Greece says up to 70,000 migrants may be 'trapped' next month

A Syrian refugee is helped by volunteers to leave a sinking dinghy at a beach on the southeastern island of Lesbos on February 28, 2016. Manu Brabo/AP Photo

Athens // Greece on Sunday said the number of refugees and migrants on its soil could more than triple next month, reaching as many as 70,000, as a cap on border crossings by Balkan countries left them “trapped” in the country.

“We estimate that in our country the number of those trapped will be from 50,000-70,000 people next month”, migration minister Yiannis Mouzalas said.

“Today, there are 22,000 refugees and migrants”, he said.

Some 6,500 people were stuck at the Idomeni camp on Greece’s northern border with Macedonia on Sunday as Macedonian border officials let only 300 refugees and migrants pass the day before.

Dozens of refugees staged a protest on the rail tracks near Idomeni on Sunday.

The build-up at the 1,500-people capacity camp began in earnest last week after Macedonia began refusing entry to Afghans and imposed stricter document controls on Syrians and Iraqis.

The bottleneck is expected to get worse after EU members Slovenia and Croatia, as well as Serbia and Macedonia, imposed a limit of 580 migrants entering their borders each day.

Those measures came on the heels of a clampdown by Austria, which lies farther up the migrant trail that extends from the Balkans to Germany and Scandinavia.

Austria introduced a daily cap of 80 asylum-seekers and said it would only admit 3,200 migrants transiting the country.

As a result, the tighter controls have had a big knock-on effect in Greece, where migrants have been arriving en masse from neighbouring Turkey.

Thousands, including many children, are now stranded there as the European Union struggles with the continent’s worst migration crisis since the end of the Second World War.

Mr Mouzalas said he expected the influx of refugees and migrants to slow when the information about closed borders spread in Turkey, where millions of people fleeing the war in Syria have taken refuge.

“I believe that the influx will diminish when the news that the Idomeni border crossing is closed will be propagated. We are preparing an information campaign which will be broadcast in Turkey,” the migration minister said.

He added that this campaign as well as Nato’s presence in the Aegean Sea, which is helping to police Greek waters, was expected to reduce arrivals by 70 per cent.

On Saturday, Mouzalas told Sto Kokkino radio that Greece intends to create provisional camps across the country to accommodate up to 3,000 people each, but “preferably 1,000 people, in order to cover their basic needs for a little while.”

In a bid to regulate the flow of refugees until the border situation is resolved, Greek authorities are trying to house them on the Aegean islands where migrants’ arrivals, despite the good weather conditions, have decreased.

* Agence Frane-Presse