Macedonia struggles to ration entry of rain-soaked refugees

[August 22, 2015]  By Fatos Bytyci and Yannis Behrakis
 
 GEVGELIJA, Macedonia, IDOMENI, Greece (Reuters) - Police and soldiers deployed along Macedonia's southern border with Greece struggled on Saturday to control the numbers of refugees and migrants, many of them fleeing Middle East conflicts, seeking to reach western Europe.

Conditions on the frontier were rapidly deteriorating after the migrants -- escaping wars in Syria, Iraq and beyond -- spent a cold night under open skies, drenched by heavy rain and with little or no access to food or water.

The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR urged Macedonia to reopen its border and to provide more help to the vulnerable.

Macedonia says it must ration entry to control a tide that hit 2,000 per day in recent weeks and caused chaos at the local Gevgelija railway station as crowds stormed trains.

The impoverished Balkan country declared a state of emergency on Thursday. Police sealed the border and fired tear gas and stun grenades on Friday to drive back crowds, the latest flare-up in a migrant crisis rattling the whole of Europe.
 

Some 600 people were allowed through overnight, jammed into a 5 a.m. (2300 ET Friday) train north towards Serbia, the last stop on a long road from the Middle East, Africa and Asia to Hungary and Europe’s borderless Schengen zone.

More arrived by foot on the Greek side as morning broke, many of them Syrian refugees brought by boat chartered by the Greek government to the mainland from inundated Greek islands such as Kos. Some 50,000 hit Greek shores in July alone.

"It’s really cold here," said 30-year-old Faroq Awais, from Pakistan, waiting for a train in Gevgelija. "Last night it was raining and we couldn’t go anywhere inside. We were sleeping against the walls of a building but it didn’t help."

UNEASY GREEK-MACEDONIAN RELATIONS

Some in the crowd told Reuters reporters they had tried to cross the 246-km border at other points, away from the main crossing of Gevgelija where migrants and refugees normally converge having taken trains and buses north through Greece.

But they said they were turned back by Macedonian soldiers deployed under the emergency decree.

"We urge the (Macedonian) government to start opening the border again and prioritizing the most vulnerable, such as women, children and sick people," said Alexandra Krause, a senior protection officer with the UNHCR.

"There are around 3,000 people here and the numbers are rising," Krause told Reuters. "People are exhausted. It has rained all night and they had no shelter."

The chaotic scenes at Gevgelija in recent weeks, of children squeezed through train carriage windows and men wielding sticks, prompted the government to act, citing a lack of capacity.

For many Macedonians, the crisis has echoes of 1999, when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians took shelter in refugee camps on Macedonia’s northern border during a war in neighboring Kosovo, then a province of Serbia.

Critics say those who cross from Greece do not linger long in Macedonia and they accuse Skopje of failing to respond quickly enough to the rising numbers by opening reception centers on the border.

Conservative Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, on the ropes for much of 2015 over a surveillance scandal, faces an early election next April and may win praise at home for taking a hard line on Greece for allowing the migrants through.

Macedonian state media has criticized Athens for chartering boats to alleviate the Greek islands.

Athens and Skopje have an uneasy relationship, rooted in a dispute over Macedonia’s name since it declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. The row has effectively blocked Macedonia’s integration with the European Union and NATO.

(Additional reporting by Reuters Television; Writing by Matt Robinson; Editing by Gareth Jones)

[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.]

Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.