Croatia warns it cannot handle influx of refugees

BELGRADE, Serbia Croatia’s border remains open to refugees but the country “cannot accommodate” the influx of people trying to make their way to Western Europe, the prime minister said Friday.

“Our capacities are small. Though Croatia is for all those people a transit country, we cannot (take in) any more,” Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said at a press conference.

Migrants at Croatia’s border with Serbia will not be turned away, he said, but he warned that the country is so overwhelmed it no longer has the ability to register them, as required by the EU, and provide shelter.

“People will not be held up in Croatia,” he said, according to the daily Vecernji List reported online.

He dismissed a call from the opposition to seal the border even though his cabinet approved Thursday the closure of seven crossings with Serbia. Migrants continued streaming in through fields.

“You can’t physically close the border without a fence,” Milanovic said. “Let them explain how to close a border across 100 kilometers of flatlands.”

He criticized the European Union, which Croatia joined in 2013, for “doing nothing” to deal with the migration crisis and “waiting for the problem to go away.”

Croatia has been buckling under the surge of migrants since Hungary closed its border to them on Tuesday; around 14,000 have arrived since. The national Red Cross ran out of food and there was no longer any shelter available for the migrants at the border area.

In Brussels, European Commission spokeswoman Natasha Bertaud warned Croatia that it is bound by the bloc’s rules to register, fingerprint and offer asylum to all incoming migrants.

It has the right to deny entry to those who refuse the opportunity to apply for asylum, but allowing them movement without registration violates EU rules, she said.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban told state radio Friday that work began to extend a fence already built along the border with Serbia to the border with Croatia.

A conservative with a hardline stance against immigration, Orban told state radio that 1,600 soldiers will be working on the first 42-kilometer segment by the weekend. Hungary’s border with Croatia is 355 kilometers long.

Budapest already completed a fence, 4-meters tall and laced with razor wire, along the 175-kilometre border with Serbia.

Hungary on Tuesday sealed the border and instituted a state of emergency in the border zone, virtually barring entry to migrants after far more than 100,000 arrived in 2015.

The blockade diverted the flow of migrants, mostly refugees from Syria and other war-afflicted areas in the Middle East, in Serbia toward Croatia in the west. Croatian police said Friday morning that 13,300 people illegally entered from Serbia since Tuesday.

As in Croatia and other countries on the Balkan route, nearly all migrants want to continue west, most of all to apply for asylum in Germany, France and Sweden.

The Schengen arrangement, comprising 26 European countries, is being tested by the crisis. Austria, the gateway to Germany both from Slovenia and Hungary, introduced border checks at the three main border crossings with Slovenia.

Both it and Slovenia are also checking their border with Hungary, though all three are a part of the European Union’s passport-free Schengen zone, which is now being tested by the migration crisis.

In Geneva, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) cautioned the onset of the cold season will not deter migrants from crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe.

“We are not expecting figures to drop into the winter, as last year many continued to cross,” said Joel Millman, spokesman of the aid and advocacy organization.

The stream of migrants is fed by increasing poverty among Syrian refugees in the Middle East and by food aid cuts that are caused by a lack of donations, he added

Total arrivals in Europe by sea have amounted to 474,000 so far this year, nearly 40 percent of them Syrians, according to IOM.

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