Tag Archives: Europe

EU welcomes bold Turkey plan to stop migrants, defers decision

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – European Union leaders welcomed Turkey’s offer on Monday to take back all migrants who cross into Europe from its soil and agreed in principle to Ankara’s demands for more money, faster EU membership talks and quicker visa-free travel in return.

However, key details remained to be worked out and the 28 leaders ordered more work by officials with a view to reaching an ambitious package deal with Turkey at their next scheduled summit, on March 17-18.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron among others hailed the surprise Turkish proposal at an emergency summit in Brussels as a potential breakthrough in Europe’s politically toxic migration crisis.

More than a million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and beyond have flooded into the EU since early 2015, most making the perilous sea crossing from Turkey to Greece, then heading north through the Balkans to Germany.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told EU leaders that Ankara was willing to take back all migrants who enter Europe from Turkey in future, including Syrian refugees, as well as those intercepted in its territorial waters.

“With this game-changing position in fact our objective is to discourage illegal migration, to prevent human smugglers, to help people who want to come to Europe through encouraging legal migration in a disciplined and regular manner,” he told a news conference after the summit.

In exchange for stopping the influx, he demanded doubling EU funding through 2018 to help Syrian refugees stay in Turkey and a commitment to take in one Syrian refugee directly from Turkey for each one returned from Greece’s Aegean islands, according to a document seen by Reuters.

He also asked to bring forward EU visa liberalization for Turks to June from end-2016 and to open five more negotiating chapters in Turkey’s long-stalled EU accession process.

The EU leaders agreed to the earlier target date for visa-free travel provided Ankara meets all the conditions including changing its visa policy towards Islamic states and introducing harder-to-fake biometric passports.

They left open how much additional aid they would provide for refugees in Turkey and made only a vague reference to preparing for a decision on opening more areas of membership talks – a particularly sensitive issue for Cyprus.

European Council President Donald Tusk, who chaired the summit, said the outcome would show migrants that there was no longer a path into Europe for people seeking a better life.

“The days of irregular migration to Europe are over,” he told a joint news conference with Davutoglu.

Merkel, who requested the special summit to show results before regional elections in Germany next Sunday, said: “The Turkish proposal is a breakthrough, if it is implemented, to break the chain from getting into a boat to settling in Europe.”

Desperate to end the influx of Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans and others, EU leaders brushed off warnings from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees that the EU should not shut its doors and should be willing to take in hundreds of thousands more refugees from Turkey.

Davutoglu said the summit showed how indispensable Turkey was for Europe, and Europe for Turkey.

At a preparatory meeting with Merkel and Rutte on Sunday night, he demanded double the 3 billion euros ($3.29 billion) earmarked so far to support Syrian refugees in Turkey.

Diplomats said Merkel and Rutte pressed hard for a deal on the Turkish plan but met resistance from central European states opposed to taking refugee quotas, as well as from Greece and Cyprus which have conditions for the Turkish accession talks.

Three days after the Turkish government seized the best-selling opposition newspaper Zaman, the leaders said they had discussed the situation of the media in Turkey with Davutoglu.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said he had insisted on a reference to media freedom in the final statement.

USE FORCE?

Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, one of several central European leaders who has resisted pressure to accept a quota of refugees, said the Turkish proposal, if honored and implemented, would be a big step toward solving the migrant crisis.

The EU leaders pledged to help Greece cope with a backlog of migrants stranded on its soil and welcomed NATO naval back-up in the Aegean Sea to help stop people smugglers.

Merkel refused to endorse border closures by Austria and Balkan neighbors that have stranded over 30,000 migrants in Greece, but the statement noted: “Irregular flows of migrants along the Western Balkans route have now come to an end.”

The German leader, facing a possible political backlash in three regional polls over her welcoming of the refugees, said the question of Turkish EU membership was “not on the agenda today” but strategic cooperation with Ankara was in Europe’s vital geopolitical interests.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said the bloc must speed up the process of relocating asylum seekers from Greece to other EU countries as promised last September. EU states have so far taken in only a few hundred of a promised 160,000 people and central European countries have rejected the whole principle.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance had begun patrols in the Aegean to support efforts to locate migrant boats, overcoming territorial sensitivities in Greece and Turkey to patrol in the waters of both NATO states.

“NATO is starting activities in territorial waters today,” he told a joint news conference in Brussels with Davutoglu.

“We are expanding our cooperation with the EU’s border agency, Frontex, and we are expanding the number of ships in our deployment,” he said, adding that France and Britain had agreed to send ships to the Aegean.

Germany is leading the NATO mission that was agreed on Feb. 11, which also includes ships from Canada, Turkey and Greece. Until now, ships had been in international waters.

Britain’s Cameron said he was sending a naval force to the Aegean to join the NATO force even though Britain is outside the Schengen zone of passport-free travel and has refused to take any share of the migrants from Europe.

While Cameron stressed Britain would take no part in any common EU asylum policy, further migrant chaos could damage his efforts to win a June referendum and keep Britain in the EU.

($1 = 0.9122 euros)

(Additional reporting by Francesco Guarascio, Robert-Jan Bartunek, Renee Maltezou, Philip Blenkinsop, Jan Strupczewski, Alissa de Carbonnel, Paul Taylor, Alastair Macdonald and Robin Emmott in Brussels; Writing by Alastair Macdonald and Paul Taylor; Editing by Sandra Maler)

EU courts Turkey, outlines plan to save open borders

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – European Union officials voiced guarded optimism on Friday that Turkey was starting to cooperate to stem the flow of migrants to Europe as Brussels outlined a timetable for restoring open borders across the continent by the end of the year.

European Council President Donald Tusk, who will chair an emergency EU summit with Turkey on Monday, said after talks in Ankara he saw first signs that EU states were overcoming their differences to tackle the year-old crisis.

He also said Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu had told him Turkey was ready to take back all migrants apprehended in Turkish waters. The EU is demanding that Ankara crack down on people smuggling and take back all illegal migrants from its shores who do not qualify for asylum in the 28-nation EU.

“For the first time since the beginning of the migration crisis, I can see a European consensus emerging,” Tusk said in a summit invitation letter to leaders. “It is a consensus around a comprehensive strategy that, if loyally implemented, can help stem the flows and tackle the crisis.”

The EU is trying to close its porous external borders and change the calculus of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and beyond, offering them help if they stay put.

While Tusk was holding talks with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, the European Commission announced the first payouts from a 3 billion euro ($3.3 billion) fund to help Ankara keep some 2.5 million Syrian refugees on Turkish soil.

It also said Turkey was making progress towards achieving eagerly sought visa liberalization for its citizens in the EU.

EU envoy to Turkey Hansjorg Haber told reporters in Istanbul that 400 million euros had been disbursed on humanitarian aid and schooling for migrants.

Meeting in Paris, the leaders of Germany and France agreed that refugees fleeing war in Syria should stay in the region and said their common objective was to put Europe’s frayed Schengen passport-free travel agreement back into operation.

“Our efforts are not done yet,” Chancellor Angela Merkel told a joint news conference with President Francois Hollande. “I understand that Turkey also expects Europe to deliver.”

Merkel pressed for Monday’s summit with Davutoglu in an effort to demonstrate results before three regional elections in Germany on March 13 in which her conservatives face losses to the anti-migration Alternative for Germany party.

STAMPEDE

Tusk said Monday’s summit would confirm the EU had closed the so-called Western Balkans route from Greece to northern Europe, which has been the main entry point for migrants.

“The number of illegal entries from Turkey to Greece remains far too high,” he said after his talks with Davutoglu. Some 30,000 migrants are bottled up in Greece and more are arriving at a rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a day despite still wintry seas.

“We both believe that we can reduce the flow through the large-scale and rapid return from Greece of all migrants not in need of international protection,” Tusk said.

On a visit to Athens, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara was seeing a significant decrease in the number of refugees arriving at its borders due to its changing visa regime.

In Brussels, the Commission presented a step-by-step plan to implement agreed or already-proposed measures – including a new EU border and coast guard – to curb the influx after more than a million people arrived in an uncontrolled stampede in 2015.

“We cannot have free movement internally if we cannot manage our external borders effectively,” Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos told a news conference.

In a pre-summit report to EU leaders, the Commission estimated that a complete collapse of passport-free travel in the 26-nation Schengen zone could cost the European economy up to 18 billion euros ($19.8 billion) a year. Much of the cost would fall on cross-border commuters, transport and tourism.

But investment bank JPMorgan Chase said the short-term impact of more probable selective border controls was likely to be “small in business cycle terms”.

Eight Schengen countries have temporary, emergency border controls in place now to control the flow of migrants, putting in jeopardy one of Europe’s most prized achievements.

More than 1.2 million people submitted asylum requests in the 28-nation EU last year, including 363,000 Syrians and 178,000 Afghans, the EU statistics agency Eurostat said.

Some 442,000 applications were submitted in Germany, the top destination for refugees and migrants, followed by 174,000 in Hungary, which erected barbed-wire fences and used security forces to shut people out, and 156,000 in Sweden, it said.

Sweden, long regarded as the most generous EU state towards refugees, said it would scrap payments of daily allowances to migrants whose asylum applications had been rejected in its latest attempt to curtail the influx.

Fewer than one-fifth of Germans believe the EU will agree on a common approach to the refugee crisis, according to a poll published by the daily Die Welt, and some 48 percent want Berlin to improve protection of Germany’s national borders.

A clear majority — 56 percent — said Germany should cut its EU contributions if Monday’s refugee summit fails.

While Brussels and Berlin are pushing for a European response to the crisis, more and more EU states are skeptical it could work and are resorting to unilateral steps.

“The Commission would never announce that Schengen is over,” said one Brussels-based diplomat from an EU country.

“That would be a major political blow to them, the first real setback in the whole process of European integration. It would be like the pope announcing there is no God.”

(Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald in Brussels, Paul Carrel in Berlin, Andrew Callus in Paris, Nick Tattersall and Humeyra Pamuk in Istanbul; Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Gareth Jones)

EU fate at stake on muddy Greek border as migrants trapped

IDOMENI, Greece (Reuters) – In muddy fields straddling the border with Macedonia, a transit camp hosting up to 12,000 homeless migrants in filthy conditions is the most dramatic sign of a new crisis tearing at Greece’s frayed ties with Europe and threatening its stability.

For the last year, Greece has largely waved through nearly a million migrants who crossed the Aegean Sea from Turkey on their way to wealthier northern Europe.

Now, on top of a searing economic crisis that took it close to ejection from the euro zone a year ago, the European Union’s most enfeebled state is suddenly being turned into what Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras calls a “warehouse of souls”.

At least 30,000 people fleeing conflict or poverty in the Middle East and beyond are bottled up in Greece after Western Balkan states effectively closed their borders. Up to 3,000 more are crossing the Aegean every day despite rough winter seas.

“This is an explosive mix which could blow up at any time. You cannot, however, know when,” said Costas Panagopoulos, head of ALCO opinion pollsters.

Men, women and children from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq are packed like sardines in a disused former airport terminal in Athens, crammed into an indoor stadium or sleeping rough in a central square, where two tried to hang themselves last week.

The influx is severely straining the resources of a country barely able to look after its own people after a six-year recession – the worst since World War Two – that has shrunk the economy by a quarter and driven unemployment above 25 percent.

After years of austerity imposed by international lenders, who are now demanding deeper cuts in old-age pensions, ordinary Greeks say they feel abandoned by the European Union.

A staggering 92 percent of respondents in a Public Issue poll published by To Vima newspaper last Sunday said they felt the EU had left Greece to fend for itself.

The poll was taken before the European Commission announced 300 million euros in emergency aid this year to support relief organizations providing food, shelter and care for the migrants. But such promises do little to soften public anger.

“I want to spit at them,” said 40-year-old Maria Constantinidou, who is unemployed. “Those European leaders .. should each take 10 migrants home, feed them, look after them and then see how difficult things are.”

While the EU and Turkey will struggle to find a consensus at an emergency summit on Monday on how to stem the influx of migrants, Greece looks set to become Europe’s waiting room for months to come.

At Idomeni, a small border town in northern Greece, men from Syria held screaming babies close to a razor wire fence on Thursday, imploring Macedonian police they be allowed to cross.

Greece says it is a victim of geography; some EU partners say Greek fecklessness forced them to reimpose border controls, putting the future of a border-free Europe at stake.

“Its like watching a slow moving train wreck,” said Theodore Couloumbis, a veteran professor of international relations who is an expert on the Balkans and Greek foreign policy.

Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister who took Greece to the brink of a euro zone exit last year by battling creditors over bailout terms, says the crisis was symptomatic of a moral, political and economic trauma in the EU.

“Greece has been, as it always is, the weakest link in the organism and shows the biggest symptoms of disease,” he told Reuters.

CRISIS IN A CRISIS

The initial response from the public has been an outpouring of generosity towards stranded migrants, although a neo-fascist party, Golden Dawn, which advocates forcing immigrants out of Greece, has captured 7 percent of the vote in recent elections.

The migrant crisis threatens a nascent economic turnaround forecast in Greece from the second half of 2016, after six years of deep recession. Business leaders and the central bank have warned that the uncertainty could be a drag on the economy.

The main uncertainty factor is stalled negotiations between Athens and its creditors – the euro zone, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

A first review of economic reforms under the bailout plan agreed last August, which Greece wants concluded fast to move on to debt relief talks, has been held up by disagreement among the lenders over how much more Athens needs to save in public spending, notably on pensions.

Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos insisted on Thursday that cuts in basic pensions were a “red line” for the government.

Publicly at least, nobody is making linkages between the refugee crisis and the bailout review or discussing trade-offs between the two, which are being handled separately.

“It is certainly not my intention to say, ‘look, I have a refugee crisis and that gives me leeway to operate beyond the framework of the (bailout) agreement’,” Tsipras said in a television interview this week. “The agreement will be kept.”

One of the most hawkish creditors, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told Reuters that while the EU should give Greece humanitarian aid, the bailout program must be kept separate.

Greece is funded till July when it faces bond repayments to the ECB, so there is no immediate financial pressure.

But a worsening migrant flow could further complicate Tsipras’ attempts to sell painful bailout reforms to a public which already feels maltreated by its EU partners.

And some policymakers in Brussels, Paris and even Berlin acknowledge that having averted a Greek exit from the euro last year, this would be the worst time for another Greek financial meltdown or political upheaval.

Greeks don’t need much prompting to take to the streets. Mass protests are a regular feature in a volatile country of 11 million where pensions have been cut 11 times since 2010.

Pollster Panagopoulos said he doubted the dual crisis would topple the government, but Tsipras might call another election — after two general elections and a referendum last year — if he felt in a deadlock.

CRISIS HOVERS OVER BREXIT

In mid-February, Greece briefly threatened not to sign off on final agreements at an EU summit on amending Britain’s membership terms unless Athens won assurances that EU states would not shut their borders. They did so anyway.

Now Tsipras has hinted at using the veto threat again to ensure his country does not become a holding pen for migrants.

“What I am seeking is the best possible outcome for Greece. Even if it means, to achieve that, using all tools provided for under (EU) conventions,” the leftist prime minister said in a television interview this week when asked if he could veto a deal between the EU and Turkey at a summit next week.

How Greece and the migrant crisis are handled may resonate at the other end of the continent in Britain, where voters will decide in a June 23 referendum whether to stay in the bloc.

James Ker-Lindsay, a Balkans expert at the London School of Economics, said leftist academics in Britain – a small but influential group typically supportive of the EU – were so dismayed by Brussels’ treatment of Greece in 2015 that it would not take much to alienate them completely.

“If it looks like a double dose harsh treatment, the euroscepticism which is coming in very strong from right-wing parties across the EU could start being repeated on the left, but for a very different reason,” Ker-Lindsay said.

(Writing by Michele Kambas; Editing by Paul Taylor and Mark John)

EU Council president urges migrants to stop coming to Europe

ATHENS (Reuters) – EU Council President Donald Tusk told illegal economic migrants on Thursday not to risk their lives or money to make a perilous trip to Europe “for nothing” but said unilateral actions by European Union states to deal with the crisis must stop.

Tusk was on a trip through Balkan states to try to drum up support for cohesion on how to deal with hundreds of thousands of migrants – a crisis that threatens to tear the bloc apart – before an EU summit on Monday.

From Greece, which has been a primary gateway of migrants flooding into Europe for more than a year, Tusk said anyone who was not a refugee should stay away.

“I want to appeal to all potential illegal economic migrants wherever you are from: Do not come to Europe. Do not believe the smugglers. Do not risk your lives and your money. It is all for nothing,” Tusk said.

Up to 30,000 refugees and migrants have been stranded in Greece from progressive border closures further up the “Balkan corridor”, the route taken to get into wealthier central and northern Europe.

“At Monday’s summit, Greece will demand that burden sharing be equitable among all countries in the bloc, and sanctions for those that do not,” Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said after meeting Tusk.

“We ask that unilateral actions stop in Europe,” said Tspiras in a view echoed by Tusk.

EU officials have told Reuters that European governments, and particularly Germany, are looking to Turkey to reduce the number of migrant arrivals in Greece to below 1,000 a day at most as an initial condition for discussing taking some Syrian refugees directly from Turkey.

Tsipras said Greece would continue to do whatever it could to ensure no migrant or refugee was left helpless. But he added Greece could not bear the burden by itself.

“We will not allow Greece or any other country to be turned into a warehouse of souls,” Tsipras said. “We are at a crucial moment for the future of Europe.”

Greece would make every effort to apply international treaties. Speaking of the masses of people reaching Greek shores on small inflatable dinghies from Turkey, Tsipras said: “We will not push back people in the sea, risking the lives of children.”

Officials said Tusk would be stressing in Athens and Ankara on Thursday that the goal was to eliminate entirely the transit of migrants from Turkey to Greece and that Europeans believed Turkey should be able to bring the numbers down to the “low triple digits” very soon.

“If there were to be a target figure, it would be zero,” one EU official said, noting that 1,000 people a day would mean an unsustainable 350,000 people a year arriving in Greece.

(Editing by Richard Balmforth)

Macedonia police fire tear gas at migrants while Europe bickers

IDOMENI/ATHENS (Reuters) – Macedonian police fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of migrants who stormed the border from Greece on Monday as a deeply divided Europe traded barbs over the biggest humanitarian crisis in decades.

As frustrations boiled over at restrictions imposed on people moving through the Balkans, migrants trapped on the Greece-Macedonia border tore down a metal gate in the barbed wire fence.

A Reuters witness said Macedonian police fired several rounds of teargas into the crowd and onto a railway line where other migrants sat refusing to move, demanding to cross into the country.

Greece raced to set up temporary accommodation for a build-up of thousands of migrants stranded in the country after Austria and countries along the Balkans migration route imposed restrictions on their borders, limiting the number of migrants able to cross.

Many of the migrants, fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and North Africa, hope to reach Germany, which last year took in 1.1 million asylum seekers.

There were an estimated 22,000 migrants and refugees trapped in Greece on Monday, some sleeping rough in central Athens, some in an abandoned airport and at the 2004 Olympic Games venues.

Greece’s migration minister said without any outlet, that figure could rise as high as 70,000 in coming days.

More than 1 million migrants passed through the country last year, prompting criticism from other European nations that Athens was simply waving them through.

“These people do not want to stay here,” said Thodoris Dritsas, Greece’s shipping minister. “Even if we had a system in place for them to stay here permanently it wouldn’t work.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, facing the biggest test of her decade in power, on Sunday defended the country’s open-door policy for migrants, rejecting any limit on the number of refugees it allowed in despite divisions within the government over the issue.

“It is my damn duty to do everything I can so that Europe finds a collective way,” she told state broadcaster ARD.

That way was lacking on Monday, however, a week before European Union leaders meet with officials from Turkey to discuss how it can help stem the flow of migrants from its shores.

In an increasingly shrill debate, Austria’s defense minister suggested Merkel take in all those who were stranded in Greece.

“The German chancellor … said that formally there is no upper limit in Germany. Then, I would invite her to take the people, who arrive in Greece now and whom she wants to take care of, directly to Germany,” Hans Peter Doskozil told Austria’s Oe1 radio.

TENT COMMUNITY

Thousands of people have been gathering at Idomeni, the small frontier community on Greece’s border with Macedonia, for days. Hundreds of tents were pitched in soggy fields on Monday and there were reports that fights had broken out among families over tents, which were in short supply.

Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki said that there was a problem with “shifting in responsibility” and shifting the problem to the next border.

“Frustration has accumulated because for several days some of these people have been blocked at the Greek border,” he told Reuters.

Nearly 100 foreign police officers – from countries including Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria – were deployed in Macedonia, he said, adding the figure could go up to 350.

In a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, he said that “encouraging” cooperation had been established with Greece on the issue but that it may not be enough.

On Monday, a crush developed along the frontier after rumors spread that Macedonian authorities had opened the border. Crowds gathered at the razor wire fence then used a heavy metal pole to bring down a gate. At least two people collapsed in the crush and after teargas was fired at them, Reuters television images showed.

Aid agencies said the border was opening with Macedonia intermittently, with about 7,000 people gathered in the area.

People were also being sent back for apparent discrepancies between registration documents they received from Greek authorities and their own travel documents, witnesses said.

“There are people who have been here for as long as 10 days,” said Gemma Gillie of aid agency Medicins Sans Frontieres. “Things are really stretched to the limit.”

(Reporting By Alexandros Avramidis in Idomeni, Lefteris Karagiannopoulos in Athens, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Kirsti Knolle in Vienna; Writing by Michele Kambas; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Greece seeks to stem flow of migrants as thousands trapped by border limits

ATHENS/IDOMENI (Reuters) – Greece moved to slow the flow of migrants from its islands to the mainland on Friday as thousands of homeless refugees were trapped in the country by border limits imposed along a Balkan route to richer nations in northern Europe.

From its northern frontier with Macedonia to its port of Piraeus in the south, Greece was inundated with refugees and migrants after border shutdowns cascaded through the Balkans, stranding at least 20,000 in the country.

At Idomeni, a small community on the border with Macedonia, Reuters witnesses saw hundreds of families walking towards the frontier to join an estimated 3,000 more at a makeshift camp where many pitched tents in a field close to razor wire fence.

More than 500 km further south, hundreds of people were temporarily accommodated at a disused airport west of Athens. Sleeping mats were strewn across the terminal among biscuit wrappers as many women sat on the floor, some weeping.

“Planes bombed our homes, it was dangerous to stay there,” said mother of three Rajiya Zara, 38, nine months pregnant. “I’m afraid for my children.”

Between 300 and 400 people refused to stay at the airport, and took off on their own. “Help Us,” a large piece of paper held by one said. “We are human, open the borders”, read another, scrawled on a sleeping mat.

WE DIDN’T START IT

Athens on Thursday recalled its ambassador to Austria in anger over the border closures and has threatened to block European Union decision-making unless the bloc comes up with concerted action to deal with the crisis.

In the latest measure to slow the northward movement of migrants, the police chiefs of Slovenia, Austria, Macedonia, Serbia and Croatia agreed to limit the flow to about 580 per day per country, Slovenian police said on Friday.

The police chiefs are “obliged to limit daily transit through Western Balkans countries to a number which would enable a control of every migrant according to Schengen rules,” the police said.

Austria had earlier in the week hosted a summit of Balkan nations on how to regulate the migrant flows, but did not invite Athens. “Greece is being attacked by short-sighted countries, as if we were bombing Syria or created the refugee flows,” said Nikos Kotzias, Greece’s foreign minister.

Greece asked its passenger ferry companies and travel agencies on Friday to cut back on bringing migrants and refugees from frontline islands to the mainland and said its own chartered ships would stay put for a few days.

The moves, described by Greece’s shipping minister as temporary, are designed to stem a flow of people mostly fleeing violence in the Middle East.

Most refugees arrive in the European Union after a short but at times dangerous journey by small boats from Turkey to nearby Greek islands such as Lesbos.

“We have taken some actions because of border closings, including an increase of temporary shelter spaces and a relative slowdown of the transport of migrants from the islands to the port of Piraeus,” Shipping Minister Thodoris Dritsas told Skai TV.

He said three ships chartered specifically to move migrants to the Greek mainland would be docked at the islands and accommodate refugees for “two or three days”.

“It is a small scale slowdown (of flows to the mainland),” he said.

Macedonia, to the immediate north, is accepting only Iraqis and Syrians, witnesses say, with Afghans being turned back. Many of those who travelled the 550 km journey north only to be turned away sat in the stinking and overcrowded airport terminal on Friday, pondering their fate.

“I want to go to Germany,” said 18-year-old Nadershah Ahmedi, a student from Afghanistan. “When we came to Greece we heard the borders to Macedonia are closed for Afghans. Why can Syrians and Iraqis pass but not us?”

(Additional reporting by Lefteris Karagiannopoulos, Angeliki Koutantou, and Alkis Konstantinidis, and Marja Novak in Ljubljana; writing by Michele Kambas; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt and Dominic Evans)

Europe’s free travel will end unless Turkey halts flow of migrants, officials say

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Europe’s cherished free-travel zone will shut down unless Turkey acts to cut the number of migrants heading north through Greece by March 7, European Union officials said on Thursday.

Their declaration came as confrontations grow increasingly rancorous among European countries trying to cope with the influx of refugees. Those recriminations culminated in Greece’s recalling its ambassador to Austria on Thursday.

“In the next ten days, we need tangible and clear results on the ground,” the top EU migration official, Dimitris Avramopoulos, said after EU justice and home affairs ministers met in Brussels on Thursday. “Otherwise there is a danger, there is a risk that the whole system will completely break down.”

EU leaders are now pinning their hopes on talks with Turkey on March 7 and their own migration summit on March 18-19. The two meetings look like their final chance to revive a flailing joint response to the crisis before warmer weather encourages more arrivals across the Mediterranean.

Seven European states have already restored border controls within the creaking Schengen passport-free zone. More said they would unilaterally tighten border controls unless a deal with Turkey shows results before the two March summits.

That deal promises Turkey $3.3 billion in aid to help it shelter refugees from the Syrian war, in return for preventing their traveling on to Europe.

“By March 7, we want a significant reduction in the number of refugees at the border between Turkey and Greece,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said. “Otherwise ,there will have to be other joint, coordinated European measures.”

Germany has been pushing the Turkey plan hard. Many other EU states are increasingly frustrated and skeptical, though. Another 110,000 people have arrived on the continent so far this year, mostly from Turkey via Greece, after more than a million arrived last year.

CRUCIAL DATE

“The 6th of March, the 7th of March is when you can expect the spring influx to rise. We have until that time to find solutions … ” said Klaas Dijkhoff, migration minister for the Netherlands, which now holds the EU’s rotating presidency.

“If that doesn’t lead to lower numbers, we’ll have to find other measures and we’ll have to do more contingency planning,” he said.

NATO has agreed to send ships to the Aegean to help fight people-trafficking, and one military official said the aim was to have the mission running before March 7.

The crisis was exacerbated when German Chancellor Angela Merkel last year waived EU procedures to take in hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Mutual recriminations have sabotaged efforts to share the burden systematically ever since.

“We have no policy any more. We are heading into anarchy,” said Jean Asselborn, Luxembourg’s foreign minister.

Belgium, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Denmark have all introduced emergency border checks, allowed under the Schengen rules. But Austria, the last stop for most migrants before Germany, infuriated Brussels and Berlin last week by setting daily caps on the number of people it processes.

CASCADE OF CLOSURES

The decision set off a cascade of similar moves back through the western Balkans, the main migration route, leaving ever more migrants stuck in Greece.

“If Greece is not able or willing to secure the EU’s external border, others have to act,” Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said. “If Greece insists that it cannot protect the Greek border, one has to ask themselves whether the Schengen border should be there.”

Struggling to emerge from years of economic crisis, Greece accuses other EU states of forcing it to take a disproportionate share of the migrants. It not only has withdrawn its Austrian ambassador but threatened to block other EU decisions if its fellow members do not share the burden.

EU ministers agreed the EU’s executive arm will monitor the Western Balkans route and offer humanitarian assistance to Greece or elsewhere if bottlenecks grow. But Athens is raging.

“Many discuss how to handle a humanitarian crisis in Greece, which they themselves are trying to create,” said the country’s migration minister, Yannis Mouzalas. “Greece will not accept unilateral moves. Unilateral moves can also be made by Greece.”

(Additional reporting by Francesco Guarascio, Alastair Macdonald, Tom Koerkemeier in Brussels, Michele Kambas and George Georgiopoulos in Athens; Writing by Gabriela Baczynska; Editing by Larry King)

Austria sticks to migration cap despite EU legal warning

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Austria said on Thursday it would go ahead with introducing daily caps on migrants despite warnings from Brussels that the move broke European Union rules, which have already been badly stretched by the migration crisis engulfing the bloc.

Vienna announced it would let in no more than 3,200 people and cap asylum claims at 80 per day from Friday as it tries to cut immigration, drawing criticism from the European Union’s migration chief.

“Politically I say we’ll stick with it … it is unthinkable for Austria to take on the asylum seekers for the whole of Europe,” Austria’s Chancellor Werner Faymann said on arriving at an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels.

Around 700,000 migrants entered Austria last year and about 90,000 applied for asylum in the country sitting on the migrant route from Turkey via Greece and the Balkans to Germany.

“After 100,000 refugees, we can’t tell the Austrian people that it will just continue like this. That’s why I tell the EU: we set a good example but to think that you don’t have to do anything, then I have to say it is time for the EU to act,” Faymann said.

Austria is the latest EU state to resort to its own measures to curb migration and try control the flows as the 28-nation bloc has all but failed to implement a joint response to its worst migration crisis in decades.

“It is true that Austria is under huge pressure,” European Union Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos told Reuters earlier on Thursday. “It is true they are overwhelmed. But, on the other hand, there are some principles and laws that all countries must respect and apply.”

Avramopoulos sent a letter to Austria’s Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner on Thursday, urging Vienna to reconsider the move as it was against EU laws.

“The Austrians are obliged to accept asylum applications without putting a cap,” Avramopoulos said.

But Faymann blamed the failure of the European migration and refugee policies, saying the bloc’s relocation plan to ease the burden on most-affected countries was not working and criticizing central-eastern EU members who have stalled it.

The migration crisis, which saw more than a million people reach Europe last year, opened deep rifts between EU states, which are trading blame and increasingly resorting to ad-hoc national solutions despite Brussels calls to prevent them.

Faymann backed Merkel in pushing for more cooperation with Turkey to get Ankara to curb the number of migrants and refugees who embark from its shores toward Europe.

Germany and Austria are among 11 EU states that were due to meet Turkey separately before the summit of all 28 EU leaders to discuss taking in more people directly from Turkey to discourage perilous journeys across the Mediterranean.

“Every agreement between Turkey and Greece to protect the common border and make legal immigration possible, every advance and may it be ever so mediocre, would be necessary and right,” Faymann said, adding he would seek a new meeting with Turkey after the Thursday one was canceled over a bombing in Ankara.

(Additional reporting by Shadia Nasralla and Francois Murphy in Vienna; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

Europeans stack up $1.1 trillion in cash as economic worries grow

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – The amount of cash across the euro zone rose to more than 1 trillion euros ($1.1 trillion) last year, with almost 30 percent of it hoarded in 500 euro notes, ECB data has shown, as nervous individuals keep more of their money at home or in a vault.

Cash in circulation is almost double the amount of 10 years earlier and has risen steadily throughout the debt crisis, a trend that reflects fears about the euro zone and its banks as well as exasperation with low returns on savings.

Cash across the 19-country bloc climbed to 1.08 trillion euros at the end of last year, roughly 8 percent higher than at the start of 2015.

The supply of money has also increased over this time, partly due to quantitative easing or money printing, although by nothing like the same amount.

The rush for cash effectively reduces deposits at banks, thereby weakening them. As cash in circulation rose last year, deposits edged up at only a quarter of the pace.

The phenomenon is partly due to nervousness about the euro zone and its banks. Capital controls prohibit large withdrawals in Greece, where savers have hoarded tens of billions, after big depositors lost money in the country’s financial bailout.

One Cypriot central bank official told Reuters of a woman who had burnt cash in an oven after forgetting she had hidden it there. Other Cypriots stashed their lucre in washing machines and later sought to replace soggy notes at the central bank.

But the scale of the increase shows that hoarding is not limited to financially troubled countries.

“There are two issues: lack of trust in the banking system and concern about where to invest your money,” said Stavros Zenios, an academic and former member of the Board of Directors at Cyprus’s central bank.

The data comes amid a debate about scrapping the 500 euro note. The head of the European Anti-Fraud Office has suggested banning it because it is used by fraudsters. Benoit Coeure, an ECB policymaker, told Le Parisien newspaper on Thursday that the central bank was considering the future of its largest denomination.

Ditching the note, which could only be gradually phased out, may prompt savers to dissolve the more than 300 billion euros stored in 500-euro notes.

“It has a major impact on the economy,” said Zenios. “This hoarding is working against what the ECB is trying to do – get more liquidity into the system.”

(Additional reporting by Michele Kambas in Athens; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

NATO launches sea mission against migrant traffickers

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – NATO ships are on their way to the Aegean Sea to help Turkey and Greece crack down on criminal networks smuggling refugees into Europe, the alliance’s top commander said on Thursday.

Hours after NATO defense ministers agreed to use their maritime force in the eastern Mediterranean to help combat traffickers, Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Philip Breedlove said he was working quickly to design the mission.

“We are sailing the ships in the appropriate direction,” Breedlove told a news conference, and the mission plan would be refined during the time they were en route. “That’s about 24 hours,” he said.

The plan, which was first raised only on Monday by Germany and Turkey, took NATO by surprise and is aimed at helping the continent tackle its worst migration crisis since World War Two. More than a million asylum-seekers arrived last year.

Unlike the EU’s maritime mission off the Italian coast, which brings rescued migrants to Europe’s shores, NATO will return migrants to Turkey even if they are picked up in Greek waters.

Britain’s defense minister said that marked a significant change in policy. “They won’t be taken to Greece and that’s a crucial difference,” Michael Fallon told reporters.

NATO will also monitor the Turkey-Syria land border for people-smugglers, said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

Although the plan is still to be detailed by NATO generals, the allies are likely to use the ships to work with Turkish and Greek coastguards and the European Union border agency Frontex.

“There is now a criminal syndicate that is exploiting these poor people and this is an organized smuggling operation,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter told reporters.

“Targeting that is the way that the greatest effect can be had … That is the principal intent of this,” Carter said.

The numbers of people fleeing war and failing states, mainly in the Middle East and North Africa, show little sign of falling, despite winter weather that makes sea crossings even more perilous.

A 3 billion euro ($3.4 billion) deal between the EU and Turkey to stem the flows has yet to have a big impact.

SEEKING SHIPS

Germany said it would take part in the NATO mission along with Greece and Turkey, while the United States, NATO’s most powerful member, said it fully supported the plan.

The alliance’s so-called Standing NATO Maritime Group Two has five ships near Cyprus, led by Germany and with vessels from Canada, Italy, Greece and Turkey. Breedlove said NATO would need allies to contribute to sustain the mission over time.

Denmark is expected to offer a ship, according to a German government source. The Netherlands may also contribute.

“It is important that we now act quickly,” German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen said.

Intelligence gathered about people-smugglers will be handed to Turkish coastguards to allow them to combat the traffickers more effectively, rather than having NATO act directly against the criminals, diplomats said.

Greek and Turkish ships will remain in their respective territorial waters, given sensitivities between the two countries.

NATO and the EU are eager to avoid the impression that the 28-nation military alliance is now tasked to stop refugees or treat them as a threat.

“This is not about stopping or pushing back refugee boats,” Stoltenberg said.

(Additional reporting by Sabine Siebold in Brussels and Michele Kambas in Athens,; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)