Tag Archives: Greece

‘Game changer’: How the EU may shut Turkish door on migrants

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – A European Union draft deal with Turkey to stop migrants reaching Greece introduces a harder edge of coercion to what critics have derided as a hitherto feeble EU response to a crisis tearing it apart.

Just last week, some saw European Council President Donald Tusk running short on ideas when he urged would-be migrants: “Do not come to Europe.” UKIP, a party campaigning to take Britain out of the EU at a June referendum, said his “weak plea” was “too little too late to stop the vast migrant flow into Europe”.

Yet what Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu called a “game-changing” plan for Turkey to forcibly take back not only economic migrants who make it to Greek islands off its coast but even refugees from Syria, who will then suffer disadvantages, is the strongest move yet to change the calculus of migration.

If the plan is agreed, and if it works, taking to a boat from a Turkish beach at the cost of life savings to a smuggler – and possibly of life itself – would no longer be a ticket to a better life in Germany but a rapid round trip to Turkey. There, those returned would be, in the words of EU officials, “at the back of the line” for legal asylum and resettlement in Europe.

The United Nations refugee agency warned that Europe must not close its door to those in need, as civil war in Syria has left millions homeless and afraid. Human rights groups have been scathing about a Europe preaching democracy but cutting a deal with a Turkish government accused of persecuting opponents.

Many are concerned about a quickfire process of deporting everyone back to Turkey with little regard for individuals.

But 1.2 million people reached the EU last year to claim asylum amid chaotic scenes on beaches and on the long trek north from Greece through the Balkans. It has set EU states at odds, shut long-uncontrolled borders and fueled nationalist sentiment among voters across the bloc. Leaders’ patience is thin.

“We need to break the link between getting in a boat and getting settlement in Europe,” they said after Monday’s summit.

DETERRENCE

An earlier EU plan foresaw deportation back to Turkey reserved for those, such as Pakistanis or North Africans, with little likelihood of winning refugee status in the EU – though in practice making such distinctions has proven problematic.

The new plan would see even Syrians and others with stronger asylum claims being shipped with little ceremony back across straits, now being demonstratively patrolled by NATO warships.

To force back crowds that last year numbered up to 20,000 a day seems impracticable. But EU officials said the key was to dissuade people from traveling in the first place.

For every Syrian sent back from a Greek island in future, another Syrian would be entitled to a legal, safe trip to Europe. That could be a rather small number if deterrence works, so EU leaders agreed to consider also resettling larger numbers.

For Europeans, the deal could help end a crisis that has jeopardized their cherished Schengen passport-free zone.

There are clear gains for Greece, where Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has warned of becoming a “warehouse of souls” as more than 30,000 migrants have become stranded there since its northern neighbors began closing their borders. The downside could be ugly scenes on the islands off Turkey.

For German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who worked closely on the deal with Davutoglu before the summit, a dramatic sign of an imminent end to the crisis could be a boost in regional elections on Sunday that will, in part, pass judgment on her decision last summer to open Germany’s doors to Syrians.

“DIRTY DEAL”

Turkey is seeking in return some 6 billion euros ($6.6 billion) to help improve the lives of refugees over the next three years – twice as much as a two-year deal with the EU struck in November, as well as the opening of new “chapters” in its long-stalled negotiation to join the European Union.

Also important for Turkish public opinion is a request to bring forward by four months to June a plan to make it easier for Turks to travel without visas to Europe’s Schengen zone.

Several European governments have strong reservations about the Turkish proposals. Cyprus is wary about lifting its veto on parts of the accession process as long as Ankara does not end a refusal to recognize or trade with Cyprus, diplomats said.

It is also concerned not to disrupt talks that have brought the prospect of ending the four-decade division of the island.

France, sceptical of Turkey ever joining the EU, is resistant to a rapid easing of visa requirements for Turkey. President Francois Hollande said it would still have to meet 72 criteria – among them modernizing Turkish identity documents.

Britain, too, where Prime Minister David Cameron is campaigning to persuade voters to back continued EU membership on June 23, is wary of newspaper headlines suggesting 75 million Turks may soon be traveling more easily around Europe, even if Britain is outside the Schengen visa area they could access.

And central and eastern European states, long opposed to EU efforts to force them to take in a share of refugees, are concerned about elements of the deal that could see more calls for asylum-seekers to be resettled around the bloc.

However, the lure of an end to the crisis – at least inside Europe – may prove a compelling argument despite the critics.

John O’Brennan, Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration at Maynooth University in Ireland, tweeted: “EU norms of pluralism are being completely eviscerated. By the European Union itself. Shame on this dirty deal with Turkey.”

Summit chair Tusk, a former Polish premier, insisted the EU was not going soft on defending human rights in Turkey. But he stressed the benefits of the plan to crack down on travelers, saying: “The days of irregular migration to Europe are over.”

(Editing by Robert Birsel)

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 launches emergency refugee aid scheme for Greece

By Gabriela Baczynska and Francesco Guarascio

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union, faced with a burgeoning refugee crisis in Greece, launched a new aid program on Wednesday worth an initial 700 million euros that mirrors the kind of disaster relief it offers developing nations.

As European states have tightened borders following the arrival of more than a million migrants by sea last year and the Athens government has appealed for help to house and care for tens of thousands still arriving and now stranded in Greece.

The European Commission’s proposal will, if approved, switch 300 million euros ($325 million) this year from its 155-billion euro annual budget to the new emergency assistance scheme and 200 million euros both next year and in 2018.

Officials stress that the program will not divert funds from the EU’s 1.1-billion annual budget devoted to helping the world’s poorest. They note that relieving the suffering of refugees closer to their homes is a key part of the 28-nation bloc’s strategy to discourage people from making dangerous journeys to Europe.

More than 400 people have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean this year as they tried to reach Europe, most of them on the short but perilous crossing from Turkey to Greece.

Turkey is at the heart of the EU’s efforts to slow the influx of refugees and migrants and the bloc wants Ankara to ensure that daily arrivals fall below 1,000 from 2,000-3,000 at present.

Two officials told Reuters that Germany, the principal destination for those arriving in Europe, is looking for flows to be “in the realm of three digits, not four” per day and, should that happen, Berlin would start taking refugees directly from Turkey for resettlement – an attempt to promote legal migration rather than continuing the chaotic influx of 2015.

The Commission also said on Wednesday that 308 irregular migrants who had no case for asylum in Europe were being returned to Turkey from Greece, a sharp increase on recent numbers going back to Turkey.

The EU money, to be spent in conjunction with the United Nations and private charities working in Greece and other EU states, is intended to fund purchases of shelter, food, medical aid and other basic services.

Greece, which now houses about 25,000 refugees and migrants, has hitherto benefited from EU funding and assistance under other programs to bolster its border and security systems and coordinate donations of aid from fellow EU members, though Athens has complained that offers have been inadequate.

“The number of refugees continues to rise, so do their humanitarian needs. All of this is happening inside Europe,” Humanitarian Aid Commissioner Christos Stylianides said.

At a single border point, the Idomeni crossing between Greece and Macedonia, between 12,000 and 15,000 stranded people were in need of urgent humanitarian assistance, he said.

“OVERWHELMED”

Officials in Brussels said the aim is to have the scheme operational on the ground “within weeks rather than months”.

The new program, to be a permanent feature of the EU budget, is intended for use by any EU state that is “overwhelmed” and cannot cope with a wide range of emergencies, including accidents, militant attacks and epidemics. It will need approval by the European Parliament and member states.

Greece, the main gateway to Europe, would initially be the main beneficiary of the emergency scheme for “tackling wide-ranging humanitarian crises within the EU”. The money would also be available to other EU countries along the Balkans migration route — the main track used by refugees and migrants.

Greece, its economy blighted by the euro zone debt crisis, has asked for 480 million euros to help it cope with 100,000 migrants. EU officials said on Wednesday they were still looking at the request.

More than a million people reached Europe last year and some 133,000 arrived on the continent so far in 2016 in what has grown to be a major crisis for the bloc, that now also risks turning into a humanitarian disaster.

(Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald and Robin Emmott; Editing by Dominic Evans)

Euro zone, IMF split over how much Greece needs to reform

By Jan Strupczewski

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Euro zone lenders and the International Monetary Fund disagree over how much more Greece needs to do to reform its economy, a dispute that may delay new payouts and the start of debt relief talks, officials said.

Greece has been kept afloat since 2010 by IMF and euro zone bailouts. The lenders have disagreed in the past, but they have managed to resolve their issues before they got much publicity.

But after Athens had to ask for a third bailout last year, some in the IMF wanted to stay out of yet another program unless they were sure it would get Greece back on its feet.

“The main problem now is disagreement between the institutions, because that will harm the credibility of any solution,” one senior official said. “They must get their act together and agree on a scenario and on policy measures.”

IMF and euro zone officials hope to reach a compromise on Greece in talks this week, before a meeting of euro zone finance ministers on Monday. Senior officials from both sides are to meet for dinner on Wednesday in Brussels to discuss the issue.

Until the euro zone and the IMF agree, they cannot decide if Greece has met the first requirements for the payout of new loans. Nor can the euro zone start discussions with Athens on debt relief that would help make Greece’s huge debt sustainable.

Greece has no major debt redemptions due until July, giving the lenders and Athens time to find a compromise. But the drawn- out talks undermine investor confidence.

“If we now enter a cycle of whether this review will be concluded or not, it will generate the kind of insecurity we more or less had last year … with the loss of confidence and capital flight,” a third official close to the lenders said.

The dispute focuses on what Greece has to do to reach a 3.5 percent primary surplus in 2018 and keep it there so that it no longer has to borrow from the euro zone to remain solvent.

Officials said the IMF had a more cautious outlook than euro zone institutions on Greek economic growth and fiscal performance, as experience showed Athens underperformed targets.

The IMF believes Greece’s primary surplus in 2018 will be around 2 percent with the current reforms. Growth will be about a percentage point lower than forecast by the euro zone. Greece should therefore be more ambitious with reforms, especially with the most politically difficult, pension reform.

REFORMS NOT ENOUGH

Yet Greece’s commitments are spelled out in a memorandum of understanding (MoU) it signed with the euro zone in August. It says the pension reform will deliver savings of 1 percent of gross domestic product in 2016.

The draft reform prepared by Athens does that, but Greece also understood the deal from August a bit differently.

“In summer we promised to do 1 pct GDP of extra measures to be legislated in 2016 but to be implemented in 2017 and 2018. The IMF is asking for even more measures than this, which is very difficult for us to understand,” Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos told a hearing in the European Parliament.

“We feel that we have already compromised. I don’t think we have to make a greater compromise … because we are at the end of a recession and … we have already had 11 cuts,” he said.

The IMF was involved in talks on the memorandum, but did not sign off on it and is not formally part of the bailout. It says the numbers don’t add up.

“To reach its ambitious medium-term target for the primary surplus of 3.5 percent of GDP, Greece will need to take measures in the order of some 4-5 percent of GDP,” the IMF’s head of the European department, Poul Thomsen, wrote on Feb 11. “We cannot see how Greece can do so without major savings on pensions.”

The pension reform could be less ambitious and the 2018 primary surplus lower if the euro zone offered Greece greater debt relief, Thomsen said.

That would irk some in the euro zone who have to maintain similar surpluses to keep debt sustainable or who, like the Baltics or Slovakia, find it difficult to justify Greeks getting bigger pensions than their own citizens.

“We should do what we promised in the summer, and the IMF should pressure the EU to make that sustainable (with more debt relief),” Tsakalotos told European parliamentarians.

Another snag is that the IMF wants debt relief to solve the issue once and for all. The euro zone wants a staggered scheme, linked to conditions over time.

While the IMF is not formally part of the third bailout, the euro zone would very much like it to be. But the Fund will not join unless their views align.

The approval of the IMF is also a must for northern European countries like Germany, Austria or Finland, which believe the European Commission is too lenient towards Greece and too optimistic with forecasts.

(Reporting By Jan Strupczewski, additional reporting by Paul Taylor and Francesco Guarascio in Brussels, Gernot Heller in Berlin, editing by Larry King)

Europe on cusp of self-induced humanitarian crisis, UNHCR says

GENEVA/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The build-up of thousands of migrants and refugees on Greece’s northern borders is fast turning into a humanitarian disaster, the United Nations said on Tuesday as the European Union prepared to offer more financial aid.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said clashes at Greece’s border with Macedonia on Monday – when migrants battered down a gate and were tear-gassed – simply underlined the urgency with which the EU needed to act on the crisis.

But Austria – which last month limited the number of migrants it lets through to 3,200 a day – stuck to its position that it did not want to become an overcrowded waiting room for thousands wanting to make it further north.

Croatia, which is also on what is now the well-trodden migrants route northwards from Greece, said it might deploy its armed forces to help police control flows.

But near Idomeni, on the Greek-Macedonian border itself, a tent city mushroomed, prompting some despair among those trapped there. “Macedonian police put us here, the Greeks don’t want us back,” Yase Qued, a 16-year-old from Afghanistan, told Reuters.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) called for better planning and accommodation for at least 24,000 it said were stuck in Greece, including 8,500 at Idomeni.

“Europe is on the cusp of a largely self-induced humanitarian crisis,” U.N. refugee agency spokesman Adrian Edwards told a news briefing.

“The crowded conditions are leading to shortages of food, shelter, water and sanitation. As we all saw yesterday, tensions have been building, fuelling violence and playing into the hands of people smugglers,” he said.

Migrants have become stranded in Greece since Austria and other countries along the Balkans migration corridor imposed restrictions on their borders, limiting the numbers able to cross.

Police chiefs from Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, meeting in Belgrade, agreed to improve the system of joint registration of refugees to unblock gridlocks in Greece.

The burgeoning crisis adds to last year’s chaos when more than a million migrants and refugees arrived in the EU, many fleeing the war in Syria and walking from Turkey northwards.

Some 130,000 have reached the continent so far in 2016.

CRISIS AID

The European Commission, the EU executive, said it would float a plan on Wednesday to offer emergency financial aid for humanitarian crises inside the 28-nation bloc – comparable with operations it has launched elsewhere in the world.

Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker spoke to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Monday and European Council President Donald Tusk was on a visit to Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Greece and Turkey.

Tusk’s tour comes ahead of a special European Union summit on the crisis next Monday. Germany’s Merkel said television pictures of migrants desperate to make their way into western Europe via the Balkans drove home the urgency of the summit.

“The pictures show us clearly every day that there is a need for talks,” she said after meeting Croatian Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic in Berlin.

“We also naturally need to deal with the very difficult situation in Greece and see how we can fulfill what the (European) Commission demanded from us, namely to end the politics of waving people through and to return to the Schengen system as soon as possible and to the greatest possible extent.”

The difficulty of reaching agreement on an issue which goes to the heart of public fears for security and safety in many countries was underlined by Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann, who honed in on comments from German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere that suggested he thought Austria might wave through too many migrants.

“What is not acceptable is to say that they should definitely come and then the interior minister says he is against waving people through (to Germany),” Faymann told a news conference after a weekly cabinet meeting.

“Then how should they go to Germany?”

The UNHCR, meanwhile, urged all EU member states to reinforce their capacity to register and process asylum seekers through their national procedures as well as through an EU relocation scheme.

“Greece cannot manage this situation alone,” Edwards said.

Despite commitments to relocate 66,400 refugees from Greece, EU member states have so far pledged just 1,539 spaces and only 325 people actually have been relocated, he added.

(Additional reporting by Lefteris Papadimas in Idomeni, Francois Murphy in Vienna, Aleksandar Vasovic in Belgrade, Paul Carrel in Berlin; Writing by Jeremy Gaunt; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

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)

Migrant girl in wheelchair sits silently at shut Macedonian border for hours

IDOMENI, Greece (Reuters) – Wheelchair-bound Zhino Hasan, 17, sat silently and alone for most of Friday in front of a closed border gate, hoping that Macedonia would relent and allow her and her family to resume their northward trek through the Balkans to Germany.

Her father, Sarkawt, wheeled her there at daybreak on Friday, hoping to get a headstart in the queue whenever the border Greece shares with Macedonia in the small community of Idomeni reopens.

The Hasan family, Iraqi Kurds from Kirkuk, are among at least 20,000 refugees and migrants trapped in Greece following successive border shutdowns along the Balkan route used by refugees to reach wealthier European nations.

“We want to get to Germany,” said Sarkawt Hasan, 46. They arrived in Greece through the island of Lesbos eight days ago.

Strapped in and wearing no shoes, Hasan is handicapped and unable to speak. When it started raining, her family covered her with plastic bags.

Hunched to one side in a black fleece hoodie covering her face, she sat in front of a sliding iron gate topped with razor wire. Occasionally, Zhino’s father would call across the border asking Macedonian police to open the gate, but did not get a response.

“I am begging (United Nations’ Secretary-General) Ban Ki-Moon for help, I’m begging the EU to open the borders,” he said.

“My daughter needs help. I don’t know what to do.”

Macedonia and other countries along the Balkan route have agreed to limit the flow of migrants to about 580 per day per country, Slovenian police said on Friday, one day after a meeting on the crisis hosted by Austria.

Greece, furious over not being invited to the talks in Vienna, asked its passenger ferry companies and travel agencies on Friday to cut back on bringing migrants and refugees from frontline islands to the Greek mainland.

Macedonia has previously said it will only now allow Syrian and Iraqi nationals to cross its border from Greece.

(Writing By Michele Kambas; Editing by Gareth Jones)

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)

Greece rages at neighbors amid fears migrants could be halted

ATHENS (Reuters) – Greece raged at neighbors and began bussing hundreds of migrants back from its northern border on Tuesday, fearing it could be inundated with migrants halted by Balkan states trying to shut the main land route to Western Europe.

Athens filed a rare diplomatic protest with fellow EU member Austria for excluding Greek officials from a high-level meeting on measures aimed at curbing Europe’s biggest inward migration since World War Two.

More than a million migrants and refugees passed through Greece last year, and nearly 100,000 have already arrived this year. Nearly all reached Greece by sea and travelled onward by land over the Balkan peninsula to richer EU countries further north and west, above all Germany.

But several of the countries along that route have been taking measures to close their frontiers, prompting those further down the chain to impose similar restrictions to prevent a bottleneck.

Greek police removed migrants from the Greek-Macedonian border on Tuesday after additional passage restrictions imposed by Macedonian authorities left hundreds of people, mainly Afghans, stuck at the border.

About 450 of them were loaded onto buses to be taken to reception centres in Athens, joining hundreds more fresh arrivals from outlying Greek islands who arrived on the Greek mainland on Tuesday morning.

“I will continue on to Macedonia,” said Abdulah Farash, 21, a student from Syria. “My friend and I want to go on to Germany… it was important to reach Greece through Izmir,” he said of a Turkish Aegean port where many migrants set off for the passage to Greece. “Then things are easy.”

At the border with Macedonia on Monday, witnesses said Syrian refugees who did not have all travel documents, including passports, were turned back.

European countries are trying to slow the migration wave, which includes hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria and other war zones, as well as large numbers of other migrants from north Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East.

Austria is due to host west Balkan states on Wednesday to discuss efforts to manage and curb the flow, but did not invite Greece. In unusually heated language that shows how the migration crisis has raised passions across Europe, Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias described the snub as a “unilateral and non-friendly act”.

“The exclusion of our country at this meeting is seen as a non-friendly act since it gives the impression that some, in our absence, are expediting decisions which directly concern us.”

Greece also accused its old foe Turkey of trying to “blow apart” an agreement that NATO would help patrol the porous sea border between Greece and Turkey to clamp down on human trafficking.

Turkey, which is hosting 2.5 million Syrian refugees, the largest refugee population on earth, says it is trying to stop them from sailing for Greece but needs more aid.

FINANCIAL CRISIS

Greece, still labouring under a financial crisis that has wrecked living standards at home, says it would not be able to cope with the influx on its own, if the onward passage of migrants through the Balkans is halted.

It says it cannot turn back thousands of people arriving on its shores daily in inflatable dinghies, citing international conventions.

Austria, the last country on the overland route to Germany, said last week it had imposed a daily limit of 3,200 migrants passing through, and 80 asylum claims.

Further down, Hungary has said it would shut three railway crossings with Croatia used by migrants, effective Feb. 22. Slovenia has erected a fence on its southern border with Croatia to ensure that migrants can enter only through official border crossings.

“The Balkan route was a humanitarian corridor. It could close after consultations and not by turning one country against the other,” Greek Migration Minister Yannis Mouzalas told Skai TV. “We are faced with an action that has elements of a coup.”

Vienna denied it had snubbed Athens by excluding it from Wednesday’s talks. The meeting of West Balkan nations was an established format which had first convened in Austria last year to discuss the issue of Islamist militants, a foreign ministry spokesman said.

The meeting includes interior and foreign ministers from Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.

(Additional reporting by Alexandros Avramidis, Alkis Konstantinidis, Lefteris Karagianopoulos, Renee Maltezou and George Georgiopoulos in Athens and Francois Murphy in Vienna; writing by Michele Kambas)

Frontex: 68K migrants arrive in Europe last month, 38 times last January’s rate

Cold weather and rough seas did not deter the approximately 68,000 migrants who arrived in Greece last month, the European Union’s border protection agency announced Monday.

That number was 38 times higher than the number of migrants who made it to Greece last January, Frontex said in a news release, at the start of what was a record year for displacement.

Frontex has said more than 1 million migrants arrived in the European Union last year, nearly five times the 2014 total. Monthly arrivals topped 100,000 in July and remained at six-figure levels through December as refugees fled conflict-torn nations in the Middle East and Africa.

The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says another 35,000 migrants traveled to Greece and Italy by sea during the first three weeks of February, bringing this year’s total arrivals above 100,000.

Only 13,000 people arrived in Greece and Italy in the first two months of 2015, the UNHCR said.

Frontex tried to place a positive spin on the migrant numbers released Monday, saying they represented a roughly 40 percent monthly drop from the 108,000 who arrived in Greece last December. The agency said winter weather contributed to the month-over-month decline.

But those who did arrive still added to a growing list of migrants who are seeking better lives in Europe, as nations face growing pressure as to how to cope with the massive inflow of people.

The vast majority of them arrive in Greece, the International Office for Migration (IOM) has said, as they are often shuttled on packed, unsafe boats across the Aegean Sea from Turkey.

Most of the migrants who arrived in Greece are from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, Frontex said.

Others arrive in Italy, a destination for sea routes that depart from Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.

Most of the migrants who arrived in Italy last month were from Nigeria, Frontex said.

The African nation is home to Boko Haram, which last year’s Global Terrorism Index dubbed the world’s deadliest terror group, and Fulani militants who have become increasingly deadly.

However, the migrants who are choosing to make the journey are also encountering some risks.

On Friday, The IOM, UNHCR and United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund on Friday warned of the increasing number of migrants who have drowned on their journeys to Europe.