some protesters threw stones at police while others fell to their knees shouting “We want to go to Germany”.

The Iranian government has disproportionately targeted the country’s Sunni, ethnic Kurdish minority with arbitrary arrest, prolonged detention, and physical abuse, according to the U.S. state department. “We are so sad for Paris”, he said.

“We won’t go back to Iran”, one man had scrawled on cardboard.

“You would not believe the cruelty that is going on in our country”, she said, describing the ongoing civil war in South Sudan. “Why can’t we go to Europe?” he said.

“Profiling asylum seekers on the basis of their alleged nationality infringes the human right of all people to seek asylum, irrespective of their nationality and to have their individual cases heard”, United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon said in a statement issued by his press office.