EUROPE-MIGRANTS/MACEDONIA CHAOS Migrants break through police lines on Greece-Macedonia border

Record ID: 143004

  • Title: EUROPE-MIGRANTS/MACEDONIA CHAOS Migrants break through police lines on Greece-Macedonia border
  • Date: 22nd August 2015
  • Summary: BORDER AREA BETWEEN GEVGELIJA, MACEDONIA AND IDOMENI, GREECE (AUGUST 22, 2015) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF MIGRANTS PUSHING AGAINST METAL WIRE FENCE VARIOUS OF POLICE TRYING TO PUSH MIGRANTS BACK, SOME BREAK THROUGH POLICE HELP COLLAPSING WOMAN GIRL RUNS AWAY AFTER BREAKING THROUGH MIGRANTS RUN THROUGH FIELD UNHCR REFUGEE WORKERS HELP PEOPLE WHO HAVE PUSHED THROUGH FENCE VARIOUS
  • Embargoed: 6th September 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Greece
  • Country: Greece
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVAAEKYN8Q5QYMDX2U0JNUYELFQ5
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Thousands of rain-soaked migrants stormed across Macedonia's border on Saturday (August 22) as police lobbed stun grenades and beat them with batons, struggling to enforce a decree to stem their flow through the Balkans to western Europe.
    Security forces managed to contain hundreds in no-man's land. But several thousand others - many of them Syrian refugees - tore through wire fences in muddy fields to Macedonian territory after days spent in the open without access to shelter, food or water.
    Macedonia on Thursday declared a state of emergency and ordered its borders sealed to migrants, many of them refugees from war who have been entering from Greece at a rate of 2,000 per day en route to Hungary and Europe's borderless Schengen zone.
    On Friday (August 21), riot police fired tear gas and stun grenades to drive back angry crowds, in the latest flare-up in a migration crisis that has brought ripples from the conflicts of the Middle East to Europe's shores.
    Calling out the army, Macedonia said it would limit access, and allowed some 600 through overnight; they squeezed onto a dawn train north to the Serbian border.
    But far more have since arrived on the Greek side, converging on a filthy, chaotic strip of frontier with little sign of an organised aid effort. Some industrious Greeks sold sandwiches and drinks to those prepared to pay. A man with a generator charged 1.5 euros to charge mobile phones.
    Many of those arriving are Syrian refugees who have come via Greek islands such as Kos. Some 50,000 hit Greek shores in July alone.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
  • Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2015. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
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