Europe Chokes Flow of Migrants to Buy Time for a Solution As warmer weather draws nearer, pressure on borders is set to build By Valentina Pop and Anton Troianovski
http://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-chokes-flow-of-migrants-to-buy-time-for-a-solution-1454232247
European Union member states have sent border guards, police vehicles and fingerprinting machines to Macedonia, a nonmember of the bloc. The goal: to squeeze the river of people still streaming north from Greece toward Germany into a trickle, turning away all but those from warn-torn countries such as Syria and Iraq.
The mounting restrictions are buying German Chancellor Angela Merkel time as she asks voters for patience and lobbies fellow EU leaders to implement what she promises will be a comprehensive solution to the migration crisis.
Ms. Merkel wants Turkey to dismantle smuggling networks that bring migrants across the Aegean Sea to Greece, and she wants Greece to set up large registration camps that would allow recognized refugees to be distributed across the EU.
But with the chancellor’s approach making little headway, many European policy makers say they have only until March to reduce the numbers from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa who are arriving in the Continent’s core, mainly Germany.
Soon, spring weather in the Aegean is expected to accelerate the arrivals, just as Ms. Merkel’s conservatives face state elections in which an anti-immigration party is poised for unprecedented gains.
Within Ms. Merkel’s ruling coalition, demands to shut Germany’s own border are multiplying. Support for her open-door policy is waning abroad too. Even her ally Austria has announced an annual cap on asylum places.
Mounting political pressure around Europe to cut the numbers arriving, coupled with security fears about potential terrorists using the migrant trail, is leading to measures that could effectively redraw Europe’s border at the Balkans.
In Macedonia, a small, impoverished ex-Yugoslav republic, officials warn that European governments are discussing a plan B that would have the Macedonian-Greek border sealed off entirely, with the help of EU and Balkan countries further north.
ENLARGE “We aren’t three months away, but weeks” from cutting off Greece, Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki said in an interview. “Actually, this is the second-worst option, because the worst option is not doing anything, and then each of the [EU] member states would be sealing off its own borders,” Mr. Poposki said.
EU governments are already drafting contingency plans to deal with the humanitarian impact of a swelling buildup of migrants in Greece if its northern border is sealed off, according to minutes of a meeting in Brussels last week seen by The Wall Street Journal.
Some countries, notably Italy, are worried that shutting the Greek-Macedonian border might only open up new migration routes, with the most likely being a sea crossing from Greece or Albania to Italy. However, overall numbers would likely fall, diplomats believe.
The European Commission, the bloc’s executive, on Wednesday said Greece isn’t properly fingerprinting incoming migrants and began proceedings to potentially suspend Greece from the EU’s borderless Schengen zone. Greek officials say the EU is pressuring Greece to build huge detention camps for migrants, with no viable plan for what to do with the inmates.
Unlike last summer, when Macedonia’s calls for help went largely unnoticed despite peaks of 8,000 arrivals a day, EU countries are now beefing up their assistance at the border with Greece.
Hungary has donated razor wire, to be deployed near the main border crossing and funneling people to a registration camp at the Macedonian town of Gevgelija.
On a crisp afternoon in recent days, joint patrols of Hungarian and Macedonian police escorted migrants across train tracks to the camp at Gevgelija. Some enterprising locals sold cigarettes to migrants in a litter-strewn field.
As night fell, a Hungarian police Jeep patrolled side roads on the Macedonian side of the border, looking for smugglers and migrants trying to evade the tightening controls.
Even for war refugees from Syria, whom Germany officially continues to welcome, passage into Macedonia is now considerably slower than in 2015.
Macedonia has closed the border on several days this month. On other days it lets only a limited number enter. Macedonian officials say they are helping northern neighbors Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia to manage the flow of migrants and avoid bottlenecks. “Our upper limit is determined by the stream up north,” said Mr. Poposki, the foreign minister.
Bederdin Habib, a wheelchair-bound 59-year-old who said he was from Aleppo, Syria, spent two days on the Greek side of the border with his three sons, waiting to be allowed into Macedonia. They said they had been on the road from Syria for 20 days, often sleeping rough as relief organizations didn’t have enough heated tents.
Meanwhile, Greece—which last year let migrants leave its territory as fast as they entered—has been forced to slow down the transport of people to its northern border. Last week, more than a thousand migrants were camping at three gas stations along the road from Athens to the border town of Idomeni.
ENLARGE Police at Idomeni said the gas-station camps are being used to avoid a crush on days when Macedonia lets though only a few hundred. A bus trip to the border now takes two or three days, compared with eight to 10 hours last year, says bus driver Sheptim Disha.
Ms. Merkel remains skeptical about cutting off Greece, according to people familiar with her thinking: She shares Athens’s concerns that swelling numbers of trapped, frustrated migrants could destabilize a country still struggling with a long-running debt crisis.
But despite Ms. Merkel’s warm words for Syrian war refugees, her government is desperate to avoid a repeat of 2015, when a million asylum seekers and irregular migrants entered the country.
“We must absolutely prevent the inflow rising massively again in the springtime,” Ms. Merkel’s interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, said in an interview with news magazine Der Spiegel published Saturday. “Time is running out.”
The EU wants Greece to hold on to migrants, claiming bona-fide refugees can be spread around Europe under the relocation scheme, while unwanted economic migrants can be returned home. But Greece has so far been reluctant to hold tens of thousands in camps because there is little sign that other countries will take them in. As controls tighten on its northern border, however, the pressure is mounting on Greece.
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