SERBIA: Buses packed with migrants backed up on Serbia’s border with Croatia on Sunday, their passage to western Europe slowed by a new diversion through Slovenia, which vowed to limit the influx.
Many spent the night on the buses, wrapped in warm clothes and blankets against the autumn cold, waking to dense fog and another hours-long wait around a kilometre from Serbia’s western border with the European Union.
Slovenia said it would only accept as many as are able to exit the country into Austria.
“Croatia asked us to accept 5,000 migrants per day, but Austria told us they can accept at maximum 1,500,” Bostjan Sefic, state secretary at the Slovenian Interior Ministry, told a news conference.
“We cannot accept unlimited numbers of migrants if we know that they cannot continue their journey.”
Some 3,000 migrants, many of them Syrians fleeing war, entered Slovenia from Croatia on Saturday after fellow EU member Hungary sealed its southern border with Croatia at midnight on Friday.
Hungary’s right-wing government says the mainly Muslim migrants pose a threat to Europe’s prosperity, security and “Christian values”, forging ahead with a unilateral crackdown in the absence of EU unity.
The arrival of a projected 700,000 migrants this year to Europe’s shores, fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia by boat and dinghy across the Mediterranean and Aegean seas, has exposed deep and often ugly divisions in the EU.
