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 Croatia said it was urgently sending demining experts to the
border area to identify minefields left on the frontier from the
Balkan wars of the 1990s, the last time hundreds of thousands of
displaced people marched across Europe.
Hungary's decision to shut the EU's external border with Serbia this
week was the most forceful attempt yet by a European country to
close off the unprecedented flow of refugees and economic migrants
overwhelming the bloc.
The route through Hungary has been the main one used by migrants who
arrive first by dinghy in Greece and then trek across the Balkan
peninsula to reach the EU's frontier-free Schengen zone, most
eventually bound for Germany.
With that route closed, thousands of migrants remain in the Balkans
seeking other paths north and west, possibly through Croatia and
Romania, both of which are in the EU but not in Schengen.
Reuters reporters saw hundreds of people, some of whom identified
themselves as Iraqis, trek through fields near the official Sid
border crossing between Serbia and Croatia, a fellow former Yugoslav
republic which joined the EU in 2013.
They arrived by bus from the southern Serbian town of Presevo,
rerouted late on Tuesday to the Croatian border after the Hungarian
border shut.
Serbian media reported that at least 10 migrant buses had left
Presevo overnight bound for Sid. A Reuters television crew saw three
arrive, one a double-decker that offloaded its passengers within a
few hundred meters of the border.
Hungary has thrown up a 3.5 meter (10 foot) high fence along the
length of its border with Serbia. Engineers and soldiers were
marking out a path on Wednesday to extend the fence along the border
with Romania, a plan that has angered Bucharest.
ENFORCING RULES
The biggest flow of immigrants into Western Europe since World War
Two has sown discord across the continent, fuelling the rise of far
right political parties and jeopardizing the 20-year-old achievement
of Schengen's border-free travel.
 Hungary says it is simply enforcing EU rules by sealing the Schengen
zone's external border. It says Serbia is a safe country, so asylum
seekers who reach the frontier there can be automatically turned
back in a process that should take hours.
The United Nations says Serbia lacks the capacity to receive
refugees halted at the gates of Europe. Critics at home and abroad
say Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's rhetoric - he has said
he is defending Europe's "Christian values" from the mainly Muslim
migrants - has crossed the line into xenophobia.
The crisis has pitted countries that are comparatively open, led by
Germany, against those, many in former Communist eastern Europe, who
argue that the welcoming approach has made the problem worse by
encouraging people to make dangerous voyages.
Hungary blames Germany for exacerbating the crisis by announcing in
August it would suspend normal EU asylum rules and take in Syrian
refugees regardless of where they enter the EU. Thousands have since
been trekking across the bloc, mainly through Hungary and Austria,
to reach Germany, clogging railway stations and forcing trains to be
canceled.
Record numbers rushed to cross Hungary in the days before the border
was shut, with thousands now backed up in Austria trying to reach
Germany.
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Germany ordered the emergency reintroduction of border controls on
Sunday to divert migrants away from Munich, the southern city that
had been overwhelmed by tens of thousands arriving within days.
Austria and Slovakia said Germany's move left them no choice but to
impose similar controls.
An emergency meeting of EU ministers failed this week to reach
agreement on a Berlin-backed plan to share out 160,000 refugees
across the bloc. A German cabinet minister said on Tuesday the EU
should consider financial penalties against countries that refuse to
take their share, drawing angry responses from countries which
oppose quotas, such as the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Croatia said it would allow migrants who arrive Serbia to continue
onwards. It has a border with Slovenia, which could provide the
migrants with a new route into the Schengen zone.
“Croatia is entirely ready to receive or direct those people where
they want to go, which is obviously Germany or Scandinavian
countries," Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said.
"They will be able to pass through Croatia and we will help, we're
getting ready for that possibility.”
There was little sign so far that the new difficulty crossing the
Balkans was slowing the flow of migrants out of Turkey, which has
been housing 2 million Syrian and Iraqi refugees.
Hundreds of migrants, mainly Syrians, spent a night out in the open
near Turkey's land border with Greece after Turkish police blocked
them reaching the frontier.
"I am young I am strong, if I can make it to Europe perhaps I can
have a life. We have degrees, we have education, there's nothing for
us here in Turkey," said 25-year old Saleh, an electronics engineer
from the Syrian city of Aleppo.
Most reach Greece by sea across the Aegean, like 26-year-old Abeer,
a Syrian refugee who arrived by boat before dawn. She was waiting
with her two daughters outside a travel agency in Athens for five
hours while her husband Ihab went to collect money wired in by his
brother from Germany. When he returned, they bought bus tickets
north to the border with Macedonia to trek across the Balkans.
"I never thought that one day I would find myself in such a
situation," said Abeer, whose husband was a health ministry employee
in Syria's city of Deir al-Zor.
"I am ashamed to expose myself in such a way. I feel like a beggar."
(Reporting by Reuters bureaux; writing by Peter Graff and Matt
Robinson; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
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