UN Refugee Agency: Over 10000 Migrants Cross Into Serbia in Recent Days

The migrant emergency in the Balkans has shifted to Serbia, where hundreds are arriving every day after Macedonia decided not to block the border with Greece, resulting in an improvement of the situation along the Gevgelija border.

Many refugees told AFP correspondents at the Hungarian border they had passed through Serbia after travelling through Macedonia’s border with Greece.

The new surge of migrants has anxious EU politicians and left the impoverished Balkan countries struggling to cope with the humanitarian crisis.

Just this week, Hungary announced that it would send thousands of policemen to its border with Serbia to prevent migrants from crossing illegally into the EU’s Schengen zone.

Equality Commissioner Brankica Jankovic visited Serbia’s reception centre for migrants in the southern town of Presevo on Monday and said that refugees there had assured her that they were being not discriminated against in any way.

Speaking to Deutsche Welle, one Syrian refugee said he and his parents will pay a total of about €4,500 to a man known as the “Pakastani” in order to be smuggled across the border all the way to Germany.

“I lost my job, I lost everything”, he said.

After entering Serbia, the migrants head toward EU-member Hungary, from where they want to try to reach richer EU countries, such as Germany and Sweden.

Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said yesterday that although the influx is “huge”, Serbia won’t “build walls or put them (migrants) in containers and drive them out of the country”.

Nearly all the migrants from border with Macedonia leave for Belgrade on buses provided by the UN refugee agency UNHCR in order to continue their trip towards Hungary and other EU member countries.

In a separate development, Greece’s coast guard is searching the Aegean Sea for at least five people missing after the dinghy they were using to cross from Turkey overturned off the coast of the eastern island of Lesbos.

The Greek coastguard said it had rescued eight people on the northern coast of the island early on Monday, and recovered the bodies of two men.

State authorities and aid agencies threw up tents and scrambled to supply food and water to thousands surging through the western Balkans, their numbers swelling since Greece began ferrying migrants from overwhelmed islands to the mainland. The two told authorities they had been in a boat carrying about 15 people when it overturned. The figures do not include the hundreds of migrants who make it to the islands by themselves, mostly in inflatable dinghies.

There were chaotic scenes on Friday as Macedonian police lobbed stun grenades at desperate migrants trying to cross newly-laid rolls of barbed wire at the frontier.

“I think there’s a need for border control, at least on the outlines of the European Union”.

“It is not just a case of Greece not processing those (asylum) claims, but they are actively doing their very best to get the refugees to move on to central Europe as soon as possible”, Kurz said.