EUROPE-MIGRANTS/MACEDONIA ARRIVALS UPDATE Scores of migrants arrive in Gevgelija en route to northern Macedonia

Record ID: 143036

  • Title: EUROPE-MIGRANTS/MACEDONIA ARRIVALS UPDATE Scores of migrants arrive in Gevgelija en route to northern Macedonia
  • Date: 22nd August 2015
  • Summary: GEVGELIJA, MACEDONIA (AUGUST 22, 2015) (REUTERS) (NIGHT SHOTS) MIGRANTS WALKING ON STREET MIGRANTS SITTING ON STREET MIGRANTS AT BUS STATION WOMAN SITTING AT BUS STATION HOLDING CHILD TWO CHILDREN SLEEPING (SOUNDBITE) (English) REFUGEE FROM SYRIA, MUHAMMAD, SAYING: "We open the border, we open the border, by force, we gathered and rush so it is open finally." MIGRANTS TRYI
  • Embargoed: 6th September 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVABUQX4QFUISYIFPDO1V6I4E0AD
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Thousands of migrants and refugees desperately pushed their way across Macedonia's border on Saturday (August 22), overwhelming security forces who threw stun grenades and lashed out with batons in what became a futile bid to stem their flow through the Balkans to western Europe.
    Some had spent days in the open with little or no access to food or water after Macedonia on Thursday (August 20) declared a state of emergency and sealed its borders to migrants, many of them refugees from war in Syria and other conflicts in the Middle East.
    By nightfall, just a couple of hundred people remained in a rain-soaked no-man's land. Riot police were also present, but some migrants appeared to simply stroll over the border to a hoard of buses that had arrived at the town of Gevgelija.
    There was no official word that Macedonia had abandoned its bid to keep them out, with authorities saying they would continue to enforce a regime of rationed access despite the even greater pace of arrivals from the other side in Greece.
    "We open the border, we open the border, by force, we gathered and rush so it is open finally." Muhammad, a refugee from Syria said.
    Migrants had been pouring across the border into Macedonia at a rate of some 2,000 per day, en route to Serbia then Hungary and Europe's Schengen zone. Some 50,000 arrived on Greek shores in July alone by boat from Turkey.
    "We had to cross the mountains, about six hours, by the way, and we are here now that's it. But police there were so violent and it's horrible in there," a refugee from Syria, Barri said.
    The surge in numbers had overwhelmed Gevgelija, testing the patience of a conservative government that faces an election in April and has for years been thwarted in its efforts to join the European Union and NATO by a dispute with Greece over Macedonia's name.
    The government lashed out at Greece, as an EU member, for letting the migrants through and in some cases aiding their passage by chartering ships to take them from inundated Greek islands to the mainland.
    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.
    Tired, angry and wet, one part of the crowd pushed through police lines, while others ran through open fields several kilometres from the bulk of police. Some small children were separated from their parents; people collapsed or staggered across with bloodied faces.
    For many Macedonians, the crisis has echoes of 1999, when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians took shelter in refugee camps on Macedonia's northern border during a war in neighbouring Kosovo, then a province of Serbia.
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