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Overwhelmed Macedonia holds up migrants in dusty no-man's land
Four-year-old Rashida from Kobani, Syria, part of a new group of more than a thousand immigrants, sleeps as they wait at border line of Macedonia and Greece to enter into Macedonia near Gevgelija railway station, August 20, 2015. PHOTO BY REUTERS/Ognen Teofilovski
By Fatos Bytyci
20/08/2015
GEVGELIJA, Macedonia (Reuters) - More than 1,000 migrants and refugees are gathered in a dusty no-man's land between Greece and Macedonia, held back by Macedonian police overwhelmed by a dangerous crush at a nearby railway station for trains heading north to Serbia.
Police periodically allow small groups through to join roughly another 1,000 at the once-sleepy Gevgelija railway station, unrecognizable since the surge in Middle Eastern, African and Asian migrants and refugees - many of them Syrians - trying to reach the European Union.
At the station, families sleep in the open, before running and pressing to board the few trains leaving for Serbia, the last stop before Hungary and Europe's borderless Schengen zone.
Stung by scenes of chaos, of children squeezing through open carriage windows to escape the crush and men wielding sticks, Macedonia has sent riot police to Gevgelija to try to restore some semblance of order.
It appealed on Wednesday for neighboring countries to send train wagons to address the demand. But the United Nations refugee agency urged the government to do more, saying it should allocate a site to properly accommodate the 1,500-2,000 migrants and refugees now arriving daily, up from 200 per day in May.
The problem risks worsening with the possible arrival of thousands more being evacuated by boat from the Greek island of Kos to the mainland after 21,000 people landed on Greek shores last week alone.
A passenger ship, which has acted as a floating accommodation and registration center for Syrian refugees since Sunday, was expected to dock in the northern port of Thessaloniki on Thursday. It was unclear whether they would be allowed to disembark, but if they are, they will almost certainly head for Gevgelija.
HARSHER WEATHER
“Depending on how Greece uses ships to decongest the islands that will also temporarily increase the arrivals here,” said Alexandra Krause, Senior Protection Officer at the UNHCR in the Macedonian capital, Skopje.
“The (Macedonian) government needs to provide an appropriate site to be able to shelter the arrivals properly and to ensure sufficient assistance,” Krause told Reuters.
The only site currently being used is at the local police station, where Krause said the UNHCR had constructed some shelter with capacity for just 165 people. Krause said the Red Cross had access to the migrants and refugees in the border area but warned of harsher weather approaching.
In Serbia, conservative Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said authorities would open a temporary shelter in the capital, Belgrade, to house migrants and refugees currently camping in a park outside the main railway station, before they continue north to Hungary.
Hungary is building a fence to keep them out, angering Serbia which fears becoming the latest bottleneck in a crisis challenging European unity.
In the Macedonian-Greek no-man’s land, people warm themselves by small camp fires as children play in the dusty scrubland near a white border stone bearing the letters SFRY, the acronym for the former socialist Yugoslav federation of which Macedonia was once a member.
“My wife is eight months pregnant,” said Hassam Alali, who said he was from the devastated Syrian city of Aleppo. “It’s hard here. We can’t sleep, we cannot eat.”
(Writing by Matt Robinson; Editing by Giles Elgood)
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