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Macedonian police drive back refugee crowd on Greek border
Macedonian special policemen guard the border as more than a thousand immigrants wait at the border line of Macedonia and Greece to enter Macedonia near the Gevgelija railway station, August 21, 2015. PHOTO BY REUTERS/Ognen Teofilovski
By Fatos Bytyci
21/08/2015
GEVGELIJA, Macedonia (Reuters) - Macedonian police drove back crowds of migrants and refugees trying to enter from Greece on Friday after a night spent stranded in no-man's land by an emergency decree effectively sealing the Macedonian frontier.
A Reuters reporter said tear gas was fired and saw at least four bloodied migrants taken for treatment on the Greek side of the border.
Several thousand people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, many of them Syrian refugees, spent a cold night in no-man's land after Macedonia on Thursday declared a state of emergency and effectively blocked its southern frontier to migrants and refugees.
The flow into Macedonia had reached 1,500-2,000 per day in recent weeks, up from some 200 daily in May, leading to desperate scenes of crowds wrestling to board packed trains at a nearby railway station, children squeezed through open carriage windows.
Reuters reporters on the border said tensions quickly subsided, but a crowd of at least 1,000 was sitting in no-man’s land at the entrance to Macedonia, their path blocked by riot police with armoured vehicles.
Some were on the railway line, and one morning train heading south from Macedonia was stopped at the Gevgelija border station, the passengers told to disembark and take buses into Greece.
Some migrants and refugees managed to cross during the night, telling Reuters that others were caught by police and driven back into no-man’s land.
“I ran fast and escaped,” said Mohammed Khalid, an 18-year-old Syrian from the devastated city of Aleppo. “They got my brother and most of the others and sent them back to Greece.”
The crowds stranded in no-man’s land may increase through the day as more arrive from Greece, including 2,400 Syrian refugees taken by boat from the island of Kos to the mainland on Thursday.
The United Nations refugee agency is on the ground, and has urged the government to allocate more space to provide shelter for migrants and refugees on its side of the border. The Red Cross is also present.
Some 50,000 arrived on Greek shores from Turkey in July alone, seeking to reach western Europe through Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary, where Europe’s borderless Schengen zone begins.
Macedonia says it cannot deal with the influx. The situation is not aided by a tense relationship between Macedonia and Greece, rooted in a dispute over Macedonia’s name since it declared independence from socialist Yugoslavia in 1991.
Macedonia has confronted refugee crises before, most notably in 1999 during the war in Serbia’s then southern province of Kosovo when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians took shelter in refugee camps on Macedonia’s northern border.
(Additional reporting by Fedja Grulovic; Writing by Matt Robinson; Editing by Giles Elgood)
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