Border situation worsens in Greece

More than 5,000 people were trapped at the Idomeni camp on Greece's northern border with Macedonia on Saturday after four Balkan countries announced a daily cap on migrant arrivals.

Published: 27 February 2016 14:58 CET

Refugees arriving at Vienna's Westbahnhof station. File photo: Carit

The buildup began in earnest last week after Macedonia began refusing entry to Afghans and imposed stricter document controls on Syrians and Iraqis, slowing the passage of migrants and refugees to a trickle.

And the situation looked set to worsen significantly after Slovenia and Croatia, both EU members, and Serbia and Macedonia said they would restrict the number of daily arrivals to 580.

The tighter controls have left thousands — including many children — stranded in Greece, as the bloc's worst migration crisis since World War II shows no sign of abating.

By Saturday, some 5,500 people were stranded at Idomeni, local police said, with another 800 gathered at another provisional camp some 20 kilometres (12 miles) away.

Since Thursday night, only 150 people have crossed into Macedonia, officials said, putting the total number of refugees and migrants currently on Greek soil at around 25,000.

Tensions were running high along the border with some 400 people protesting by the Idomeni crossing early on Saturday, demanding that the Macedonian authorities let them in.

Friday's announcement by four Balkan states came a week after Austria said it would only allow 80 people claim asylum per day, and also pledged to limit the daily number of people crossing the country to 3,200.

The move has sparked a bitter spat between Athens and Vienna, with Greece fearful it would trigger a domino effect, leaving thousands stranded on its territory.

Austria has repeatedly accused Greece of failing to police its borders properly and allowing an excessively-high number of migrants to continue their journey northwards to western Europe.

“Europe can't be indifferent to those of our partners who don't respect their obligations,” Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos said on Saturday, referring to the border restrictions.

Last week, the EU told Austria that limiting asylum claims was “plainly incompatible” with European and international laws.

'Open the borders'

On Saturday, around 200 people held a protest outside the Austrian embassy in Athens, an AFP correspondent said.

Chanting slogans like “Open the borders” and “Stop the War” in Syria, which has sent millions into exile, they demanded safe passage for refugees.

In a bid to regulate the flow of refugees until the border situation is resolved, Greek authorities are trying to house them on the islands where they land by boat from neighbouring Turkey.

On Saturday morning, another 437 people landed in Piraeus port, Athens News Agency said.

With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.