EUROPE-MIGRANTS/SERBIA-CZECH Czech PM offers financial support to Serbia as migrants keep arriving

Record ID: 140485

  • Title: EUROPE-MIGRANTS/SERBIA-CZECH Czech PM offers financial support to Serbia as migrants keep arriving
  • Date: 1st September 2015
  • Summary: SOBOTKA AND VUCIC LISTENING TO SERBIAN NATIONAL ANTHEM SOBOTKA AND VUCIC LISTENING TO CZECH NATIONAL ANTHEM SOBOTKA AND VUCIC WALKING BY GUARD OF HONOUR, BOWING TO SERBIAN FLAG GUARD OF HONOUR
  • Embargoed: 16th September 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Serbia
  • Country: Serbia
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA8QMO205I2M9YW83PZ1FN9SE1H
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Serbian Prime Minister Alexsandar Vucic on Tuesday (September 1) said that the Czech government had pledged financial and technical support to his country as it struggled with a surge in migrant numbers.
    "We also discussed the migrant problem and I want to say that we got direct financial and technical help from the Czech government. I thank their Interior Minister, Milan Chovanec, who brought a first 360,000 euros for our country. They are ready to give us technical support for our policemen," Vucic said at a joint news conference with Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka, who is in Serbia on a two-day visit.
    "We have been facing a huge wave of migrants. Since the beginning of the year we have registered -- when I say register, we are almost the first country on their way towards western Europe who registers, makes a list of them, takes fingerprints, perform medical exams -- so the number is 115,000 since the beginning of the year. At this moment on the territory of Serbia, at four different points, there are around 7,800 people. We are doing our best according to our potential to help them," Vucic added.
    Migrants are coming in their thousands to Serbia on their way to western Europe.
    "First of all, I want to point out that Europe must face the migrant crisis united. Reactions cannot be individual, country by country: the European Union must work together. We, the Czech Republic, in all crises that needed to be solved, like Ukraine or the migrant crisis, we always insist that we must agree within Europe. The worst case scenario would be that in such a crisis, member states react individually," Sobotka said.
    According to the United Nations, some 3,000 people are expected to cross the route through Serbia daily in the coming months, many of them refugees fleeing the war in Syria.
    On Tuesday, hundreds of angry migrants demonstrated outside Budapest's Eastern Railway Terminus demanding they be allowed to travel on to Germany, as the biggest ever influx of migrants into the European Union left its asylum policies in tatters.
    A refugee crisis rivalling the Balkan wars of the 1990s as Europe's worst since World War Two has polarised and confounded the European Union, which has no mechanism to cope with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of poor and desperate people.
    Germany is likely to accept by far the largest share. In the case of those fleeing the Syrian civil war it has effectively suspended an EU rule that asylum seekers must apply in the first EU country they reach. But it insisted on Tuesday that the rule was nevertheless still in force and urged other EU countries to abide by it.
    The vast majority of refugees fleeing violence and other migrants escaping poverty arrive on Europe's southern and eastern edges but are determined to press on and seek asylum in richer and more generous countries further north and west. That means illegally crossing a bloc that has no internal border controls to stop them.
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