Hungary
closes border to refugees as Turkey questions EU deal to stem crisis
Police
use barbed wire to seal the border with Croatia as the Turkish
president ridicules the offer of aid in exchange for help controlling
the passage of migrants
Agence France-Presse
Saturday 17 October
2015 03.26 BST
Hungary has closed
its border with Croatia to refugees in a bid to block the path of
streams of migrants desperate to get to northern Europe as a European
deal to stem the crisis looked precarious.
After the last 1,500
or so migrants to arrive by train on the Croatian side trudged
silently through mud over the informal Zakany crossing, Hungarian
police and soldiers sealed it with barbed wire shortly before 1am
(2300 GMT), said AFP reporters at the scene.
“Closure!”
shouted a soldier after the last weary travellers had passed through
slowly in single file, some of them carrying an elderly woman in a
wheelchair and children’s buggies.
“The ‘green
border’ has been closed [to economic migrants] but you can still
cross the border legally and seek asylum,” government spokesman
Zoltan Kovacs told AFP.
The two official
border posts of Beremend and Letenje remain open for those with valid
papers.
Earlier on riday,
Croatia said it would begin diverting migrants on its territory to
Slovenia after Hungary announced it would close the border – a key
crossing point on the travellers’ route since Budapest sealed its
frontier with Serbia in mid-September.
Most migrants –
many of them fleeing conflict or poverty in the Middle East, Africa
and Asia – are trying to get to Germany, Europe’s economic
powerhouse, which has said it expects at least one million asylum
seekers this year.
Hungary’s
shut-down came as an EU deal with Turkey to stem the flow of migrants
looked precarious, after Ankara said Brussels had offered too little
money and mocked Europe’s efforts to tackle the refugee crisis.
Just hours after the
European Union announced the accord with great fanfare at a leaders’
summit, Ankara said the plan to defuse a crisis that has seen some
600,000 mostly Syrian migrants enter the EU this year was just a
draft.
In the latest in a
series of jabs at Europe over the crisis, Turkish president Recep
Tayyip Erdogan ridiculed the bloc’s efforts to help Syrian
refugees.
“They announce
they’ll take in 30,000 to 40,000 refugees and then they are
nominated for the Nobel for that. We are hosting two and a half
million refugees but nobody cares,” Erdogan said.
The Turkish leader
also challenged the Europe to take Ankara’s bid for EU membership
more seriously.
“They keep saying
‘We can’t do without Turkey’. It’s very clear but they are
not being clear. Then why don’t you let Turkey in the EU?” he
asked.
His foreign
minister, Feridun Sinirlioglu, heaped scorn on the EU’s proposals
of financial help, calling the offer “unacceptable” and saying
his country needed at least three billion euros ($3.4 bn) in the
first year of the deal.
Under the tentative
agreement, Turkey had agreed to tackle people smugglers, cooperate
with EU border authorities and put a brake on refugees fleeing the
Syrian conflict from crossing by sea to Europe.
In exchange,
European leaders agreed to speed up easing visa restrictions on
Turkish citizens travelling to Europe and give Ankara more funds to
tackle the problem.
While they did not
specify how much they would give Ankara, they did say the three
billion euros demanded by Turkey would be a problem.
While the summit was
underway, the volatile situation on the EU’s frontier with Turkey
exploded into violence with the fatal shooting of an Afghan refugee
crossing the border from Turkey to Bulgaria, which the UN refugee
agency said was the first of its kind.
The victim was among
a group of 54 migrants spotted by a patrol near the southeastern town
of Sredets close to the Turkish border and was wounded by a ricochet
after border guards fired warning shots into the air, officials said.
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